Like all popular science authors, I get my fair share of communications from people sharing with me their new theories, whether they be an alternate theory of gravity or time, or disproving quantum physics. In the old days, these used to come as letters via my publisher - I particularly treasure examples with impressive diagrams such as the one illustrated. These days, of course, they tend to be emails, but usually my response has to be that I'm a science writer, not a working physicist (or mathematician) and I'm simply not qualified to comment on their theories. Sometimes, though the email is rather different. The other day, I got one asking me if I was intentionally filling one of my books with 'people of many diverse backgrounds'. It is true that some publishers will request more quotes from women or scientists, with diverse ethnic backgrounds, though when writing a primarily historical book, like my Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World , there is a limited pool ...

Up to this point, this series (outline at the bottom of the post) has been about having a book published by a publisher, but self-publishing is now a much easer option in some ways than it used to be. The Tl;dr summary is 'It's easy to do, but it's really difficult to do well.' I've done it myself for most of my fiction, but what I describe below applies equally well to non-fiction. Personally I prefer to go through a publisher if I can, because they take away a lot of the hassle - but I'd rather have a book self-published than not at all. Others love the whole business - how you will find it will certainly depend on how much time and effort you can put into it. There are many routes to self-publishing. I'm going to describe using KDP, Amazon's route, which for me is the most likely to result in good sales and is relatively easy to use. What I'm describing here is different from vanity publishing or hybrid publishing. Here, a publishing company does ...

In the next in my series on writing a non-fiction book (see outline at the end), I've skipped a rather big part: actually writing the book. The reason is it's such a big part, I think it's worth a series of posts in its own right. But our assumption here is you've written the book and it has been published. Between finishing your manuscript and this key moment will have been a lengthy period - typically 6 to 18 months - when the book will have been edited, proof read, typeset (obviously, not literally involving type setting anymore) and produced. You might hope that the publisher would deal with the hands-dirty business of marketing your book. You're a writer (or a professional doing a bit of writing on the side). It's not your job. But the reality is that most publishers will only pull out the stops for a handful of books each year. You aren't going to get posters on the Tube or adverts in the newspapers. In fact these days, it's quite hard even to get ...

This is surely one of the most exciting points of the writing journey. Your book proposal has been accepted by a publisher and they send you a contract. Woo-hoo! You might be tempted to immediately sign on the dotted line but you do need to check it out carefully. Publishers' contracts can be littered with 'interesting' clauses that you need to query - and just because they have made you an offer doesn't mean you have to go for it in its initial form. A starting point is the kind of book deal they are offering. Broadly, they tend to be either flat fee or advance-and-royalty based. In the case of a flat fee, the publisher offers you a fixed amount, often divided into two parts (usually one on signing the contract, and on acceptance of the manuscript). The more traditional publishing approach is advance and royalty. Here you get offered a smaller amount up front - the advance. You will then get extra payments (the royalty), but only once your part of the earnings from the...

The quick version of this part of the non-fiction book journey is 'do your research'. I have a friend who runs a small publishing house that specialises in certain kinds of memoir and self-help. Every week, she receives novels, and non-fiction proposals that are way outside her scope. This does not make her happy. Traditionally I would have said the best thing to do would be to buy a copy of one of the publishing guides, but now it's easy enough to go through a good number of books aimed at a similar readership as is your own in an online bookshop, noting down their publishers. Build a list of, say, ten likely publishers then visit their websites and explore them in detail. Look at how they describe themselves and what ranges of books they publish. Take a look at any guidance they have for authors. As mentioned in the previous part , try to find an appropriate contact (a commissioning editor, usually) to send a proposal to for each publisher. (Linked-In can sometimes help w...

To date in this series, we've got a book proposal together. There's one last component that can seem relatively trivial - but in reality requires as much effort as you can put into it - the pitch letter. This is the cover letter for your proposal. In reality, these days, the 'letter' is likely to be an email, and that makes it particularly dangerous as we're used to writing emails quickly with limited editing. I highly recommend you craft your basic cover email in a separate editor, such as Word and only paste it in as an email once you are happy with the contents. This should help give it the attention it deserves. Put yourself in the head of the person who receives this email. They will receive many such emails. Although I'm not an editor, I review a lot of books and I get sent plenty of book press releases from publishers, which are a form of pitch email. They go through a two stage filter. Quite a few will get deleted after a few seconds, because I can alrea...

The previous part of this series looked at putting together an outline, which both helps the writer get ideas together and is an essential part of a book proposal. Here we'll look at what else a good book proposal contains. Always remember that in the end this is a sales document - you are selling your book idea to a publisher. Make it engaging, not dull. Start off with a title and subtitle. These may we be changed in discussion with a publisher, but it's a starting point and is necessary. The title is your first opportunity to grab the attention of a would-be reader. Don't waste it. It can either make clear what the book is about, or be a clever title that intrigues, which is then explained in the subtitle. Either way, the subtitle is also a good opportunity to get in some keywords that might be useful when someone searches in an online store. I recently read Ananyo Bhattacharya's book The Man from the Future . This title could have applied to anyone male, but grabs t...

As I  mentioned recently , not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series. In the first part of this series I looked at deciding whether your idea was really a book - to do this I recommended listing around 10 headings that would set out your basic structure. Now we're going to flesh those out. What we'll get is the biggest part of a book proposal - the document you send to a publisher to sell your idea. It's also extremely valuable once you starting writing the book. What you will do next is, for each heading, fill in some detail. I'm going to show you two ways to do this - but before I do, I ought to warn you that putting together the outline is the hardest part of writing a book. It can be agony. If you do it pro...

As I mentioned recently , not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series. The good thing about writing non-fiction is that, if successful, you sell the book to a publisher before you write it. By contrast, fiction has to be written first, and in most cases has to be presented to publishers via an agent. But even if you intend to self-publish (more on this later), it's still crucial to establish whether or not you have an idea for a book before putting too much effort into it. The chances are, the topic is something you are enthusiastic about - and that's great. When an author loves their topic, it can come through very effectively to the reader. However, this doesn't mean that there is a readership out there that will be...

I saw on Twitter the other day (via someone I know answering it), the question 'What's the best writing advice you would give to someone who wants to become a writer?' My knee-jerk response was 'Don't do it, because you aren't one.' What I mean by this is that - at least in my personal experience - you don't become a writer. Either you are one, or you aren't. There's plenty of advice to be had on how to become a better writer, or how to become a published writer... but certainly my case I always was one - certainly as soon as I started reading books.  While I was at school, I made comics. I wrote stories.  My first novel was written in my teens (thankfully now lost). I had a first career that wasn't about being a writer, but I still wrote in my spare time, sending articles off to magazines and writing a handful of novels. And eventually writing took over entirely. If you are a writer, you can't help yourself. You just do it. I'm writ...