There was once a discussion among some of my coworkers about documentation on using some sort of cloud platform tool. I have a paraphrased version here for the purpose of discussion. “The book? But there’s the blog too, what’s the difference?” “The blog is all online, and it was written first. The book, you have to pay for, but it contains more information.”
So, here’s the deal. All books start out as a series of notes that are then assembled and organized to create the final book. A blog, as it stands, is a collection of individual articles that are concatenated one after another, in chronological order. Suffice it to say, starting out with a blog is a great way to transition into writing a book. But a better question is worth asking. “Why would you want to write a book?”
A book is not a one-sided story. There are always two parties that operate in the story of any book: the readers and the writers. As it turns out, both have very different interests. What do the readers want out of a book? The answer to that question depends on who the readers are.
Pleasure readers will tend to look for fiction books and simply read those from beginning to end. These are by far the easiest books for writers to produce, and most publishing industry pundits claim that there is an oversupply of fiction writers compared to customer demand. The advent of low-cost digital publication platforms have allowed publishers to be much more generous in accepting fiction book submissions. But, incidentally, the problem remains that there is very low demand for reading fiction from a digital device: paper books are preferred; therefore, the new growth in fiction publishing remains largely untapped by fiction readers.
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Footnote: Matter of fact, I am also working on a fiction writing as a hobby. However, my substantiation in this effort is rather particular: the primary purpose of the fiction writing is for internal development notes in the process of producing my final intended product. I would have never thought digital books would be of interest to my target audience. Oh, no way. No, no, no, no, no. The intended product is digital video such as a movie or a television series, made available via the Internet, and the intended audience myself, family, and friends. As we all know, digital audio and digital video has been experienced an overwhelmingly strong adoption by media customers. It is by far and large the preferred way to receive advanced multimedia signals like audio or video, compared to the althernatives such as vinyl records, movie film reels, audio cassette tapes, and video cassette tapes.
- However, the oldest of audio-visual media, vinyl records, movie film reels, and cathode ray tube television sets, are starting to experience a comeback. Why? Because now we are approaching a time where the youngest generation has never previously experienced using the oldest technology in their lifetime, so the novelty of the older media forms is mentally intriguing. Therefore, working with the older media formats is entertaining, even though it is not economically efficient to work with compared to the modern technology.
So, with such steep restrictions and requirements on the community of fiction authors, how do they ever get started? Simple: they start in an entirely different environment and community of readers. Historically, there was the pulp fiction subculture: writers would submit short stories to a newsletter, magazine, or digest-style publication that would aggregate the stories and publish them in regular time intervals, such as monthly volumes. Subscribers would read several stories, and converse among themselves about what they think, and which ones they like best. Eventually, the best of these pulp fiction writers would get promoted to professional fiction writers that actually write the titles read by the mass fiction readership market. Of course, nowadays this community dynamic has all been reinvented online, in the form of fan fiction and other online fiction community sites.
Now, let’s take a trip into the nonfiction side of affairs. We’re talking serious business here, no time for nonsense playing around with obsolescent, less efficient ways of doing things like using paper when digital is faster and cheaper. Nonfiction readers tend to have an educational or business-oriented focus. On the education side of affairs, the driving force behind reading are principally the choices of an instructor when designing their course work for the classes they teach. An instructor will survey the market for whatever literature is available, then pick which books contain information that they like. The instructor will then winnow down that book and assign only the subset of chapters and pages that they want their students to read for the course. The rest of any other content included in the book will effectively be ignored. Wow! Once you make that statement of fact, you start to realize that writers targeting the educational sector should seriously reconsider their approach: rather than focusing on publishing longer books, they should focus on publishing shorter articles; that is, the direct items that an instructor will pick and choose for their course work.
For business-oriented texts, often times there is a strong emphasis on searchability or reference-style information. Is the text indexed for fast searching? Are there cross references?
Suffice it to say, if you are writing nonfiction, keep in mind that this will be the mindest of the readers. Sure you can write your own “full story” and organize your texts as such, but most readers won’t care to read it. Most readers will instead want to take their own path, writer their own story, but use each piece of article information as-is. For nonfiction, focus on writing good articles and sections, but for the high-level organization, design a layout that works well for “searching,” not one that is designed for logical reading from beginning to end.
So, finally, to wrap up this post. I started out with a proposition: You shouldn’t write your own “book.” Let’s summarize why that is the case:
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For fiction, getting readership will be an uphill challenge. By far and large, all odds are against you. The world of fiction is largely an incumbent establishment one: those authors who already are popular are the ones who have their books printed and sitting on physical book shelves, and only those printed fiction books are the ones that are popularly read by fiction readers. By contrast, if you target a small fan community and focus on short stories and other article-like fiction material, your chances of being successful are much higher.
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For nonfiction, although people will love the individual articles of content you produce, they will not be so fond of any of your efforts to produce higher-level organization relating to the goal of expecting the readers to read the text from cover-to-cover. Nope. The order in which the material is read and the subset of it that does get read is fully a decision of the reader; so much, that the value of attempts on the writer’s side to add “organization” that does not relate to improving searchability is effectively nil.