Pat Iyer’s Blog
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How to Organize the Chapters in Your Nonfiction Book
Most authors think the chapter order will show up once they start writing. But it often does not. Ideally, you organize the chapters before you start writing, not during it. If you wait for the draft to sort itself out, you'll rewrite the same three chapters five...
Your Book Has Too Many Ideas: How to Organize and Limit Them
A client of mine — a consultant with twenty years of experience — sent me an outline for her book. It had an outline of 47 chapters. Forty-seven. She was drowning in ideas and felt she had to include everything. Every framework she'd ever taught, every client story,...
Why Version Control is Crucial: Which is the Current Version?
A client came to me recently in a bind. He’d been working on his book for months, revising chapters, sending them to a publishing company, getting feedback from the editor, and saving new drafts whenever an idea struck him at midnight. By the time he reached out to...
7 Writing Mistakes That Make a Good Book Look Amateurish
A few years ago, I read a memoir by someone with a genuinely compelling story to tell, sharing the intriguing details of her husband’s involvement with underworld criminals and his unexplained death. She had a unique story. But I almost put it down after I started...
When Your Book is Stalled (And The Hidden Price You Pay)
“Michael was reaching for his son’s pack as he started to say, ‘Good job, Son’. But he couldn’t finish his sentence as he slumped to the ground like a stone. I ran over to catch him so his head would not hit the cement. After I laid him down, I ran inside to the front...
Why Shorter Business Books Win (And How to Write One That Delivers)
When my client hired me to help him write a business book that was part memoir and part guidance on being a leader, I envisioned a book of about 40,000 words. The project ballooned to 70,000 words before we concluded that it was best as a two-volume set. Books Have...
Why Your Book Needs a Map Before You Write a Single Chapter
A few years ago, I sat down for what should have been a routine book coaching project with a client — a professional speaker with expertise worth sharing. She hired me as her ghostwriter. Initially, we talked about her vision for the book and the content she wanted to...
Why Dialogue Makes Your Writing Come Alive
One of my clients, who is an attorney, questioned me recently on the use of dialogue. Trained to be precise, she was uneasy when I transformed long passages of narrative into lively dialogue. Her memoir was about events that took place several years before, and she...
Momentum and Your Writing
I just finished a novel about momentum: John Grisham's The Confession. A young man in Texas is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. With days left before the execution, the real killer sets out to save him — and the entire book becomes a race to see...
Educational Writing and Promotional Writing: What is the Difference?
Denise had been sending a weekly email to her list for eleven months. Three thousand two hundred subscribers. While she had respectable open rates, she got almost no replies. And when she pulled her book sales report before a conference, she couldn't point to a single...