I’m working with a highly educated mental health professional. Right now I’m editing the manuscript for her first nonfiction ebook. She spends a lot of hours each week writing, so you’d think there wasn’t a lot to be changed. How wrong you’d be!
So that we’re clear, there’s nothing wrong with her words, her grammar or her punctuation. It’s just that normally her reports are meant for other professionals like herself, and members of the court, the schools systems, etc. This book is targeted toward parents. Most parents are, at best, casual readers. 50 Shades of Gray, sports stories in the paper, instructions on how to put together a bunk bed – you get the idea. The verbiage, sentence structure and chapter length in this woman’s book is, frankly, far above the head of the casual reader.
If you, like my client, are writing a book for mass readership, there are three very important tips you need to keep in mind.
- Write for the Walmart crowd. Keep your writing at approximately a 5th-grade reading level. Use short sentences and lots of contractions. You want the most harried of parents to be able to read and comprehend what you’ve written.
- Keep chapters bite-sized. Our society today expects information in small, easily digestible chunks. I’ve got a ton of tips for writers of nonfiction, but I’m stopping at just three. And these are short ones, easy to understand and put into practice. A chapter in a nonfiction book could be as short as 3 or 4 paragraphs. Make it just long enough to cover the chapter topic. Much more, and you might lose your reader.
- Break down, then build up. If you’re explaining a process, break it down initially into a handful of “chunks.” Then, as you explain each “chunk,” break that down into another handful of parts. At the end, you can then reassemble the “chunks” to lay out the whole process again. People will understand and remember a “five step process” after the fact, even if you took them through 27 steps to explain it.
While these tips won’t guarantee you a best-seller, you’ll get a lot more people to read your ebook “from cover to cover.”
