Brian Clegg's Blog, page 23

I want to write a non-fiction book - part 1 - Is my idea a book?

As I mentioned recently, not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series.

The good thing about writing non-fiction is that, if successful, you sell the book to a publisher before you write it. By contrast, fiction has to be written first, and in most cases has to be presented to publishers via an agent. But even if you intend to self-publish (more on this later), it's still crucial to establish whether or not you have an idea for a book before putting too much effort into it.

The chances are, the topic is something you are enthusiastic about - and that's great. When an author loves their topic, it can come through very effectively to the reader. However, this doesn't mean that there is a readership out there that will be equally fascinated. Your readers are not you. Just because you've been engrossed, say, watching the birds in your back garden, does not mean a book about them would be a natural bestseller. (I'm not ruling that out as a topic - but it needs thinking about.)

Broadly there are three things to consider - is there enough material for a book, have you something new and interesting to add, and who will buy it.

My former agent's first question was always whether an idea was a book or a magazine article. A topic can make for an absolutely riveting article but may not be worth giving, say, 75,000 to 100,000 words to discussing it. A great way to explore this a bit more, which will be useful for the second step of the process too, is to break down your topic into a series of headings. You can do this as a list, or, if you prefer, with some kind of visual structure, such as a mind map. Say you have around ten of these headings. Could you write 7,000 to 10,000 words on each (around five magazine articles), or would you struggle to put together more than a few of pages?

If there isn't enough to go on, this doesn't mean you have to abandon the idea - though in some cases that would make sense - but rather to think more widely about your overall topic. If, for example, this is a biography, but not enough is known about the individual, you could bring in headings covering various contexts. This might be about some major historical event they were part of, or something more on the specialty area that makes this person worth writing about... context is key here.

The second point was whether you have something new to add. This means doing some research. What's already out there? What other books might overlap with yours on the topic? If yours is about a very personal subject, the overlap might be in the type of story involved. For example, if the key to your book involved your grandparents' unusual upbringing, look for other memoirs that have this kind of subject.  If you are writing about something more general, then others could have already written a book on the topic.

Note that there being other books out there doesn't mean that you can't write one too - but you need to find your unique selling point. What is it about you and your take on the subject that is truly different? It might be there is new information to add, or a topic is particularly timely because of an anniversary. It could be that you have new stories to tell, or can approach the same topic in a totally different way. It may be that your personal experience gives you a unique insight. Each or all of these could apply. Remember, though, that it is not enough just to be different from the rest. You need to be different and appeal to your audience.

That leads us neatly on to the third question - who will buy your book? When we get onto a proposal - the document you need to put together for a publisher, but that is also worthwhile as a guide if self-publishing, you will need to identify exactly who your audience will be. It's not enough to say 'Everyone would want to read this.' Not only is that extremely unlikely, it doesn't help at all. Give some serious thought to the kind of person you will be aiming your book at, and whether such people will be willing to pay the cover price to get hold of a copy.

One final consideration at this stage and throughout - the importance of narrative. I've mentioned the 's' word (story) a couple of times already. You may be thinking 'But I want to write non-fiction - why is he wittering on about stories? Surely non-fiction is about facts?' A collection of facts is not a book in the sense I'm trying to help with, it's a list. It might be a useful list. It may even be one you can sell in book form (think, for example, of something like the Guinness Book of World Records). But it isn't what we normally think of as a non-fiction book - it's a reference, a gift book or a novelty title. If you are to write a successful general non-fiction book, its success will depend on your ability to draw the reader in and get them interested. And that means telling stories. More on that in the next part of this series.

To finish, here's an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

Is my idea a book?OutliningOther parts of a proposalThe pitch letterFinding a publisherThe contractSelf-publishing

Image by Nick Morrison from Unsplash

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A sad farewell to an old Google search rival

Writers are more prone than most to search for themselves on Google, if only to keep an eye out for reviews. For many years I've had a friendly rivalry with Brian Clegg art supplies as to who comes out on top in those searches - but now, I'm sad to learn that the company has gone into receivership. 

The firm dates back to 1973, and for years has been a leading supplier of art materials to British primary schools and beyond. What's more, it was established in the town where I lived for my first 22 years, Rochdale in Lancashire - a town that has suffered more than most in a post-industrial world, and will be hit hard by the redundancies.

Inevitably we sometimes get confused with each other. I occasionally get emails about paint, and an old work colleague just the other day emailed to say he was impressed to see my paint-based sideline. I might have sometimes moaned in the past when they beat me to that top spot (when I looked just now they were still there)... but it's really sad to see them go.

Review: British Rail: a new history - Christian Wolmar ****

If you're interested in railways - and it's hard to imagine why you would buy this book if you're not - this is a fascinating exploration of the rise and fall of British Railways/British Rail from nationalisation in 1948 through to privatisation in the mid-1990s.

Along the way, we take in the phasing out of steam (and why, unlike many other countries we mostly converted to diesel), the infamous Beeching cuts of the network in the 1960s, successes such as the 125 mile per hour High Speed Train with the InterCity brand and more. What comes across most strongly is the way that interference from government has time and again messed things up. It's not that the railway management itself was without faults - particularly in the way that the old regions, reflecting the four private companies that were taken over, tried to still do things their own way. And Christian Wolmar is no fan of the many restrictive practices that had to be gradually removed in the face of resistance from staff. Similarly, the London-centric management never properly handled what was dismissively referred to as the 'Provincial' region. But time and again, the government got it wrong.

Whether it was Beeching's total mishandling of the necessary pruning of some of the oddities and low usage branch lines left over from Victorian railway expansion, removing many valuable connections and stations, the inability to properly account for the need to subsidise some lines for the public good, or a lack of recognition of good management practice where it was brought into play, successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, have proved totally incapable of understanding the country's rail needs - while the Treasury has resisted every sensible investment to improve the railways from day one. And, of course, the story ends with the disastrous privatisation, just when BR was getting its act together, that has resulted in far more public subsidy than was previously the case - plus terrible services in some areas. Wolmar holds up some hope for the planned formation of Great British Railways, an oversight body taking in most of Britain's railways - but since the book was written, that too seems to be suffering from government mishandling.

From the point of view of a railway enthusiast dating back to peak diesel, the book's biggest fault is an over-concentration on politics and details of management structures. Of course this is important, but it is given too much detail sometimes, where some of the niceties of the experience of being a rail traveller in the BR period could have had more coverage. The favourites of late 60s/early 70s trainspotters, the Deltics, do get a couple of mentions - but no real details. The beautiful, if flaky, diesel hydraulic Western class aren't even named - they get lumped in with a general criticism of the Western Region's attempt to do it their way. And I would have liked to have seen more detail, for example, of the seating, food provided in the dining cars and suchlike.

However, I can't deny that the politics, management and strategy (or lack of it) that are explored here are central to understanding what happened to British Rail, why it got better - and why it wasn't far better still. A must for UK rail fans.

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Review: Dear Bill Bryson - Ben Aitken ***

This is what they call a high concept book - you don't need many details to get the point, as what it sells is a clear, simple concept. In this case it's retracing Bill Bryson's journey from his 1995 book Notes from a Small Island, as much as possible staying and eating in the same places, seeing the same sights and having the same experiences. This book just jumped at me off the bookshelf - I love travel books that are humorous (the serious ones generally come across as far too worthy) and am a big fan of Bryson, even when he had the temerity to amble into popular science.

As a result, I was a little unnerved when I read in Ben Aitken's introduction 'I mention this (the book being an irreverent homage, rather than a pious and gushing one) to give the more zealous members of Bryson's fan club a chance to back out now... Nor am I funny. If I ever seem funny, or write things that seem funny, it is almost always by accident.' So, it's arguable this introductory statement pretty much entirely counters my reason for buying the book in the first place (and probably quite a few buyers). Perhaps it should be mentioned on the back cover (interestingly, it is in the online equivalent of a blurb). Luckily, though, Aitken's comments turn out to be more self-deprecatory than entirely factual.

There's no doubt that there are dollops of humour in here, some of which work really well - though the style of book doesn't sit awfully well with Aitken's regular thoughts on social justice and inequality. It's not that I disagree with him about the impact of inequality, particularly in the North and the South West - I'm all in favour of levelling up and such - it's just that this content does not fit well with Bryson and would be more apposite if Aitken had decided to take the same approach to an Orwell or J. B. Priestley book. In fact both get several mentions, and probably the biggest thing I've got out of reading Aitken is putting Priestley's English Journey on my 'to read' list.

Aitken's writing comes alive when he recounts conversations, from the delightful to the downright scary, when encountering a character who quite clearly could resort to violence at any moment. And some of his descriptions of places are effective. But at times he follows Bryson in such a half-hearted way that it's hard to get much out of the travel writing. So, for instance, he tells us that Bryson thinks that Blackpool's illuminations were tacky and inadequate. But he doesn't bother to actually look at them himself, relying on a one line comment from a local to give his response.

In the end - and Aitken effectively admits this - any attempt to be critical of Bryson's travel writing is breaking a butterfly on the wheel. The original book was not about in-depth analysis, or even deep reaction to the surroundings. It's as much about Bryson's character and the feel he gets of the place as it is 'real' travel writing. That being the case, it was never going to be an easy job to try to follow Bryson and update us on how things have  changed, because Bryson was not offering biting social commentary or exquisite architectural observation. There is, in the end, very little in Notes from a Small Island that can sensibly be updated, unless it were done by Bryson himself - and frankly, his attempt in the 2015 The Road to Little Dribbling wasn't up to the original. So, to some extent, this was a project that was likely to fail right from the start.

Despite this, at risk of damning with faint praise, I never felt like I wanted to give up on Aitken. There was always enough to interest me to keep me going. But it's certainly not a book from which to get the same kind of enjoyment as the original.

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Best writing advice

I saw on Twitter the other day (via someone I know answering it), the question 'What's the best writing advice you would give to someone who wants to become a writer?' My knee-jerk response was 'Don't do it, because you aren't one.'

What I mean by this is that - at least in my personal experience - you don't become a writer. Either you are one, or you aren't. There's plenty of advice to be had on how to become a better writer, or how to become a published writer... but certainly my case I always was one - certainly as soon as I started reading books. 

While I was at school, I made comics. I wrote stories.  My first novel was written in my teens (thankfully now lost). I had a first career that wasn't about being a writer, but I still wrote in my spare time, sending articles off to magazines and writing a handful of novels. And eventually writing took over entirely.

If you are a writer, you can't help yourself. You just do it. I'm writing this when I should be doing something else. I rarely go a day without writing something (and I don't just mean a shopping list). It's a compulsion. It is part of what I am.

So, if you really need to ask, don't bother. See above re being a better/more effective/published/successful/etc writer. But don't expect help to become one if you aren't already.

And that's my best writing advice...

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Book for Swindon's Festival of Tomorrow

I'm delighted to be appearing again at Swindon's Festival of Tomorrow. This year I've a fun talk based on the book Lightning Often Strikes Twice, taking place on Saturday 18 February at 10.45am in the Egg Theatre at Swindon's Deanery Academy.

We'll be exploring common misperceptions in science from the the title behaviour of lightning to toast falling butter side down, the suicidal behaviour of lemmings, the confusing nature of food packaging and far more. You'll even take part in a long-running science experiment.

Book here - you need to 'Reserve a spot' for the day, then add tickets for the talk. £2 for adults, under 18 free!

The full Festival is on over two days - you can get the big picture here.

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Review: The Appeal - Janice Hallett *****

Wow. This is the most original modern murder mystery novel I've read in a long time. When I opened it and found that the text was primarily made up of page after page of emails, my heart sank. Admittedly epistolary novels are hardly something new, dating back to the very first entries in the field, but while some can be delightful (one of my favourite Gene Wolfe books, The Sorcerer's House , for example), some can be heavy going. I shouldn't have worried, though - these emails, primarily between members of the Fairway Players amateur dramatics group - tell a story beautifully and extremely engagingly.

The title is a double reference - much of the book is concerned with an appeal to raise money for a novel medical treatment for the granddaughter of the am dram group's leaders, the Haywards. However, the whole thing is framed as a collection of evidence that is being assessed by a pair of young legal associates, whose boss wants them to view the documents dispassionately to test the grounds for an appeal for a sentence of murder that was passed on one of the central characters in the email exchange.

Once we get past the murder itself, there are two additional sets of information passed to our intrepid investigators, Olufemi and Charlotte, before they finally reach the same conclusion as their boss. I really can't remember when I've devoured a book with such enthusiasm - it is both extremely clever in format and beautifully structured - Janice Hallett has done a wonderful job.

I only have two very small moans. One is that a critical factor towards the end depends on something that has pretty much been scientifically dismissed now. The other is that towards the end of the book we spend a fair amount of time in discussions between Olufemi and Charlotte as they try to work out what happened. Although occasional 'The What's Up' interventions dictated by their boss who doesn't get the technology are amusing, I found these sections lacked the engagement and drive of the email exchanges. They were significantly harder to follow (not helped by the WhatsApp parts being printed in black on grey, which made them hard to read).

However, I must stress those are small moans indeed. I've come late to this book, which was published in 2021, but I find it hard to believe I'll read a murder mystery to match it this year.

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Has the war in Ukraine killed HVDC from Northern Africa?

Every now and then someone points out that you could power all the UK's needs, or even all of Europe with solar panels located in a relatively small area of North Africa. Of course, there is a technical problem with this - getting the electrical energy all the way to its destination. The preferred solution tends to be HVDC - high voltage direct current.

Traditionally, we've used AC (alternating current) to transmit power, because it's easy to switch voltages of AC using transformers. High voltage is desirable for long distance transmission, because this reduces the amount of current required to carry the same amount of energy, and the lower the current, the less that is lost to heat. However, now it is far more practical to convert DC to AC, HVDC has become important because it can reduce both the cost of the transmission process and the energy loss. It is now used for many of the interconnectors that allow electricity to flow between countries.

Perhaps more obvious than the selection of HVDC is the reason for suggesting North Africa, as the nearest region for Europe that has such high levels of sun exposure combined with a lot of unused/otherwise unusable open space.

I've always been concerned that this approach is naive. The science might now be feasible, but the politics has always been worrying. Energy supply is crucial to modern civilisation - and it would be unwise to place a large proportion of our electricity generation in the hands of another country. 

This concern has, in the past, been represented as xenophobic, but over the years, the nations that supply one source of energy - oil - have demonstrated time and again how they can use their near-monopoly to political gain. And now, the impact of the war in Ukraine on energy supplies to Europe and the associated costs of disruption (which include some countries re-opening coal-fired power stations - horrendous from an environmental viewpoint) has demonstrated just how important it is that countries generate as much of their energy themselves as they can.

What always seemed to some degree an impractical suggestion has now, I would suggest, been shown to be a totally irresponsible concept. If anyone is still suggesting it, they need to think again.

Image: HVDC power lines in North Dakota by Wtshymanski from Wikipedia

This has been a Green Heretic production.

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Review: Blurb Your Enthusiasm - Louise Willder ****

As someone with a good number of published books, I couldn't help be fascinated by Louise Willder's exploration of everything there is to know about book blurbs (and quite a lot about how books are presented that isn't about blurbs). But the good news is that you don't have to be in the business to find this chunky little hardback enjoyable. Willder has apparently written over 5,000 book blurbs (the bits on the back or dustcover flap that tell you about the book) and both knows the topic inside out and also delights in it.

We discover the difficulties of getting a whole book across in a couple of hundred words without resorting to gushing praise, how humour can entice the reader in, how blurbs differ from country to country and far more. As suggested above, Willder also brings in things like cover design, titles and subtitles, front cover text, review extracts and even opening lines (and page 69) as examples of other ways a potential reader might be persuaded to first lift a book off the shelf and then get it as far as the till. I've only recently got back to going into physical bookshops after the depths of the Covid pandemic, and it was brought home to me far more than usual as a result, how much the experience of picking books off the shelf and looking at the cover and back is so different from perusing a book website (and how much more enjoyable).

This is, then, an easy sell - though it's hard to fault the number of entertaining snippets, whether from history, books themselves or the experiences of other blurbists that Willder crams in. This is a book to savour. Having said that, I'm not sure it's a book that is best read from cover to cover as I did, because after a while it can feel a little samey. The book is dividing into many short sections (though it's not an A to Z in the conventional sense, despite the subtitle), and I suspect it would be perfect as a loo book, or for short train journeys, taking it in a chunk at a time. 

Funnily, one of the few times I didn't agree with Willder was reflected in the title of the book itself. She is positive about puns as a way of winning over a book buyer, where I find them a bit cringe-inducing. They also sometimes require a particular cultural awareness. I didn't realise the book's title was a pun - I just thought it was rather clumsy. I had vaguely heard of the US TV show 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' - but not sufficiently for it to immediately spring to mind when adding the book to my Christmas list. However, that's a minor point - this is a delicious little book, if more a box of chocolates to be consumed with breaks than a plate of steak and chips to enjoy as a single entity.

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Review: The Path of Peace - Anthony Seldon ****

One of the best things about being given books as presents is that you get to read things that you would never buy for yourself and make interesting discoveries. That was the case for me with The Path of Peace - on one level it's a travel book, featuring the author walking (approximately) along what was the First World War's Western Front, from France's border with Switzerland up to Belgium - but there's more to it. We not only get an awful lot of detail about aspects of the First World War that are likely to be unfamiliar to most readers (certainly me), we also get to share in a romantic dream.

The whole thing is hung on a letter written by a young British Second Lieutenant from the trenches in Northern France in 1915, shortly before he was killed. Douglas Gillespie, somewhat oddly writing to his old school headmaster, expresses a wish that 'when peace comes, our government might combine with the French government to make one long Avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea...' - this would be a 'Via Sacra' which would provide a pilgrimage route to enable the inhabitants of Western Europe to 'think and learn what war means.' Inspired by this, our author Anthony Seldon, who had recently lost his wife and reached a turning point in his career, set up a charity (which would close in 2022 to be replaced by a commercial venture) to work towards an end-to-end 1,000 kilometre 'hike and bike' trail called the Western Front Way. Seldon's walk, at the centre of this book, was in part a means of raising publicity for the venture.

As a travel writer, Seldon is not particularly effective - he is much more a historian, which means that there is no doubt that the reader gets a strong feel for what both soldiers and civilians along the Front experienced between 1914 and 1918. Early in the book Seldon comments 'I had noticed as a teacher how gripped my students were by the First World War - far more so than they were by the Second.' I can't say this reflects my own experience - when I was at school, the Second World War was far more prominent and engaging as a historical subject - but Seldon's passion for the horrific events of the period comes through strongly and I learned a huge amount. The repeated sets of details of numbers killed, atrocities and more certainly hammer the point home, though over time it can feel a little repetitive. 

I did struggle a little to identify with Seldon's upper middle class, academic, establishment worldview. He notes that he was head of two public schools and then ran a 'small university' which his father had helped set up in 1976. Apart from his teaching and administrative work, his establishment credentials included being director for the National Shakespeare company, name dropping Boris Johnson as a contact and easy access to national newspapers and TV channels. (And, inevitably, he owns a house in France.) His walk had echoes of the exploits of nineteenth century explorers - not only did he undertake it when most of us weren't travelling because of the Covid pandemic, it seemed to involve very vague planning, carrying no paper maps, and the mad inspiration of not taking any spare clothing to reduce the weight of stuff to carry.

As for the realism of the idea of establishing the Western Front Way as a long distance footpath/cycle path, Seldon's struggles to avoid busy roads and to stay anywhere near the multiple lines of the front for stretches at a time, combined with the sheer scale of the project, made it feel unlikely ever to be fully achieved. The good news is it now seems well-established on the Belgian section, though. It was also notable that several times Seldon tells us how few people visited the various monuments and sites he came across - it does suggest that it is perhaps too late for this to be a project that will ever capture the imagination of massed pilgrims.

However, whether or not the romantic dream is achievable, the book is both informative and occasionally able to hit the emotional spot. I might not share Seldon's passion, but I can appreciate it and feel the importance that this walk traces a line that has a deep connection to the personal history of many European families. It gives the opportunity to think a little about the rights and wrongs of war and peace. And because of that, at a time when there is again war in Europe, I'm glad I read it.

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