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Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
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But I’ve been seeing a lot of short non-fiction ebooks (under 100 pages) by authors who equally lack credentials so I figured, Why not? So say if I was writing an ebook on dealing with fear. I could do:
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Don’t write non-fiction just because “Why not?” -- write it for the same reasons you write fiction --- you have a story to tell. Either your own story, or a story you have researched (or want to research).
Do you want to tell a story about fear? Do you have five easy steps to overcoming fear? Are they
your five steps? Are they really guaranteed to work? That’s a pretty big claim. How many people have you shared these five steps with who will back you up that they work?
Just to be totally honest -- if I looked at your website or amazon author page or whatever and saw a few thriller novels I might try one -- if I saw a few thriller novels
and a few short
non-expert self-help titles that sound more like a sales pitch than research or experience, I’d immediately move on.
Maybe you do have a story to tell about fear. But is it five easy steps you want to sell me, or is it a personal story of your own stuggles that you want to share? The latter might actually be interesting, but--
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The second one is really like a memoir I suppose, and if I wanted to write a lot of little non-fiction ebooks, which I do, it would seem strange to me to have a lot of memoirs.
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True enough. But it seems you are looking at things backwards -- trying to imagine what kind of bibliography you might have in N-years, rather than what you really want to write today.
If you want to write lots of short non-fiction, act like a journalist and write short pieces researching this, that, and other things under a separate blog. Maybe you’ll research current science and technology. Maybe you’ll incorporate bits of that research into your next novels. Maybe N-years from now you’ll have material for a non-fiction book on what technology succeeded and what fizzled. Or maybe a book on how you incorporated your non-fiction research into your novels. Or maybe -- anything, but at least you’ll be writing interesting things now rather than thinking about your future bibliography.