Most people feel, at one point or another in their lives, that they’ve “got a book in them.” And with the whole spectrum of human experience being lived on this planet every single day, a lot of them do.
If we just keep to the category of nonfiction, we’re talking about true stories of people who travel, uncover secrets, or overcome major struggles during their time on earth. We’re talking about people who know areas of science and history and culture that you’ve never even heard of. Or the best cooks in the world, or people who want to share knowledge about dying crafts and hobbies.
You might be one of these people. You might dream of writing a book one day to leave a legacy or give something back to humanity or just share something you think is cool.
But as much as I love human creation and personal exploration, I think people should be way more circumspect about “having a book in them” and actually writing it. And that’s for several reasons. One is a consideration for the aspiring writer. Writing books is really, really hard. It takes time and a whole set of skills you might not have developed yet, no matter how much work you might have done to develop your other skills and knowledge.
The other is a consideration for the whole world of readers out there drowning in content and struggling to find quality. Our inboxes are stuffed with more updates then we’ll ever be able to read and our social media feeds are seas of people all screaming about the same things. We might be interested in topics, but the screaming! The screaming takes up all the real estate in our heads that might otherwise be filled with actually helpful insights to make our lives richer.
And yet another consideration is for the writers who actually create excellent work and struggle to have it discovered in a saturated market. “Yeah, boohoo, that’s the market,” you might be thinking. Yeah, you’re right. Nobody is owed a readership. But I do happen to think a lot of important stuff gets overlooked due to the fact that they’re just too hard to find.
Especially in our current tech landscape, people think that the “book in them” will be a lot easier to write. And on the surface, I can’t argue with that. If you can throw some info into Claude and be like “make this sound good”…that is empirically easy.
But if that’s what you do, was that really the book that was in you? Or is that the book in the collective unconscious of the scraped internet and destroyed books? Will it be written in your actual voice or in the universal voice that we’re all compressing into like a collapsing star system (whether we actually use AI or not)? Will what’s written in that book be true, or did it just borrow from people who were talking out of their asses on Reddit? And if you didn’t take the time to actually fact check or develop your voice and ideas, is it really “yours” at all?
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not just an AI thing. I’ve said it before: the slop was coming from inside the house. The sheer volume of books we’ve been producing, especially since self-publishing became so accessible, has exploded.
And let’s be real—a lot of it’s trash.
I’m not saying, “Your baby is ugly,” I’m saying, “People have been slapping things together with no eye for quality and throwing them online, since long before they started ‘writing’ books with LLMs.”
(Although, you know what? I won’t sugar coat it. If you’re not putting in the work on your craft, checking your sources, and getting helpful feedback and collaborating to make a good product, your baby is probably ugly.)
So is that the kind of book and content culture you want to be a part of? Just make some trash to ostensibly make some money? And by “some money” I mean, maybe a hundred dollars…if you’re lucky?
If you’re actually listening to this, I really doubt that’s what you want for yourself. If nonfiction is your thing, dear reader, I imagine you want to make—or read or help someone else make—books that people read and benefit from. That could be learning something applicable to their lives, giving them an emotional experience with yours or someone else’s compelling life story, or just fulfilling someone’s curiosity and giving them the opportunity to connect with subjects beyond themselves.
And it’s both easier and harder to do than ever. You can get more help finding sources, but you can’t trust without verifying: and that process of verifying takes a lot of willpower and stick-to-itiveness. There are talented designers and editors everywhere, but they do need to be paid. There are tools that you can use yourself to create the books (and the marketing work that you must do to promote them), but those cost money too and often require you to develop new skills.
But if doing this really matters to you, if you really want to go to the trouble of writing and publishing nonfiction, ask yourself the following questions:
- Why? Why do you want to publish a nonfiction book?
- Are you willing to put in the time, money, and energy it takes to get it done?
- How far are you willing to go to put out worthwhile and accurate information?
- And maybe this should be the question you ask before a lot of those other ones, who do you want to read it and what value would it actually bring them?
The next several episodes are going to be deeper dives into answering some of those questions, which will hopefully give you clarity as you decide whether and how you want to write nonfiction.
Why are you doing it?
Nonfiction isn’t just about “learning” something, and “learning” something isn’t just a function of nonfiction. (If you’ve never learned anything from fiction, I simply don’t believe you.) It’s a wide-ranging category—definitely not a single genre.
As I’m looking for a way to define it, in fact, I’m struggling to find a definition I agree with. I started on Wikipedia and it said, “Non-fiction (or nonfiction) is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to convey information only about the real world, rather than being grounded in imagination.” I can’t even except that, because a lot of nonfiction is written in bad faith.
Merriam-Webster says, “Writing or cinema that is about facts and real events.” And I’m dubious of that definition as well. You always have to ask “According to who?” at the end of that one.
Definitions aside, there are a lot of types of nonfiction and reasons to write it. Narrative nonfiction, like memoir and journalistic pieces full of interviews and connected threads; prescriptive nonfiction that gives you tools to learn new practical skills or heal from trauma; even joke books and trivia books and all those fun little morsels that your dad kept next to the toilet.
But let’s focus on the motivation for writing first.
One is that you have an idea you want to expand. You see connections between different topics that you believe are all wired together, and you want to unscrew the cover and show that circuit board to the world. There’s a lot of love in making those connections for people, and it takes a lot of work. You could be a physical scientist trying to break down complex ideas for laypeople or a sociologist connecting different phenomenon into a way to help readers make sense of human behavior. Or you might just want to share everything you know about your favorite movie subgenre.
This is nonfiction that’s based on curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it’s just to feed interest or to help readers know more about the way the world works, as you see it, your primary interest here is to inform and enlighten.
Another motivation is you have a message to send. Your biggest priority is a clear call to action. Religious or not, you’re evangelizing for a cause: you’re trying to prove to people why they should care about something.
Arguably, you can make that thing they care about you. Like, you personally. If anyone has ever encouraged you to use your book as a “business card” (and yes those words have come out of my mouth before), that’s a form of message.
Political books, self help, spiritual nonfiction, they’re all based on sharing a message. And at least over the last decade, it’s been the most popular type. But it’s also the type of motivation where I’d start getting dubious of the “facts and real events” claim.
The next motivation is that you’re driven to tell a story: a true story about yourself and someone else. Memoirs and biographies and histories are examples. Maybe that’s to inspire people or to warn them, or inform them or unite them. That brings me to my next point—with nonfiction, a lot of these motivations overlap. Sometimes narrative and prescription overlap. You may have all of it in your book.
You may want to connect ideas regarding historical events to call people to action. You might want to tell stories of different activists whose work intersects. Hell, you may just want to share all the hiking trails in a particular area, informing people so they can spend more time out in nature—and use the stories of your own hiking adventures to frame them all.
Writing nonfiction involves a lot of thinking across a lot of domains, and to keep from making the whole process miserable for yourself, you’ve got to have at least one of those motivations driving you.
Do you have the time, money, and energy?
To state the obvious: writing is hard, and the big esoteric parts aren’t it. The mechanics and practicalities themselves are difficult. For a lot of people (and at this point, that includes me) they’re the most difficult part of all.
First, if you’ve got a day job and also want to write, you’re going to have to make sacrifices and create strategies . And if you have some kind of neurodivergence or chronic illness or anything that causes brain fog or makes you get tired faster? It’s going to take you some work to figure out how to manage your energy and pin down a time where you can actually write. Even task switching itself, before you even start the writing process, takes energy.
And with nonfiction, you can’t really just sit down and start writing the story in your head and see where the wind takes you. Not even fiction writers can always do that. Before you can even get started, you need to have your ducks in a row. You need to have a theme, you need to do research—which could mean anything from finding books, primary sources, or scheduling interviews. You’d be amazed at the True Detective or, depending on your preferred genre, Pepe Silvia boards that nonfiction writers put on their walls. Over the course of their writing lives, some people will spend hundreds of dollars in Post-It notes.
And here’s something people don’t talk about but is very real: actual physical pain. I ghostwrite and copyedit nonfiction daily; I write fiction and podcast scripts and newsletters, and I now work and sleep in wrist braces 100% of the time I’m working or sleeping. Sometimes I have to take the night off with the heating pad wrapped around my forearm. Repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome are real problems, and they hurt. And if you spend enough time typing, you’ll get something going on with you, no matter how ergonomic your setup.
“Just dictate then, if that’s a problem for you,” you might say. Okay. But it’s not like you can just pick up a microphone and start dictating. If you don’t write very much otherwise, dictating can be a great way to get your thoughts into words, but if you do write a lot, you might find speaking uses a completely different set of cognitive skills.
And that’s not to mention the transcription errors. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I love to post the things that my transcription programs think I said.
And then there’s software, which…boring, yeah, but just because you have a computer doesn’t mean this is all for free. And if you’re not paying with your money, you are paying with your data and the technological hoops you have to jump through in this age of enshittification. But we’ve talked about that plenty, haven’t we?
How far are you willing to go to put out worthwhile and accurate information?
Right now, Amazon is full of a glut of self-published reference books that are fully AI generated. It seems like people have kind of forgotten what supply and demand means, so just a little reminder: what usually happens when there are a high volume of identical products on the market, the price goes down (I know…imagine prices going down!). So people who are creating AI generated books need to produce a lot of them to see any actual profits.
Most of the people who post these books are not fact checking. Why would they? The whole point of this is that they don’t want to do any work.
You as the writer are responsible for supplying us with the correct information. And I mean “we” as readers, but also “we” as people who work in publishing. There is no real gate a book has to pass through that requires accurate information before it’s posted, not for self-published books at least. A nonfiction book, particularly a self-published one, can jut be put up online no matter whether or not the information is true.
If this is a reference book, that can be a disaster. Because people aren’t just using nonfiction books to write reports, they’re using it for activities that might actually pose danger if done wrong.
Back to the AI slop example: Emily Bender and Alex Hanna tell a story in their book The AI Con about how machine-generated books can literally be dangerous. Members of a Mycological Society in New York—a mushroom foraging organization—noticed a lot more books being posted online about foraging. And this isn’t something that you just pack up and do risk-free. Mushrooms famously can be extremely poisonous, which most people know, including—I assume—whoever posted this AI-generated book.
Reddit posters have talked about how trusting these foraging books have sent their entire families to the hospital.
This rise in AI-generated self publishing books means LLMs are asked for information about things that can affect people’s lives and health. Fortunately for real experts, that means that more than ever, readers need nonfiction that they can trust from people who know what they’re talking about.
As for traditional publishing: while some legal departments are very careful about fact-checking what makes it onto the market, there often aren’t provisions in a contract saying the company will fact check you, which is something I’d like to talk about more in a future episode.
The bottom line? Presenting accurate information is, in fact, your responsibility as the writer, and even if the publishing company gets a little embarrassed, the author is going to bear the brunt of any repercussions that come from inaccuracies. It might be from readers, it’s often from journalists, and unless you’re already some well regarded author who can go hide for a while, lick their wounds, then make a comeback, it could cost you a future book deal.
Who do you want to read it and what value would it bring them?
Writers are often accused of being self-focused, even self absorbed. That’s understandable. We live in our heads a lot of the time, and when we’re trying to constantly develop ideas, it can be hard to get out. In fiction, we can easily advise people “write for yourself” to get the stories out that mean so much to them. That’s part of why fanfiction is a thing: a lot of people write fiction for the fun of it.
Unless we’re talking about memoirs, it’s not really the same for nonfiction. For nonfiction, with few exceptions, the motivation has to point outwards. When you’re thinking about the “why” behind your nonfiction book, and the process of selling them and marketing them, it’s not just about you anymore.
As a nonfiction writer, your category implies expertise to readers. But anyone can write a book, and now anyone can put them up online as well. Those “facts and true events” come with a big asterisk. If you’ve got human integrity and expertise, you have a responsibility to make your book actually valuable to people (or at least that’s what I think).
The very fact that the market is so saturated means that, if you really know what you’re talking about, people need your nonfiction. They need your high-quality, well-researched, experience and expertise-driven nonfiction. Writing for the quick buck isn’t enough—you won’t even get one. You can get anything for $1.99 on Amazon, or for free with the right ChatGPT prompt. But what sets you apart are the ideas in your brain, the way you connect them, and the research and rigor you are willing to put in.
An LLM is only going to produce what a person can think to ask it. People don’t know what they don’t know. LLMs cannot offer up the connections that people don’t think to ask about. That’s up to you.
So you have to ask yourself: what matters to you more than the money? In fact, I’d say that you shouldn’t expect to make money doing it at all. And damn do I wish it weren’t like that, but it is. And if you do want to make money, without committing to being a grifter (because grifting is a commitment), you need to think about what the reader will gain from reading your book. And if you do want to make it part of your career, you’ll need to figure out how to use that book in combination with your other activities in order to do that.
Think about how it will help people understand the world better, how it will make them understand themselves better. How will it help them get the outcomes they want or make peace with the things that scare them or confuse them? How will it help them bring meaning into their lives?
Because if it’s bringing them meaning and clarity, it’s going to do the same thing for you in the process.
We are far from done here…
Over the coming episodes, we’re going to explore different topics and concerns in nonfiction and the challenges that each of these things present. We’re going to dig into the subjects I mentioned—talking about timeless writing topics like propaganda and misinformation, research processes, interviewing, and fact checking. But we’re also going to dig into why writing a nonfiction book even matters when people have podcasts to listen to and YouTube videos to watch and ChatGPT to consult, and when there’s a glut in the market and a rise in anti-intellectualism and book banning.
Lots of kind, optimistic people believe that everyone has a book in them. I want to be one of those people, but for my part, I think I need to throw some caveats in there.
Unless you have an entire self-contained encyclopedia of a brain, the book that is in you isn’t completely in you right now. Some of that book is still outside of you. It needs to be fed into you or built into you, like you’re an intellectual cyborg. And maybe it needs to get out of you and go into an incubator—so you can get a good look at it and figure out how to complete it. Develop and solidify your ideas, take that unfinished book from something squishy to something with structure and a respiratory and circulatory system.
And that might require you to grow as a person, to travel, to get input from the outside world so you eventually have something to show for all that growth.
And then, when it’s finally done, you need to be ready for it not to belong to you anymore. You can influence it and direct where it goes, but it’s now part of that growing cavalcade of books that makes up the information we swim in daily. You want it to float on top of that sea of screaming.
The first step to turning that intellectual fetus into a full-grown book is to decide how much you’re ready to commit. But unlike a child, your book really is an extension of you. Do whatever you need to do to make it good.
