Decide on Your Book's Content Type

The first decisions you need to make are whether your book will be fact or fiction and whether you will write it yourself or not.

Fact or Fiction?

This also touches on your reason for wanting to write a book in the first place. Do you have specialized knowledge that you want to pass on to others? If so, you're a teacher and need to approach the task from that point of view. Are you a story-teller who wants to get the book inside you out into the public eye? Then you're an entertainer. Or do you just want to make money? (And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way).

No matter what, you will structure your book in the same way and we'll cover how you do that further on in this article.

Who Will Write Your Book?

Well, that depends on your role.

If your role is teacher and you're writing about your expert subject, then you will write it yourself. You will probably combine knowledge out of your own head with additional research on the subject. That research may simply inform your own writing or may appear as footnote references.

If your role is entertainer because you have a fiction book inside you screaming to get out, then you are also going to write it yourself. There are whole courses on how to structure fiction and I'm not going to second-guess them here. My advice is to get a couple of novels by your favorite authors and re-read them. But not in order to be entertained.

Ask the question "what is the author doing here?" Are they setting up a scene for a big reveal in the future? Are they creating images in your mind? What emotions are they trying to elicit? Are they misleading you? Or are they using the old author trick of making you feel good because you know or understand more than one of the protagonists?

But what if you're just in it for the money?

If you're just in it for the money, in some ways it's a lot easier.

For starters, you're not constrained to something you ate interested in. You are simply after a genre that will be profitable.

There is a formula to determine this, and I'll cover it in the next lesson.

And second, you are not going to write it yourself and I'll also cover outlining a plot and getting a great ghostwriter in the next lesson.

Who Will Be Your Editor and/or Proofreader?

Whether you write your book yourself or use a ghostwriter, it will need to be edited and proofread. You can do this yourself, get a family member or friend to do it or pay a professional. The pros and cons of these different approaches will all be covered in the next lesson.