They all write words on a page or on a computer.

Some have quite a few readers on their web sites.

And yet, they hesitate in calling themselves “writers.”

Why?

Because they haven’t published in magazines or they haven’t published books. They just think of themselves as word tinkers.

I used to think the same of myself before I published a book. At the time my only writing credit was an online magazine and a defunct humor magazine. Then someone said in an E-mail, “You’re a writer. Now you just need someone to pay you for it and some fame.”

It was a jarring comment. I’d built my identity as a writer around external sources of validation, namely money and popularity.

Here’s the thing, having published in several magazines, several books, and online over the past five years, I can just about guarantee you’ll never think you have enough money or popularity to call yourself a writer because there will always be someone with more money and more readers.

While there are good writers and writers who have a long way to go before they’re good, perhaps the matter of calling yourself a “writer” rests more with the individual. Do you personally believe you can call yourself a writer based on the work you do?

Forget money.

Forget fame.

Do you write seriously? Do you care about the words you put on the page? Is your writing an important part of who you are?

If you can answer yes to questions such as these, then you probably are a writer. Very few writers go on to make a lot of money or to become household names, so just focus on loving what you do, put your best into it, and savor every time a reader shares positive feedback about your work no matter how you publish it.

Writing is about crafting words for readers. Set goals for yourself, but never confuse legitimate writing with the side benefits of money and popularity.

Think about it. No one will visit a book store and stumble upon your book. No one will find it on a publisher’s web site. No one will read about it in a catalogue. No one will want to stock in a book store because it’s self-published.

Oh, of course you can sell it online, but how will readers find it?

That is the trick. Can you assemble a realistic marketing plan that will sufficiently take into account all of the setbacks that self-publishing brings, while still connecting with readers on a scale that will ensure you sell enough copies to at least break even?

Ah, distribution is a huge problem for self-published authors. Heck, when self-publishing A Path to Publishing, I still didn’t quite grasp the amount of work ahead of me or the sheer quantity of potentials readers I needed to connect with in my niche.

Where should you start if you’re self-publishing?

For starters, check out my free online marketing guide. That gives both traditional and new ways to market your work.

However, the most important principle in selling books is to make a real connection with a potential reader and to communicate clearly why he or she may want to buy your book. Someone else may be able to do that for you by way of an endorsement or a review, but kicking it all off depends on you and you alone.

I began this series saying that “self” is the key word when it comes to “self-publishing”. If you have any hopes of selling your book, make sure you have more than Plan A and B for distributing your book. You’ll probably need to have plans that range from A to Z.

Your job is to find the communities, blogs, forums, Twitter users, Facebook users, groups, societies, and any other group of potential readers in your content niche. That is the publishing sales game in a nutshell, and it’s a tough one on your own!

A Path to Publishing: What I Learned by Publishing a Nonfiction Book

When working on a self-published book you may have put together a passable first draft, and even managed to spruce up a pretty decent second draft. However, chances are your argument or story will have some significant holes in it, to say nothing of some sections that readers will find confusing.

While working on my third draft of A Path to Publishing I couldn’t think of any significant changes to make, so I sent it off to several friends and colleagues to read it. Sure enough, one reader found the same glaring flaw in two of the book’s chapters.

She very gently suggested that those two sections needed significant revision. She was absolutely right. I had a few doubts at first about those sections, but I had decided they worked fine. Thankfully she pointed out some other reasons why needed to be not only rewritten but largely deleted.

And that brings us to the challenge of editing your own book. You always need perspectives other than your own to make sure your book flows and makes sense. No matter how talented you may be as a writer or an editor, you can’t catch all of your own mistakes.

Depending on your relationship with your friends and family, you may ask them for help. However, remember that a good editor will not worry about hurting your feelings. A good editor needs to feel comfortable pointing out all of your book’s flaws. Will your friends and family be able to do that?

My friends through social media and blogging have been a tremendous help in reading drafts of my books, while several key friends and family members have helped at times as well. However, I think it’s important to choose your readers carefully and to give them deadlines that can be flexible if need be.

In addition, keep in mind that these friends may publish their own books some day. Guess who they’re going to e-mail before anyone else for help…

What Self-Publishing Involves

The most important word in self-publishing is “self,” not publishing. The publishing part is fun. The self part is not.

Of course self-published authors boast higher royalties, greater control, and many other benefits. These are all true to a certain extent, but consider what you’ll need to organize by yourself:

• Researching the market and audience for your book.
• Outlining, writing, and editing.
• Researching a publisher and comparing the various packages.
• Paying for and organizing the editing, design, printing, and distribution (which of course will vary).
• Putting together a marketing plan.
• Creating a publicity kit
• Contacting bloggers, radio producers, newspaper editors, and other media outlets about your book’s release.
• Contacting independent and chain book stores to set up book events. Many of them will not call you back because you are self-published.
• Finding conferences where you can sell your book—that is, if you pay for the space.
• Setting up book events and eating the cost if they flop.

Granted, many publishers today are quite light on the marketing end of things, especially for nonfiction books where a marketing platform is essential for new authors. That being said, at least having someone who is paid to help you send out press releases and to advise you on ideas can save you a lot of time and frustration. In other words, even the publisher who provides minimal help with marketing a book is still way better than doing everything yourself.

What You Need to Know about the Publishing Business

If all of this is new to you, then I’m guessing you’ve never commercially published a book. While self-publishing is easy to jump into from the standpoint of writing and printing a book, making it into a product that someone will actually deem worthy of $15 is quite another matter.

Here are a few things you need to know about publishing as a business:

• Most books need significant editorial development.
• It takes time to learn how to write for a specific audience.
• A bad cover and sloppy interior design can be fatal for a book.
• Distributing a book effectively will take a lot of e-mails and phone calls.
• Marketing a book is a full time job.

If you want to self-publish and to sell more than 500-1000 books, your work is cut out for you. Thankfully it can be done. In the coming days we’ll discuss the importance of a marketing platform for self-publishing.

Looking for a bit more about publishing right now? Check out A Path to Publishing. It’s available for $10 as an ebook and for $15 as a paperback.

The price through Amazon is $15, while the ebook price through Lulu is $10.

So far the feedback has been really encouraging, including comments from readers who have found the book both informative and well-organized. One book publisher enthusiastically purchased a copy, and he’s someone who certainly could have taught me a thing or two about publishing! So I’m grateful to see positive responses to the book as it starts out.

If you’re interested in hosting me for an event with your writing group or book store, I offer group discounts and free publishing workshops along with my book events.

Throughout the third and fourth weeks of May a number of bloggers will be posting reviews and interviews. I hope to have the schedule up soon.

In addition, I’ll be posting a series here next week covering what I learned in the self-publishing process. If you subscribe to my e-mail newsletter (in the right column), you can also read about the inside story of self-publishing, the decisions I made throughout the process, and why I followed the course I chose.

There are a lot of decisions to make in the self-publishing process, so believe me, reading about my process will help you a great deal! I learned a ton over the past 6 months.

Good books are rejected because of similar books.

You may have a great idea and you may be an incredible writer, but if someone has written a similar book, especially for your publisher, you may be out of luck. In addition, there may be projects in a publisher’s pipeline that you could never know about unless you submitted your proposal.

That isn’t to say that different publishers will back away from your book if there are similar books. You just need to show that it has a unique message or perspective that distinguishes it from its competition.

Good books are rejected because of different focuses at a publisher.

You may have addressed an important topic, and that topic may be within the interests of a publisher, but perhaps you wrote a book that didn’t strike the right angle or genre for that publisher. One publisher may aim for literary books, while others may opt for the academic route.

Good books are rejected because of cuts or changes with editors.

Sometimes publishers may change their focus or even eliminate a line of books. With new editors come new criteria for accepting books. Editorial changes will mean a book that may have been accepted a few months ago will no longer work for a publisher. Timing and luck are huge factors when pitching book and article query letters.

Good books are rejected because editors don’t always know what they want.

While publishers have guidelines and specifications, they don’t always know what book would work best. This is something that some editors themselves have admitted.  See editorial veteran Leonard Goss’ endorsement for my new book A Path to Publishing.

That doesn’t mean that all editors are fickle and indecisive, and you should never tell them what they want. Rather, they always aren’t able to know what exactly will work and what will not. There are plenty of stories of best-selling books passing through a series of rejections before finding success. The moral is that editors are human like you and me, and that publishing is not an exact science—as it should be.

Good books are rejected because of publicity concerns.

Even if you’ve written a great book, some publishers may reject your proposals because they fear they’ll be unable to market it to a particular group of people or that you aren’t popular enough to promote it. Those are big problems for writers to deal with, but at least they aren’t necessarily marks of a poorly written book.

In addition, if you are able to write a good book, you can certainly work on raising your profile and reworking your material so that it speaks more directly to an audience of readers. These are big problems, but they don’t spell doom for you as a writer.

Rejection is just about the worst thing a writer can imagine besides publishing a book that is hated by readers and critics. Both possibilities sound pretty terrible, but rejection is the one thing that every writer who hopes to publish a book or article has to face from the start.

Even well-known authors with a history of successful books have to sometimes face rejection. Legendary Christian writer Frederick Buechner has published shelves worth of fiction and nonfiction, but even his latest book, The Yellow Leaves, was rejected by his life-long publisher. He had to take it elsewhere before landing a book deal.

Rejection is a real issue that every writer has to deal with in one way or another.

I had intended to write this series last week, but a few other projects and a persistent head cold pushed it back to this week. Tune in tomorrow, and I’ll discuss the nature of rejection in the business of writing.

If you’ve accumulated some writing credits, you’re ready to begin planning out your queries to magazines that do pay well. Don’t forget about the non-paying, high quality magazines (for example, there’s Patrol and Next-Wave in my own Christian market). They have their place in building your marketing platform if you hope to sell books or to accumulate writing credits. However, you can now broaden your scope.

I’ve heard many editors say that you need to read their magazine before sending them a query. While that makes sense, the typical writer doesn’t have time to pour over the past twelve issues for fifteen different magazines. However, most writers should be able to read at least four or five editions (if not more) of four or five magazines, especially when some of them are available online. Choose wisely as you begin, and then add to your inventory of magazines you read regularly as you query more of them.

Still, the question remains, Why? Does it really make that big of a difference if the guidelines are listed online?

In a word, yes.

Besides simply knowing what a magazine is looking for topically, reading a magazine clues you in on the kinds of stories the magazine accepts, the angle most writers take, and the expectations of readers. For example, after reading about six issues of a regional magazine I began to think of solid story ideas that one editor purchased right away.

When you’ve read a magazine the query ideas will come faster and you’ll write better queries that appeal to editors. Perhaps you could hammer out a decent query after a few hours of staring at the guidelines, but investing a similar amount of time in reading the magazine will result in better queries that are far more likely to be accepted.

When you begin to seriously consider publishing a book your first step will be identifying your goals.

Are you hoping to write full time? Are you looking to add some credentials to your current career? Do you have one particular idea that is so important you want to publish it?

How you answer these questions will determine your next step.

Publishing a book requires a tremendous amount of time and planning. It is rarely as simple as pounding out a book and shipping it off to a publisher who then takes care of everything for you, mailing a fat royalty check each quarter.

You don’t write to become rich—it rarely happens.

In addition, if your goal is to merely share information with a wide audience, there are a lot of other avenues available today that may in fact be more effective in drawing a larger number of readers to your work. One poet I spoke with said he has reached thousands more readers through his blog than through his book. While his book lends him greater credibility in some circles, the simple act of sharing his work can be accomplished effectively outside of book publishing.

Keep in mind that as the economy contracts, so have publishers, editorial staffs, book acquisitions, and marketing dollars. The competition is a bit more fierce and the desire of publishers to stick with trusted names is greater than ever.

All that to say, it is still very possible to publish today, and with smaller presses and self-publishing options there is no reason why you can’t one day hold a bound copy of your work in hand. Nevertheless, before setting out into the challenging world of publishing, be sure to identify your goals and make sure that publishing a book will be the best way to accomplish them.

I’ll continue this series next week with a few more things to consider before you publish.

This past summer a book deal of mine fell to pieces in grand fashion over the course of a week. It was quite difficult, but at the same time I think matters ended on pretty good terms for all parties involved.

The planets had aligned perfectly for the deal to fail. So it goes.

Here are a few lessons to save in your bookmark folder so that you’re prepared should this ever happen to you:

Book Deals Can Fail, and It’s OK

Your career can survive and you can end the deal on good terms with your publisher. Really, I mean it. It can be a bit embarrassing to admit that your deal fell apart, but you can survive it. If you’re approaching your career wisely, you’ll already have another project or two in mind that you can jump into.

Give Yourself Time to Process

I needed about three days to process my situation before I felt able to have a constructive conversation and make a good decision. Expect to be angry and a bit low. It will pass, and in fact, it has to pass. You have books to write!

Seek Advice

In my own case I consulted my agent and several other agents at her firm. They helped me sort through my options and the appropriate responses. Every e-mail I sent to the publisher was filtered through them first. In addition, there were other authors and publishing professionals who offered me some good advice and even did some helpful research on my behalf.

Know Your Publisher’s Interests and Trends

If a publisher wants to terminate your book deal, take some time to look at it from the publisher’s perspective and examine the publisher’s concerns and goals. Perhaps you and your book aren’t a good fit with this publisher for the coming years anyway.

Prepare a Plan B, C, and D

Your book project does not have to die with this contract. Spring into action and seek out other publishers and if not another major publishing house, look into smaller press, ebook, and self-publishing options. The technology and marketing tools are out there for many authors to sell quite a few books on their own.

Even if your book never sees the light of day, you can always cannibalize chapters for submission to magazines that may provide a larger audience of readers and a comparable amount of money in the long run. Perhaps you can also steal a few chapters and stories to write your next book, which you should have already been working on anyway.

End On Good Terms

Life is too short to play the blame game. Publishing is a really tough business and sometimes book deals fall apart. Maybe it was your fault and maybe it wasn’t.

You gain nothing by burning your bridges with your former publisher, and you also never know how well connected they may be in the larger publishing world. Even if you lost the deal, you can still hold your head up high by moving on and resolving to make the next deal work.

Seinfeld’s lessons left a mark, as I make a point of having a ready supply of sticky notes and pens around the house and in the car. I have often pulled off the road to jot down an idea, and when I forgot to leave my notepad by the bed, I’ve jumped out of it in the middle of the night for the sake of capturing an idea.

Sometimes you won’t know if the idea is worthwhile until a few days later. Perhaps it would have been better in some cases to opt for the extra sleep. However, writers are in the idea business and something as insignificant as a pen or a piece of paper should not stand in the way of sharing a good idea with others.

I’ve thought about this a lot, but I think the solution is a both/and scenario rather than an either/or.

Revisit and Recycle Ideas in Various Mediums

Experienced writers learn that they can explore ideas and topics from a variety of angles with differing degrees of detail. If a writer can revisit or recycle an idea for two different magazines, then why not explore your idea on a blog and then later in a book or magazine article?

One author was quite resistant to the thought of charging readers for the ideas of his book, but a friend added some clarity by pointing out that most of his ideas in the book were available at no charge on his web site. However, the material in his book had a higher degree of refinement and clarity that some would be willing to pay for, which leads to my next thought.

Different Mediums Require Different Processes

The book publishing process involves numerous drafts, editorial development of ideas and a team of publishing professionals walking authors through each step of the process. There is a lot of revision and planning involved in writing a book. 

Blogs on the other hand are typically the work of a solitary writer or a small team of writers. I look at a blog post as a really good first draft. For a blog post I won’t write a draft, revise it, send it to an editor who suggests major changes, make my revisions, send it back to an editor for additional comments, make additional changes, and then send it off to a fact checker. Even uber-blogger Guy Kawasaki can’t afford to put that much time and involve that many people in a blog post.

That isn’t to say that blog posts are poorly written, only that the content found in books has gone through a different process. We can debate whether the book writing process is worthwhile, and in the case of some books it is not, but the final product often looks quite different from a blog post.

Some Content is Worth Paying For

Content that undergoes a rigorous editorial and design process in magazines and books may carry a price tag, but I still believe it is worthwhile to make some ideas available in these forms. They carry greater authority because they have passed through editorial boards and will tend to be of higher quality because multiple contributors were involved in the production process.

That is not a guarantee that books or magazines will always produce better content than blogs or self-published books and ebooks. There are some rather notable exceptions. However, I guarantee that almost every book produced by a major publisher will have certain advantages over a self-published book or an ebook given away for free. Whether it’s distribution, editorial development, or layout.

The Big Decision

Writers face the big decision of deciding which process works best for themselves and their ideas. If an idea is big enough to merit a long series of blog posts, then perhaps it’s worth working with those ideas for a future book project.

There are a lot of books out there with fairly simple ideas that are not capable of filling a full-length book. In those cases it’s worth it for writers to consider turning them into several solid magazine articles that may well reach more readers than a typical book.

Marketing expert Seth Godin tells writers to spend at least three years working on a blog and developing a ready audience of writers who will buy their books once released. That is a great guideline for writers and one that I have found to be true in my own experience. Blogs give writers great practice are writing regularly for the public and provide a chance to find a particular voice, angle, or, dare I say, brand.

Selling a book tends to be a very personal, one on one process. Advertising may raise awareness, but anything from a friend’s recommendation, a book seller’s comments, or an online review often makes the difference between a book staying on the shelf or ending up on the nightstand. In addition, a series of solid reviews do not guarantee brisk sales, just as negative reviews do not equal a book’s doom.

There is plenty of competition these days for not only the public’s attention, but also for the public’s disposable income. When trusted authorities recommend a book, authors have one more way to connect a book with readers. Influencers can vouch for an author’s credibility and provide a broad point of connection with potential readers.

The ideal influencers will have trusted names, contact with a large audience, and a willingness to endorse your book. Influencers may lead to direct sales or at least give readers another reason to recommend your book.

An influencer without one of these three qualities may not be a helpful contact. In the next post of this series I’ll look into some of the problems authors encounter in putting together an influencer list.

The next installments in this series…

• Selecting influencers for a book release: The Problem
• Selecting influencers for a book release: The Solution

Join Ed Cyzewski, author of Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life for a step-by-step journey into the process of transforming your book idea into a book proposal with the necessary research, style and tips that will send your proposal to the top of the pile.

From networking advice, to tips from publishing professionals, this presentation will give aspiring writers the tools they need to take the next step in the publishing process. This workshop will emphasize the nonfiction process, but will offer
valuable advice for writers in every genre.

The workshop will be held on Saturday, October 17th, from 9-12AM at the Inn at Willow Pond on Rte. 7A in Manchester, VT. Cost is $45.00 per person/$40.00 early bird registration. Fee includes a continental breakfast. Please call 802-867-0272 for registration and information or fill out the contact form.

I’d like to tackle this from the perspective of a writer. Writers face the tricky matter of essentially “selling” ourselves and our talents of weaving words together. Readers and publishers look for someone with name recognition, and so writers must think of ways they can “make a name for themselves.” If you’re familiar with the biblical story of the tower of Babel, you may recall that the attempt of humanity to do such a thing resulted in their language being garbled by God.

Such a prospect is not necessarily encouraging for writers—especially a Christian writer.

The only way I can see handling this delicate matter of self-promotion in a way that avoids the exploitation of friends, family, and acquaintances is the following:

1. Only promote what may help them. If I’m hoping they’ll buy my book and I send updates and links their way to that end, then the book I write should be of value to them.
2. Don’t bombard anyone. I try to only send a manageable number of updates about myself and my work via twitter and facebook. I don’t want anyone to become tired of my endless stream of self-promotion. Everyone has a different limit here, so be cautious.
3. It’s not all business. Part of keeping in touch with friends and family is adding some color from your own life, sharing pictures and stories that may be funny, interesting, or unusual. Don’t stick to mere work concerns in social media.

I can’t say for sure if I’ve done this perfectly, but as a writer who has to walk this fine line, I find that friends and family generally want to know what I’m up to. Therefore, it’s my job to keep them in the loop without wearing them out with my updates.

Yesterday I wrapped up the first draft of my next book Saving Evangelicals from Themselves. The first draft often entails the lion’s share of the book writing process. There is research, brainstorming, organizing, stream of consciousness writing, editing, reorganizing, more writing, and more editing and polishing.

By 5 PM yesterday I had my draft completely finished and ready for the publisher. It even came close to the 60,000 word count with a total of 61,610 words. I’d like to share a little bit about the process of writing a first draft of a book. I hope this helps as you plunge into your own projects.

Read… A Lot

You don’t need to quote directly from every book or cite everything, but read, skim, or browse as many books as you can in your topic area. You want to communicate your own ideas in fresh ways, while giving credit where it is due.

Research

Set up Google Alerts for your subject areas, read and tag articles using del.icio.us, dig through surveys, and look up articles in key papers and magazines such as Time, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and any other magazine closely related to your topic. For myself I keep a close eye on Christianity Today.

Organize and Outline

You need to know where your book is going, and so a rough outline is necessary. Don’t be afraid to delete, add, or reorder chapters as you set out. Better now than later. Set up a rough idea of each chapter’s trajectory.

Write, Write, Write

I like to just cut loose and write a ton once I have some research and outlines to provide general guidance. I end up scrapping at least 25-35% of what I write, but the core that remains is generally pretty solid. Let your mind wander, write about things you care about, and think deeply about your topic. Always keep in mind your one-two sentence summary of your book from your proposal (you did put together a proposal first, right? If not, do that NOW!)

Fill In Gaps

After you have a good chunk of material together, you need to fill in the gaps with more research, quotes, and stories. Try to get a sense of the flow of your chapter. Are you on target? Can readers follow with you? Are they still interested? Have you backed up your claims? This is the time to ask hard questions and to be critical of your work. I have a scrap folder for each book with a document that matches each chapter. Many scrap documents have at least 7 pages of material in them. That means you need to keep adding content to your chapters, making sure you’ve sharpened your points.

Seek Opinions

When you’re relatively confident you have a solid chunk of chapter, seek out a friend or two to read it. Ask them to point out places where stories don’t work, ideas need to be developed, or the whole thing falls off course. I recommend at least two different readers since people can be very different in how they read something.

Never Stop Researching

Hopefully you’ve been keeping up on your field while you’re doing the heavy part of the writing. By saving key stories and articles on del.icio.us I have saved myself on several occasions. You never know when a crucial piece of information will surface.

The Critical Read-Through

Keeping in mind your book’s focus, reader-benefits, and goals, read through each chapter with a critical eye to anything that doesn’t fit, discredits you as a writer, loses your readers, or doesn’t sound quite right. Kill adverbs without mercy, tighten up sentence structure, delete a lot, insert strong verbs, and make sure you begin and end with bang.

Hit Send, Tell a Friend, and Buy Yourself a Treat

It’s a wonderful feeling to hit the send button when you’re done with a key phase of a book project. Celebrate the moment, treat yourself to something you enjoy, and share the joy of the moment with your friends. Chances are you won’t be celebrating when your editor writes back in two months with the revisions you need to make…

Using del.icio.us to not only tag and organize links, but to also set aside material worthy of a quotation made the research process much easier. At first I just tagged everything that looked relevant, but soon I realized that it helps to read the articles first rather than assuming I’d read them later. I rarely did that! So I read through, highlighted the section I wanted to quote, and then tagged them. By highlighting a section, I could then find it on my del.icio.us bookmarks without have to reread the whole article.

Small sticky notes make it much easier to find quotations from books. I had a system of using small sticky notes as tabs sticking out of books. I’d typically stick the note to the page, make a bracket around the relevant text, and then jot a few words connecting the quote with a particular chapter. I later found that many of my quotes didn’t fit, but without taking the time to mark everything that seemed important, I doubt I would have been able to find enough helpful quotations to pull from the many books I read.

Lining up readers for your drafts is absolutely essential. I received invaluable advice from my readers who soldiered through my early drafts. One chapter needed to be deleted, while another began with too much intensity. In both cases my readers helped prompt significant changes to my book that I believe will make it more successful.

Writing down many of my stories and anecdotes months before I began seriously working on the chapters helped me sort through the most important topics to be covered in the book. This book could have taken a couple of different directions, but I wanted it to unfold as organically as possible, letting my stories direct and shape the overall direction and point of the book. By starting with a solid core of stories totaling 30,000 words, I quickly ruled out certain chapters that would not have enough substance to work within the parameters I had established for the book.

Anything written can be deleted. I have found that I am continually amazed at what ends up working and what ends up being tossing into the “scraps” folder. Never tire of using the delete button.

Over the six-month to a year process of writing, you should be reading articles, listening to conferences, reading books, and gathering the information together under chapter categories. Sometimes you’re just expanding your knowledge, which is necessary for writing a book, but in other cases you’re accumulating quotes and key points of research that will back up your writing.

While reading books I tend to use small sticky notes to flag particular pages, writing on the notes where I imagine the quote fitting into the chapter. This can save a tremendous amount of time flipping through each book in search of quotes. In the case of online material, I heavily rely on del.icio.us, an online bookmarking service that allows you to tag web pages in particular categories, as well as saving chunks of text you’d like to quote. When you have an idea of where your chapter is going, these sticky note tabs and online bookmarks will help fill in your chapter.

Of course there will be time in the course of writing when you’ll simply need to look up a fact or do a bit of research, but when working my way through a pile of sources, I tend to either drop them all at the end of the chapter, or to sort them according to the outline. It all depends on how many I have. At this point you’ll also want to create a scrap file for each chapter, a place to dump stories and quotes that don’t quite fit, but may not warrant deletion.

At this point your chapter should be stronger, with quotes and citations adding an additional punch to your anecdotes and main points. You should take note of your weak points, continue to seek out helpful sources, and make sure your outline maintains a logical flow.

For some additional insight, see Don Miller’s post about writing a book.

Posts in this series:

1. Start writing what you know.
2. Brainstorm ideas for the rest of the chapter into a draft outline.
3. Continue writing based on this outline
4. Integrate quotes and research into the chapter
5. Read through the chapter to sharpen the outline and fill in gaps.
6. Revise your chapter draft.