Planning your book

,
closeup of open book with blurred text
Reading Time: < 1 minute

As you plan how you’re going to write your book, think about maximizing its market value (and your profits!) by structuring it as free-standing chapters, each one of which could become a magazine article. There are several advantages to writing discrete chapters:

  • Full exposition. You’re more apt to cover a chapter’s content thoroughly and clearly if you think in terms of beginning, middle, and end––thesis, discussion, and conclusion.
  • Logical development. Flaws in continuity and missing elements that could weaken your premise are easier to spot and correct.
  • Workflow. Focusing on a single topic means that you can wrap up one manageable portion of your book at a time before moving on to the next, giving you a comfortable sense of completion at the end of each chapter.
  • Flexibility. Publishing chapters in magazines or journals before your manuscript is entirely written allows you to incorporate comments from editors and readers into your book, thereby strengthening its position and timeliness.
  • Coherent organization. Preliminary feedback may convince you to take a somewhat different tack, one that is more measured, reasoned, or reader-friendly.
  • Market value. It is not only possible that you may earn fees for submitting chapters as articles, but you can also request that periodicals identify you as the author of the forthcoming book (title) to be published in (date) by (publisher).
  • Prepublication promotion. You may want to make copies of a particular article(s) and send them to interested parties along with a note saying your book will soon be available. Don’t be too concerned about evenness and flow at the time you’re writing your free-standing chapters/articles. Once you have everything done, you can go back over your work, smooth it out with appropriate transitions, and insert chapter-to-chapter cross references.