by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
The basic steps I have used to writing a professional, non-fiction book and having it published.<\/p>\n
I have written about half-a-dozen professional non-fiction books. The counting is a bit fuzzy when you include a second edition or two here and there. These were published by the IEEE and other publishers of such books.<\/p>\n
I have met members of my profession who are itching to do the same. They ask me, “How did you write that book?”<\/p>\n
For the (somewhat boring) record:<\/p>\n
Step 1 – Write a book. Use a basic word processor. Write chapters in a logical order (consult already published books). Create a lot of figures. There, now you have a book.<\/p>\n
Step 1a – I sure learned a lot by doing the research, thinking through everything, making my thoughts clear enough to express in writing. Hence, if you stop here, you are much smarter than before.<\/p>\n
Step 2 – Now that I have learned so much\u2026do I even care that it is \u201cpublished.\u201d<\/p>\n
Step 3 – Decide how to publish.<\/p>\n
a. Just make a PDF and put it out there.<\/p>\n
b. Write publishers describing your book that you have in hand.<\/p>\n
b.2. They will want editing. Lots of editing work that will probably double the amount of work done to date.<\/p>\n
Here is the odd part, at least it was odd to me. Every year, publishers send contracts to people saying, “If you deliver a book to us that meets blah blah blah, we will publish it and pay you royalties.” Every year, the majority of interested writers sign the contract, but do not deliver a book. The writing (Step 1. above), proves more difficult than anticipated or something.<\/p>\n
That is why I have the steps in the order they appear above. Write a book first. Once in hand, approach publishers. Seems backwards? Not what you have read? Well, these are professional, non-fiction books. These are not romance novels, novels about teenage girls who fall in love with werewolves, or teenage girls who save the world with a bow and arrow.<\/p>\n
And that is how I wrote that book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Dwayne Phillips The basic steps I have used to writing a professional, non-fiction book and having it published. I have written about half-a-dozen professional non-fiction books. The counting is a bit fuzzy when you include a second edition or two here and there. These were published by the IEEE and other publishers of such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67,5],"tags":[187,128],"class_list":["post-2477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","category-writing","tag-work","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2478,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions\/2478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}