Non-fiction writing

This book is usually referred to and used as the definitive guide to style for working journalists. It has hard-core facts and data about how to write for professional publications and includes the specific style that accompanies non-fiction writing and journalism. 

John R. Cashman, AA, BA, MPA, has been writing about hazardous materials response and control for thirty years. He began his career covering events such as road racing and motocross in the summer, and snowmobile racing in the winter, in his off hours while an employee of the state of Vermont. He became a full-time writer of non-fiction in 1978. To date, he has over 250 magazine articles and six books to his credit. In addition, he has published Hazardous Materials Newsletter since April of 1980 (Haznews msn.com). 

KRISTI LEW is a former high-school science teacher with degrees in biochemistry and genetics. After years in the classroom and genetics laboratories, she is now the owner of a professional K-12 educational writing service that specializes in writing textbook chapters, magazine articles, and non-fiction books for students and teachers in all fields of science. 

Writing non-fiction books related to your area of expertise can be an extraordinarily satisfying experience. However, such writing is best thought of as a supplement to your career, rather than a career in and of itself, since the financial rewards are typically small. In that sense, then, this chapter describes an activity that compliments the many careers discussed in this book. 

Non-fiction for specialists. Such books provide an understanding of the subject area at hand, often from an in-depth perspective— they can be either authored or edited. An authored book has one author or a small team of authors who do all of the writing. An edited book has many contributors whose efforts are coordinated by an editor or small team of editors. 

Textbooks. Textbooks are one of the few areas of non-fiction book writing that can be financially remunerative. However, the more specialized and higher the level of the textbook, the smaller the sales. Very high level textbooks can sometimes also be classed as non-fiction for specialists. 

Non-fiction books are often sold to publishers based only on a book proposal and a sample chapter or two. Before you begin writing, you will want to read more detailed explanations about how to write a book proposal. Several excellent sources include Handbook for Academic Authors, by Beth Luey, a good reference source for any type of non-fiction and How to Write a Book Proposal, by Michael Larsen, which is geared toward general non-fiction book proposals [1,2]. 

The scattered and gradual publishing history of Woolf s non-fiction has made it hard to see these writings as a whole, in their full significance, and in their relation to her better-known work. The essays have had a peculiarly mixed posthumous life. Praise for them came to be a subtle way of denigrating the fiction it is quite often maintained by readers out of sympathy with Woolf that she is a better writer of essays than she is of novels. By contrast, the very popularity of the essays in her lifetime has made them, for some readers, harder to admire than the fiction. The accessibility, the affability and charm of the essays can seem less interesting than the more challenging and complex texture of the novels. 

DAVID WALKER is Principal Lecturer and Head of English and creative writing at Northumbria University. Co-author (with Stuart Sim) of Bunyan and Authority The Rhetoric of Dissent and the Legitimation Crisis in Seventeenth-Century England (2000), he has published articles on Bunyan s non-fiction in Prose Studies and Bunyan Studies. He is reviews editor for Bunyan Studies and currently writing a book on memories of the sixteenth-century Reformation in mid to later seventeenth-century literature. 

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