As a follow-up to my previous blog, I would add one more criterion to the list for Picking the right topic: (c) Fill a need and want in your niche. That can greatly improve the salability of your book. What information does your target audience need and want? The trick is to match your expertise, passion, and your niche’s need on the topic. That magical match will produce a book that’s credible, salable to your audience, and fun to write.
Now let’s move on to the next strategy:
2. How to Create Chapters Quickly and Easily: Writing chapters from scratch or even a detailed topic outline can be excruciatingly painful. Where do you begin? As I’ve said elsewhere, “It’s like eating one of those dinosaurs from Jurassic Park. Once you forklift your filet of T-Rex off your grill, which is the size of Wyoming, where do you take your first bite? Tough decision.”
Fortunately, as academicians, we’re not only required to write books, but also journal articles, chapters for edited volumes, research reports, wedding invitations for our daughters, and parking violations. So we have plenty of writing practice. Here’s the SECRET STRATEGY I’ve used for years (Are you ready? Getting excited? Bet ya thought blogs couldn’t be this much fun!): convert your published articles into chapters. There it is. It takes the guess work out of what to write because you already wrote it. Ah Ha!! Some of you may already do that. As most pastors say, “Let’s unpack this a bit further.”
Here are a few issues to consider:
(a) Write articles on related topics: Most of us generate articles and research publications that follow one major theme or passion of ours. They should hinge together under a common head or rubric. (Personal Note: For example, over the past decade I was passionate about testing new teaching techniques to connect with this Net Generation of students. Almost all students hate statistics, but this generation had other characteristics that made stat more challenging to teach. My research and articles focused on these techniques: humor, music, videos, and improvisation. I also did keynotes and workshops for faculty and administrators on those topics, plus continued to test the effectiveness of the techniques with keynotes to student audiences in the U.S. and overseas. Do you see where I’m heading with this? Me neither. I’m just rambling in the longest “personal note” in history. End of Bloated Note 2.)
(b) Why use articles? Articles test the criteria stated in my previous blog. Does your article contribute something new or better than what exists? Does it fill a need? The review process will answer these questions. Your work also goes through the rigor of peer review, with detailed feedback from reviewers, maybe rejection, maybe resubmission after revision, maybe submission to another journal, and copy editing before publication. After this beating is over, you usually have an article that is appreciably better than it was originally. Given the length of the journal review process, this could take 2–5 years for a bevy of articles to be ready for book conversion. Keep in mind you’re still scoring field goals with these articles or chapters. The book will be the culmination of all of that work, that is, the touchdown. (Note: This is football season, right? You can expect football analogies and metaphors. Watch out!)
(c) Start hinging your articles: Find that rubric that draws your body of work (articles) together. Think about that hinge as you begin to write each new article. You may also write pieces that have nothing to do with that hinge for different reasons. (Personal Note: This will be shorter that the bloated one above. As you may have guessed from my article topics above, my hinge is: “How to NOT Get Whacked by Your Institution!” Haha. A little hinge humor. The topic is: “Teaching Strategies for the Net Generation.” Among the 30+ books on the Net Generation, is there a book on this topic with the content I have chosen? No. Is there a need? No. Does anybody care? No. I hope I’m kidding. End of Semi-Bloated Note.)
These paragraphs should get you started. The next blog will be “How to convert articles into chapters without violating copyright.” Stick around for my next installment.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
No comments:
Post a Comment