How Not to Write a (Nonfiction) Book: What I’ve Learned

Creating a worthwhile book is not simple but it's so satisfying!

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Publisher’s Note: We’re all in this together, and guest writer Nikki Finlay offers a cautionary tale and personal insight into her kind of rocky road to writing a non-fiction book. Congratulations to her on landing a publisher—there are solid lessons here for us.

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You need to write your book the right way to start with, but how do you write a nonfiction book? Start with knowing your audience, your message, and your teaching points or takeaways. I didn’t.

I started my book as a healing draft about my days teaching economics. That healing draft ended with me ranting about the end of my teaching career. I wrote this in a writing community that was big on accountability, but didn’t have set times to write together.

The writing process was painful. But I had been severely depressed for three years, after I became disabled. Nothing wrong with getting that out of the way. It was time to move on.

I needed to do more, and I needed a community that had established times to write together.

No place to write

Sometime in 2021, I started taking advantage of another community, Bookcamp, so I could write more often— develop a writing habit.

In January 2022, someone at Bookcamp said in conversation, “I just don’t get inflation.”

I said, “I can explain that!”

So, that was the first glimmer of my audience. And an inspiration for the book I had to write.

It took another year to find the right place to write that book. I started going to writing sprints on BookCamp and, after a while, got in the habit of writing every day. I’m the first to admit that I’m not disciplined—it was necessary, after all, to attend school three times a week to get my teaching and academic activities taken care of.

I found sprints via a BookCamp lead to AJ Harper and her book Write a Must Read, and joined the community for weekday writing sprints in November. I showed up at 4pm every weekday and still do—to write. By January 31, 2023, a miracle—35,000 words and a rough draft.

Some friends agreed to read and react, so I got a lot of helpful comments. Everyone thought it was worth pursuing further. In April 2023, I sent it to an editor, Melissa Haskins, who specializes in dissertations on economics and related topics. She went through the book, made useful comments, and pronounced it worthy of more work. I’m still working through some of my edits and have made some much-needed changes.

All of that was helpful. No one said, "Hang up your pen, Nikki, your writing is terrible."

That was a good thing because it kept me going, except that this isn’t how you write nonfiction well. It’s not how you reach the readers you think you can help.

I was still working backwards

I wrote additional pieces that eventually turned the bits I’d written before into a book. It was tentatively titled Bumps in the Road, but was far from ready. I used a college textbook outline, but this wasn’t what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a book like Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan.

So far, I had skipped all the steps—audience, message, and teaching points—except for one. I knew who I was writing for—those who skipped, forgot, or hated economics in school. Readers that were like the students I taught.

Some examples? The woman who spent every evening for a semester eating dinner while listening to my online whiteboard presentations. The man who needed his bachelor’s to get beyond a degree ceiling at work. The ones who didn’t want to learn economics at all but wanted better-than-passing grades.

A marketing professor once handed me a rare compliment, “Your students really get pricing.”

My reply, “I beat supply and demand into their heads all semester.”

Learn to walk before you run. And practice, practice, practice, a la Maria Montessori. I developed a practice-teach-practice system for my classes. So, by the end of a semester, my students, the ones who tried, could take an ordinary supply and demand graph and turn it into a six-graph model of the economy when the government and the Federal Reserve work in concert to solve a problem.

But that doesn’t translate into a book at all, much less a well-written book. You need to write your book the right way to start with.

On Sunday, I shared part of my story on writing a book. We left with how what worked in the classroom isn’t going to work in a book. I can’t use a six-graph model of the economy to demonstrate policy at work. Especially when inflation is too high. After the pandemic, the world got inflation. Too much money chasing too few goods.

And just like my friend who said she didn’t understand inflation, there were a lot of Americans who didn’t understand why prices had shot up so quickly. I needed a better way to communicate that. Or any of the rest of the Keynesian model, which is the simplest way to show how the economy works. And what policy can do.

I didn’t have my message defined. I had no idea of the teaching points needed to get someone to pick up my book and read it all the way through so they could get inflation. And recession. And why trade conflict matters.

I had one huge teaching point: To understand the economy and how we got over the tough times, you need to understand government policy. You need to know the policies that help us cope with inflation, and policies that alleviate suffering from high unemployment, and that the economy would not only survive but get better. Everyone needs to know this.

And I wanted to write something that people would be happy to pass around. Okay, I know, Nikki, get real, this is a book about economics. Who’s going to read that? Turns out there might be a few but that was never my goal.

My goal was to make it all accessible, but my message just wasn’t there.

Getting a book right takes time

It took a year, actually. My original message, which wasn’t really a message, was long and unwieldy. You must write words that help a reader learn, and those words must follow a plan that takes readers from “these are numbers I hear on the news” to “I understand and can interpret those numbers,” followed by, “I can see what, if anything, needs to be done next.”

And maybe, just maybe they can say, “I can make choices now about the next recession, about the next bout of inflation.”

In community and with lots of help, I developed my simple, compelling message. The economy will get better over time, and your personal economy can benefit from knowing what the government and the Federal Reserve will do when something goes wrong.

While had a list of topics from the textbook, I included two new ones not often featured in textbooks: a separate section on who the policy makers are for the macroeconomy (the whole thing), and a chapter that comes early in the book, in Chapter 2, on economic data and what they mean.

You know the ones: data on the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, and all that stuff about Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and growth.

I thought my readers needed to know that to start with because then they might keep reading to learn more about why those numbers are so important.

Now, we are learning what our new president will do, and we can’t be sure of the impact his actions will have. But at least my readers will understand the economic situation a bit better.

Writing a book is a humbling experience. I had expert knowledge of the subject and I can write. But that only takes me so far. Every book needs editing as well, so, I had Melissa’s help and took a great course on self-editing in the winter of 2023. I repeated it in the summer of 2024.

Earlier this month, my husband discovered the final piece of the puzzle after reading my first chapter. I have three or four more nonfiction books in me. They will take time. But I’m okay with that.

This time, I'll work smarter. This time I will have a better idea of how to start and where I want to go. In fact, that next book is calling to me as I write this.

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Nikki M. Finlay, PhD, has three decades of experience in education and business. She holds a doctorate in economics from Georgia State University. An award-winning teacher, Dr. Finlay teaches online at Substack in Nikki’s Economic Stories and just signed a deal to publish her book on the US economy. A devoted wife, mother and grandmother, she is passionate about reading, writing, traveling, cooking, and her Atlanta Braves.

There is a highly supportive and entertaining writers’ group on Discord. Free. Easy to join. Pen2Profit for Substack and Medium writers.