This is one of my favorite books on nonfiction authorship and was a big motivational factor as I drafted The Query-Free Freelancer. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

If you’ve read the book already, register on the site right from our blog sidebar or the registration link on the forum page (it’s free!). As a registered user, you can take part in the book club discussion.

I’ve kicked things off with 10 questions related to the book. You can respond to all or just some of them, and you can respond to that post by asking questions of your own. Just remember, don’t comment here on the blog. Keep book club discussions on the book club forum.

Thanks! Oh, and if you don’t have a copy yet, buy one today!

Would you like to suggest books for our future book club picks? While we already have some scheduled for the next several weeks, you can leave your own picks in our suggestion threads for future review and inclusion.

Linda Formichelli

To continue our interview series on various writing styles freelancers may be interested in pursuing, today I’m talking with Linda Formichelli, co-author of The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success and The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock, about writing nonfiction books.

Many freelancers already work in nonfiction, and some have even written longer e-books. Moving on to publishing a nonfiction book might seem like a natural progression to them. What was that transition from freelance writer to nonfiction author like for you, and what was the biggest challenge you faced when going from freelancing to that first book?

Really, it was a natural for me since I was writing nonfiction articles — and my book was on nonfiction article writing! It is challenging to write something so long when you’re used to writing 2,000-word articles, but my co-author and I broke the book into manageable chunks. I would write just a little bit at a time. I also had a great team: My husband and my mom both helped me edit the chapters as I wrote them.

You not only write nonfiction, but were actually a co-author of The Renegade Writer. What made you opt to co-author a book rather than writing one solo? What was the biggest benefit of having someone else to work with?

I thought it would be fun to write with a friend. The benefit is that it seems much more manageable when you have someone else doing half the writing, and when you have someone else to bounce ideas off of. It’s also been a lot of fun to run the Renegade Writer business together — the blog, the e-courses, etc.

I also co-authored two Idiot’s Guides, two Chicken Soup books, and a Dummies book. In these cases, unless you’re an expert in the topic with a good platform, you’re expected to write the books with an expert co-author. The benefit there is that you have an expert who can read over your writing and make sure it’s technically correct, meaning that all the info in there is correct. The downside is that some of these co-authors think that *they’re* the writer, and they take it upon themselves to edit your writing. I had this happen once, and it was a real PITA. I was very familiar with the Idiot’s Guide style, and the expert co-author would edit my writing OUT of the style. Then I’d have to go and change it all back. When the book came out, she didn’t even notice that I hadn’t made any of her style changes.

You didn’t have to prepare a proposal to have one of your books published–instead it came about through your writing contacts. How important are a writer’s network and platform in landing a nonfiction book contract?

I think having a network of writers is very important. I belong to an online writer’s forum, and one of the members posted that her agent was looking for someone to cu-author a business book. I threw my hat into the ring, and got the gig. It ended up being The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting and Running a Coffee Bar. My Chicken Soup co-authoring gigs came from another writer on a different forum, who recommended me to her editor. So join online forums, join writers’ groups, and contribute to the conversation. Be helpful and make yourself known as a good writer. And be sure to recommend other writers to your editors and agents when the opportunity comes up!

What does your book writing process look like (do you just sit down and write, do you outline extensively), and how did your freelance writing experience influence the way you approach working on a book (if it did at all)?

For the Idiot’s Guides and Dummies books, you start with a very detailed table of contents, so that works as an outline. For The Renegade Writer, I didn’t outline — I had a general table of contents to follow, and I kind of outlined in my head as I wrote. I’m not an outlining kind of person! I just write, and then go back and edit.

I viewed each chapter like an article and approached it the same way I would if I were writing for a magazine. That helped the task seem less overwhelming.

If a writer wanted to transition from freelancing to writing their first nonfiction book, what advice would you give them? Is there a way of approaching the project that might help someone adapt from writing shorter freelance pieces to a book?

One difference between writing articles and writing books is that instead of writing an article query, you need to write a book proposal, which is a much more involved thing. When you write an article query, you’re describing your idea, why it’s right for the magazine, and why you’re the right person to write it. When you write a book proposal, you’re doing all that, but also including information on competitive books, research on your market, a detailed table of contents, and usually a sample chapter as well. There are several good books out there on how to write a book proposal, and e-courses you can take as well.

To write a nonfiction book, you’ll be using all the skills you developed as a magazine writing — researching, writing, persuading, marketing — just more of it! So don’t let the idea of pitching and writing a book scare you.

About Linda Formichelli

Linda Formichelli has written for more than 120 magazines and is the co-author of The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success and The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock. Linda teaches an e-course on how to break into magazine writing at http://www.writeformagazines.com. She lives in Concord, NH, with her writer husband, new son, and three cats.

More in This Series:

• Novel Writing: An Interview With Evan Marshall

So I’m going to kick off this blog by giving you a vague list of the book and e-book projects I’m working on, or that I plan to start working on within the next several months, and talking about the strategy I’m hoping will allow me to pursue my writing to my fullest potential.

Types of Books and E-books

I’m primarily a business writer, but also want to move into some fictional projects to let my creativity flow a bit more.

I’ve been (very slowly) working on a nonfiction book for probably around two years now that’s related to my work. I’ve also fully outlined one novel, which I plan to make some changes to, but ultimately finish, and I’m in the middle of outlining a second novel now. I’ll be outlining a third later this summer. It might sound like too much fiction at once, but the first novel was outlined and shelved for a few years, and the other two outlines are a part of an experiment I’m doing – testing methods from two authors claiming to teach you how to draft or outline a novel in 30 days (more about that in a later post).

On top of that, I write e-books. I published my first in late ’06 I believe, and loved the experience (and of course the payout, considering it only took me a few hours to write in full). I have several e-books partially written, but my primary e-book focus will be a series I’m doing as a guide for Web writers.

My Projects and Ideas

I’m obviously not going to go into a lot of depth about plots and characters here – partially because I want to protect the ideas until at least the rough drafts are all finished, but more because those things keep changing in this early phase.

Here is a list of what I’m currently working on:

• Sarah – Sarah is simply the first name of my heroine in the book I’m currently outlining. I don’t have a working title in progress yet, so for now it will be referred to as “Sarah’s Book” or something similar. It’s a fantasy horror novel. I won’t go into the sub-genre. I’m not even 100% sure that I’m comfortable with that genre classification yet. I’m outlining this book as a part of an experiment, using the method detailed in First Draft in 30 Days.
• Creative Self Promotion – This is the nonfiction book I’ve been working on for a while now – it simply hasn’t been a priority time-wise enough for me to make a huge amount of progress lately. Most of my work on this project is still in the interview phase – reaching out to music industry contacts from previous work. To sum it up in my early “elevator speech,” I suppose you could say “it’s a book about what musicians can teach business executives about using creative self promotion through online marketing and PR channels and social media to turn customers into ‘fans.’”
• Web Writer’s Guide to Launching a Successful Online Writing Career – This is an e-book, and will be the first in a series of e-books targeting Web writers (and tied to my blog at WebWritersGuide.com). I’m hoping to either finish it, or at least a good portion of it, this weekend. Material was written for a larger e-book previously, and I broke it down to create the series, so much of the writing is just a matter of expanding, adding examples, etc. Some of the previously-written material has also been broken off to be used in subsequent e-books in the series.

Here are the other projects I’ll be starting hopefully within the next several months:

• Fairy Tale – I don’t really know how to describe this just yet beyond that basic term, so that’s what I’ll be referring to it as when I post updates on my progress. This is another novel, and the second that I’ll be outlining while comparing the 30-day plans from two authors – in this case using Book in a Month. It’s another dark story, possibly bordering on the horror genre, but I wouldn’t quite call it that. It’s not a traditional fairy tale. It’s not really a “twisted” fairy tale. And it’s not simply an updated fairy tale. It’s not exactly a fairy tale at all – more of an “anti-fairytale” – so just bare with me on the labeling for now.
• Dark Mystery - Again, there’s currently no working title. This is the one that was fully outlined previously (using The Marshall Plan, which I loved working with). It’s been shelved for a few years, and I plan to start revising this outline while I work on the fairy tale outline later this summer.
• Web Writer’s Guide E-books – As I already mentioned, some of the content for these is already written. I’m not going to go into them each separately. Right now the other planned e-books in the series will be The Web Writer’s Guide to: Finding Online Writers’ Markets, Networking Your Way to Higher Paying Freelance Writing Jobs Online, Making Money as a Professional Blogger, and Writing and Selling E-books and Reports. When those e-books are finished, I’m planning to continue the series with other titles, perhaps moving into specific types of Web writing for those more advanced in their careers.
• Indie Black Book Series – This is a series of books I’ve been planning to write and self-publish for several years now (although I may release them as an e-book series or report series instead, because frankly there’s a better profit margin). They will be short books on various indie music marketing and publicity issues or artist management issues (I initially worked exclusively in music PR, so it’s a topic near and dear to my heart, and one where I still have a very strong built-in audience). I’m planning at least five titles in this series, and this is possibly the lowest priority project at this point in time.
• Daughter – This is another one where what I’m calling it here probably won’t make much sense until it’s finished and I open up more about the content. As you may have noticed, all fiction projects previously mentioned are “dark.” This will be a humourous book – I hesitate to call it nonfiction, but until I delve deeper into it, that’s what I’m going to call it.
• 3 Weeks – This will be a vignette-style piece, also on the humourous side. To be as vague as possible, it will deal with the topic of failed relationships (I know – that’s isn’t saying much).

There are a few other e-book projects that have been started, but they’re more “permanently” shelved for now, meaning they’re not something I want to start researching, outlining, or drafting within the next few months. I’ll bring them up down the road if and when I decide to add them to the list of things worth pursuing.

Setting Up a Writing Schedule

So is there any way to realistically approach several long-term writing projects at once (on top of running my business, dozen or so websites, and my freelance business writing career)? I’m sure gonna try!

Right now I have three “active” projects. I think that’s a good number to work with. It isn’t entirely overwhelming, and gives me enough diversity that if I don’t feel like working on one thing, I have other options that might appeal to me in the moment.

I’m expecting the first novel outline to be finished in early July (you can track my progress on my book marketing blog – I’ll be charting progress on the second outline here instead). I’m also expecting to soon be finished with the first Web Writer’s Guide e-book.

When those two projects move out of my “working list,” I’ll be adding the second outline (after a week or two off between them) and editing the novel outline that I completed for the dark mystery a few years back.

So that’s the plan for now – stick to three if possible, and substitute one project in for another. If I find that I just can’t seem to get into one of them, I can move it to the dormant list and stay productive overall by “upgrading” another project in its place.

Wish me luck! And more importantly, if you’ve ever had to juggle multiple book and / or e-book writing projects, please share some words of advice or war stories about how you survived.