Action beats are a replacement for dialogue tags to show the action the character takes during or after speaking.

Introductions are a crucial part of most nonfiction books (and some fiction books). Introductions talk about the subject material and give the reader any background information they may need before diving into the book. This way, you can start chapter one with the actual chapter one content rather than explaining terms and concepts in chapter one needed throughout the entire book.

Citing sources is essential to playing it fair in writing! Imagine spending a ton of time and effort to putting together a document of your own ideas based on your own research, and then someone comes along and pretends it’s their work. All they did was slap their name on your paper, and now they get all the credit! Unfair! That’s exactly what you’re doing to other people when you don’t cite your sources. Whether you’re directly quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s ideas, give credit where credit is due. Always. Another reason for citing sources, other than giving credit to others for their ideas, is to allow the readers to find those sources for more information. If you read a book with a lot of amazing quotes originating from a single book, you might be interested in reading that book. But you wouldn’t be able to do that if you didn’t know which book it came from.

Overwriting often happens with amateur writers. New writers think they need to explain everything to the reader for them to understand. This means there’s lots of meaningless description without much progression of the story. The reader is pulled out of the story and gets bored! So, let’s learn how not to do that!

Are you writing to experts in the field or someone who is just starting to learn about this topic? Are you writing to upper-class people, lower-class people, or people of all SES backgrounds? Are you writing to people in your geographical area only or anywhere in the world?

You don’t need to write to everyone.

I know you’re probably eager to get started writing your nonfiction book (either memoir or self-help), but you need a plan first. It will be worth it to take the time now and figure out the answers to three big questions before you start writing.

In this blog post, we’re going to talk about how to narrow your reader audience for nonfiction books.

If you thank someone by name in the acknowledgments section of your book, you don’t need permission because it’s probably a positive or neutral mention. If you want to talk about how your stepdad ruined your life, you’ll need permission because that’s negative. Seems pretty easy, but when in doubt, always ask permission. I’ll mostly be talking about negative mentions in this blog post.