5 Mistakes First-Time Nonfiction Writers Make
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Are you working on a nonfiction manuscript, eager to captivate your readers from the very first page? In addition to writing bestselling books of my own, I’ve helped hundreds of nonfiction authors write their manuscripts as a professional book coach and ghostwriter. Now, writing a book isn’t easy; it’s often a long process with many potential pitfalls along the way. I’ve made plenty of writing mistakes in the creation of my own books, and I see some of my clients repeating them when I start working with them on their projects.
The good news is that many of these stumbling blocks are easily corrected. In this blog post, I’ll help you anticipate and overcome five mistakes frequently made by budding authors so you can confidently create a strong and engaging nonfiction manuscript that leaves a lasting impact.
Mistake #1: The subject isn’t deep enough
I have a client who is a couples’ therapist. She’s writing a book she hopes will save marriages. This is probably the only book Mandy will ever write. So, she wants everything she knows to be between the covers. But, like most counsellors, psychologists, and coaches, Mandy knows an awful lot about how humans are wired and why they get into trouble in relationships.
Imagine reading a Facebook ad or a book review that says, “This book contains EVERYTHING you can possibly imagine about couples’ therapy.” Has it piqued your interest or preemptively overwhelmed you with the Herculean reading task ahead? It doesn’t take a marketing genius to figure out that trying to say everything on a subject will be of interest to no one.
We see this often from new authors writing their first nonfiction book. They try to tell their readers too much. They go “wide” when their readers want them to go “deep.” This is especially true with memoirs and autobiographies. You don’t need to recount your entire life; rather, pick the most interesting period and tell that particular story well. Flash back to earlier moments in your life that explain how you ended up in such a predicament. But spare the reader the rest of the details. Try to narrow the focus of your subject, your message, and your storytelling. Rather than saying a little bit about everything, dig in and say something meaningful about something specific. You’ll be rewarded with more sales, better reviews, and happier readers by going deep instead of going wide.
Mistake #2: The writing is not engaging
Before I started Storyglu and began coaching authors and ghostwriting books, I was a motivational speaker for thirty years. In fact, I’m still doing it part-time as the conference industry revives post-COVID. One of the things I love about giving keynote speeches is that you receive immediate feedback — unlike writing a book. As a speaker, it’s immediately apparent whether or not the idea I’m sharing or the story I’m telling has captured the interest of the audience. As I gaze out on the sea of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of faces, I can tell if I’m losing them. Suddenly, their faces are replaced by the tops of their heads, because their phones seem more interesting than what I just said.
Naturally, as I’m a professional presenter, I can adjust in the moment, shift gears, and get the audience back under my spell. But writing a book does not afford the same luxury of real-time feedback that speakers enjoy. So, one of my favorite techniques is showing clients how to write their nonfiction book like it’s a speech or a performance to a live audience. It’s really easy to do: just read parts of your manuscript aloud and experience what it sounds like. Or, better yet, record yourself and play it back.
Another version of this technique is to imagine giving a book reading in a year from now. Your memoir or self-help book has finally been published and you’ve been invited to deliver a presentation at a large bookstore. Randomly select a five-page excerpt from your manuscript and pretend you’re giving a reading of that material to an audience of thirty people. How does it sound? Would these five pages hold that audience’s attention? More importantly: would the reading inspire most of the attendees to line up and purchase a copy?
It's a mistake to write as if you have a captive audience. You don’t. You’re competing for their attention with every sentence, every page. You’ve got to earn the precious time the reader is setting aside for you. You have to write like your life or livelihood depends on whether or not you engage your audience, with the same focus an actor, playwright, or speaker might bring to scripting a live performance.
Mistake #3: The stories or ideas are in the wrong order
Most nonfiction manuscripts written by first-time authors immediately improve by simply moving things around. A memoir written in strict chronological order is a good example, because you should virtually never start at the beginning. Start at the most interesting part. This technique is called in medias res, which is Latin for “into the middle of things.” You’ll grab the reader’s attention by launching right into the action. In nonfiction, that might be an anecdote, a pivotal moment in your career, or a dilemma that reflects your core themes. Then, you can use your literary time machine to go back to where the story begins and fill in what the reader needs to know.
Even self-help, how-to, or leadership books benefit from rethinking the order of the material. The problem is that subject matter experts always have a formula for success: a plan or process that should be followed in a prescribed order. But that doesn’t mean their book needs to be written in that same sequence. Brand new authors need to shake off this approach.
The key is to write in a flow that will keep readers reading. Unlike novelists, nonfiction authors have much greater freedom to experiment with the order of their material. Use that artistic license to keep your readers turning pages. The best approach is to frontload the manuscript with some of your best material. Once you get the reader hooked on your story or your ideas, they will be more forgiving with less than dazzling prose later on. It’s kind of like going on a first date. You want to lead with your best impression — and doing so often means changing the order of how your book is organized.
Mistake #4: Thinking your target audience is everyone
I once had a client who wanted to write a book on healthy eating habits. She was a nutritionist and her hope was that the book would garner her new clients and also generate income in royalties from sales. Linda believed that virtually everyone on earth was a potential customer of her nutritional coaching since most of her work happened online. By extension, the market for book sales was the total global population of 8 billion people since virtually all of us have to eat to stay alive! How can you possibly market your book to the whole world?
One of the biggest mistakes first-time authors make is thinking that everyone will want to read their book. Even if your memoir is a classic tale — like the underdog triumphing against overwhelming odds — don’t assume your universal message has universal appeal. We see this with clients who are writing books about surviving trauma. They think that their story can inspire just about anyone who has ever faced difficulties in life. In part, their reasoning is accurate. Their story could inspire a very diverse audience. But the gap to be bridged is at the point of sale. Would your survival story be inspiring enough, before someone reads the whole thing, to make them click “buy”? A better question is: would they have been searching for a book like yours in the first place?
The latter of those two questions contains the remedy to this common writing mistake. Instead of writing a book that would appeal to everyone, produce a manuscript targeted at someone. Imagine a very specific reader, someone who is interested in a certain kind of book that can be described with clear and unique search terms.
Start with the end result, the purchase of your book, and work backwards from there. When you focus your writing on a very particular kind of reader, someone who has a specific reason to read your book, the quality of the work you produce will increase exponentially. And here is the irony of this remedy: by writing for a very targeted audience, you might actually create broader appeal for the book because the overall craftsmanship of your prose has increased due to the tighter focus.
Mistake #5: Saying something that has already been said
My first book, Shifting Sands, has sold over 200,000 copies. Not bad for a first-time author. In it, I tell the true story of my youthful journey across the Sahara Desert as a metaphor to guide readers during times of transition. But the original manuscript was on the verge of rejection by the one and only publisher who expressed any interest in it. The reason that the manuscript I’d spent ten years writing teetered on the brink of rejection is that I wasn’t saying anything new.
The publisher admitted that they loved the gripping tale of my North African odyssey. But when it came to my “Six Rules of Desert Travel” — the self-help message that went with the adventure story — I fell flat. The biggest sticking point was the first rule, which I had called “Follow Your Passion.” They were absolutely choked by that overworked phrase and refused to acquire the rights to my book unless I found something new to say.
Many first-time authors write books that are fairly straightforward. The stories and ideas may not have anything particularly new or fresh about them, even when they’re written in an engaging style. That’s totally OK. It’s called a first draft. You’re not a writer (yet), but you’re on the way.
Now the job is to say something new. You don’t have to solve climate change or figure out how to colonize Mars, but you do need to find a unique way to convey how you think about your subject or the solution you are proposing to a problem. Try to reposition the story you’re telling to give your reader a different way of thinking about their own lives.
This final tip is similar to the first one. You need to dig deeper to find something new to say. Sometimes the shift is very subtle and yet it makes a huge difference. When I changed “Follow Your Passion” to “Follow Your Compass,” my publisher immediately sent me their contract. The message was almost the same: how something needs to guide us across our deserts of change when our old maps don’t work anymore. But naming that guiding force differently, in a way that felt new and fresh at the time, is how my debut manuscript went from the rejection pile to an international bestseller.
If you avoid these 5 most common mistakes made by new nonfiction authors, you will have a much better manuscript. It took me ten years of writing my first book to find this out. Even then, correcting 4 out of these 5 mistakes was still not enough to produce something I would be proud to publish. Challenge yourself to address each one of these five areas and you just might end up with a bestseller, too!
Steve Donahue is a bestselling author, book coach, ghostwriter and speaker. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into multiple foreign editions. Steve is the founder of Storyglu.com, a book coaching and ghostwriting firm that helps nonfiction authors write books readers can’t put down.
