I think it’s fair to say that most scholars have a few journal articles under their belts by the time it comes to write their first book – they’re not novices. Yet I know that the authors I’ve worked with who have made the leap from articles to books have been a little nervous about the whole process.
There are a few things to keep in mind as you prepare your first book for publication. Books are not just, say, eight or ten times as long as an article – the intricacy goes up exponentially, so it makes good sense to lay down good practice from the outset. Here are my top 6 tips.
#1 Plan the book
You’ve a lot more space in a book, so it’s even more important that you plan how you’re going to take your reader through your evidence and argument. It’s not enough to just put down on the page everything you know, or want to write about, a given topic. You need a central unifying thread. At the end of the book, what will the reader take away from it? And is it what you wanted them to focus on?
If you can’t figure out in one sentence what the message of your book is, you’re not yet ready to start drafting.
I’ve blogged before about nonfiction needing a story arc every bit as much as fiction. Even if your book is descriptive rather than analytical, you have selected your material with some overarching idea in mind.
Crystallise that.
If you need something slightly more unconventional, you can try this mind-mapping technique I’ve adapted from a problem-solving technique that’s been around for at least fifty years (and, frankly, what you’re going to put in your book, and what you’re going to leave out, is a problem to be solved).
Get a large piece of paper, and put it on your desk landscape (horizontally). Grab a pencil and an eraser.
Draw a diamond in the middle of one edge, large enough to write in the one-sentence message of your book. Write in that sentence.
From that diamond, draw out a straight line the length of the paper, right along the middle. From that line, above it and below it, draw slanting lines, well spaced out, so your paper should now have a large fish skeleton on it, with a head containing your one-sentence message.
And this is why it’s called the Fishbone Diagram in the problem-solving world. Google (other search engines are available) ‘Ishikawa diagram’ if you’re struggling to visualise what I’m going on about, but note that although Ishikawa described this process as helping to unpack a quality-control problem, it adapts very well to this usage.
On each of the slanting lines you write a theme, a topic, an idea, a thought about what goes into your book. Work away, adding, rubbing out, rewriting, deleting, until your book takes detailed shape in your mind. You can have lines coming off the main ribs of the fish, to show ideas that feed into the main one.
Look again at the one-sentence message in the fish’s head. Does it still fit your thinking? Refine away until you have an absolutely rock-solid one-sentence description of what the book is about.
Now you’re able to finesse that diagram into a more conventional looking plan (such as the one in my earlier blog post).
Doing this before being tempted to start drafting anything will avoid wasted effort and let you write to the purpose. It will influence what material you include and exclude, and how you marshal your facts and arguments. You may find that you’re developing two principal themes – should your text in fact be two books? Would that be clearer (and easier to write)?
As part of your planning, get hold of your publisher’s style guide and read through it. Make a note of things that don’t come naturally to you, or word limits for, e.g. author bios. Conform to the house style as much as you can. If something is a real issue, contact your acquisitions editor, or whoever is looking after you, and discuss it with them.
If you write with the publisher’s style in mind, there will be fewer changes to your text at the copyediting stage, and your voice will come through more strongly.
If the variation from the house style is agreed, do make sure you mention it to the copyeditor when you reach that part of the process, and ask your acquisitions editor to make sure the editorial or production department knows about it and puts it in the brief to the copyeditor. Otherwise there will be tears at some stage.
#2 Control your references
Yep – your referencing will need a lot of control if you’re not to get hopelessly lost. It’ll be rather longer than that needed for an article. In my areas of humanities and social sciences, an article rarely has more than 100 references; books often have 500 or more; footnotes can run into the several hundred. More than a thousand isn’t uncommon. That’s a lot to keep track of.
As you work, keep a sceptical eye on your references. If you read anything as online first, has it now been published? Does that change the date? You will need to update the publication details in your reference, and perhaps page numbers if you’re quoting from it.
Do you have ‘forthcoming’ for anything? Is that still true? (I’ve had ‘forthcoming’ references that were published six years ago…) And if that source has now been published, check the title hasn’t been amended (a lot of them undergo change) and update the publication details.
Is it quite some time since you last checked an online source? Does the link still work? Websites are often reorganised, and older material archives to a link. Use the Wayback Machine if a link appears to be broken, or you need your reader to see a particular dated version of the page, such as when you’re referring to statistics.
Sure, your copyeditor could do all that, but if you want no inadvertent errors to creep in (and you want your referencing software to stay current so old mistakes aren’t repeated in everything you publish), it’s best to do it yourself. If a source has simply disappeared and it’s not on Wayback, then ‘formerly available at…’ is your friend.
#3 Control your style
You can’t dash off your first book in a month; you’ll probably be plugging away at it for several months, even a couple of years. During that time you’ll be swayed by the style of what you’ve been reading, or simply because it’s a bit boring to do everything the same way. Publishers are very keen on consistency, and if the copyeditor is having to make a lot of changes to, say, serial commas ebbing and flowing, that’s less time to concentrate on more important elements.
You can help keep track of how you’ve decided to handle things by keeping a note of what you’re doing. When you come back to the manuscript after time away doing or writing other things, it’s far easier then to pick things up smoothly. Yes, I’ve blogged about it!
#4 Control your artwork
Something else that tends to wobble around at book length is the artwork – the placement of tables, figures, plates and so on. It’s really annoying for you when you position your table, call it Table 1, do a lot more writing, shift things around a bit as your ideas mature, and then you need to put in another table or three before it.
Here’s how to handle that.
Keep each table or figure or plate in a separate file – one per file. You are NOT going to be placing them in the manuscript file. That keeps the file size down and will make your life so much easier you’ll be thanking me for years!
For each chapter, keep a list of the artwork that belongs in it – the caption, or a handily shortened one, for convenience, if your captions tend to be rather long. You need something to remind you what the content is.
Each piece of artwork needs a very short name to go into the text as a placeholder, so you need the name to be easy to find in the manuscript, and to relate to an image or a table.
Write a list of your favourite food, drink, football team, friends… as many items as there are pieces of artwork. In front of each item, type ZZ‑:
ZZ‑pizza
ZZ‑coffee
ZZ‑waffles
You get the idea. We’re after names than don’t have an obvious sequence, alphabetical or numerical, so Marvel Universe heroes, colours… have some fun!
(I chose ZZ‑ because it’s very unlikely it’ll appear in something in the words you’ve written. If your subject has, say, someone’s name that includes those three characters, elect to use XX‑ or !!‑ or something that is less likely to occur. Just avoid trying to use something sequential and meaningful.)
When you refer to a piece of artwork in the text (and you’re going to refer to them all, of course), write (see Table ZZ‑waffles) or (see Figures ZZ‑coffee and ZZ‑custard).
Each piece of artwork has an easily identifiable name, and that name is cited in the text.
Next step – write your book, and don’t lose that list.
Next step – when the book is ready to go to peer-reviewers, or to the publisher, grab that list and place your cursor at the very start of your manuscript.
In the search box (Ctrl-F on a PC) type in ZZ‑
Now, step through your manuscript, landing on each ZZ‑ name in turn, in the order it appears. You can now note on your list the correct numbering:
| Tables | Figures | |
| ZZ-pizza | 1.3 | |
| ZZ-coffee | 1.1 | |
| ZZ-waffles | 1.2 | |
| ZZ-custard | 2.1 | |
| ZZ-chocolate | 2.2 | |
| ZZ-steak | 3.1 |
You can give this new list a logic check. Are things really in the best order? If not, move them around (in the list. So much easier than having the tables and images positioned directly in the manuscript) until it’s right.
Now you can repeat the process, stepping through the manuscript, replacing ZZ-pizza in your text with Figure 1.3, ZZ-custard with Table 2.1, and so on. These are called ‘callouts’.
Each piece of artwork, generally speaking, should appear as close to the first call-out for it. So at the end of the paragraph that the first call-out for what is now Table 1 appears, on a new line type:
<Table 1 near here>
Or something similar – take a look at the publisher’s guidance on what they want to see. These are called ‘catchlines’. You may be asked to insert the complete caption at this point, or list all the captions at the end of the chapter, or keep them in a document by themselves. That’s fine, and your friendly neighbourhood copyeditor will pick that up and run with it.
Final step – rename each artwork file with its proper table or figure number.
#5 Copyright permissions
If you’re using something written or drawn or photographed by someone else, that will need at the very least a source line, and quite possibly you’ll need to obtain formal permission and perhaps even pay for it.
The simple rule is: if you didn’t make it, or you didn’t buy it, it’s not yours.
The owner has a right to control how their work is used. They can give or withhold permission, and you have to seek it.
Copyright is a vexed and complicated subject but you don’t want your book withdrawn or delayed, or rewritten at the last gasp because you didn’t get permission from the owner of the copyright to use that image or what have you.
Fair dealing or fair usage is a very informal way of not getting permission for quotations, often mentioned as being 400 words or more. That holds reasonably good for scholarly circles, but that is 400 words total, not per quotation! And if the source is something short, like a poem, it’s a lot less than 400 words – the entire piece may not be that long. Song lyrics and newspaper articles are jealously guarded, copyright-wise.
Just because it’s on the internet does NOT mean it’s free for you to use, and certainly not for a commercial undertaking like your book!
Creative Commons licences still have to be credited, and do check them for limitations – commercial uses like your book may be excluded, so something you’ve used in one of your lectures might not be available for your book without formal permission.
If you’re using such material, then talk to your publisher about what you will need to get permission for, and begin the process when you have got your book planned out and you know what you want to use. It can take quite some time to get permissions cleared, and you don’t want to hold up the publishing schedule by starting all this when the book is all but finished.
Some publishers will take on the task of obtaining copyright permissions for you, others will expect you to do it yourself.
#6 Check and recheck, then check again
A book is far harder to carry in your head in its entirety than an article. So keep lists, keep your written plan, keep that central message where you can see and use them to keep yourself on track.
Use a to-do list and make sure it’s up to date with new tasks, completed tasks and reminders.
Keep key dates firmly front-of-mind. These will be supplied by your publisher, who will appreciate early warning if you think you may not meet your contractual delivery date.
Have you done anything that doesn’t conform to the publisher’s house style? You read their guide at the start of your planning, but it’s worth rechecking those key points you noted where there are clear instructions on wordcount, or artwork numbering, or… just about anything – spelling, punctuation, the layout of tables, the style of references…
And have you made sure that every reference is in the references list and every source in the references list is mentioned in the text (if you’re using a footnote only style, or a bibliography or selected bibliography, there will be variations to this). You don’t want all your queries to be about missing or unused sources! Read this blog post for help with doing these checks.
In summary
So those are my top six tips: plan thoroughly, before you even think about drafting; keep control of your references, style and your artwork; make sure you think about copyright permissions early in the process; then check, check and check again that you’ve done everything you set out to do and it’s all tied up and complete before pressing Send.
