How To Write A How-To Book

How To Write A How-To Book

You probably spend a lot of time browsing the internet if you’ve managed to find my little corner of the world-wide web. Based on my analytics, you’re probably interested in writing, making money or learning new skills. Hopefully, you’re interested in all of those things. Luckily for you, there’s a twilight zone where all three of those things meet. A place where you can make money, write and learn new skills at the same time. That place is in learning how to write a how-to book.

This article is going to go over how to write a how-to book. (You don’t get a prize for guessing what I’ve been doing today.) I’m not talking about writing a 5,000 word blog post and then putting it on Amazon for $2.99, upsetting all the people who want an actual book. I’m talking about learning how to create a real life, honest to god how-to book that you can hold in your hands.

How To Write A How-To Book Without Being A Scammer

I’ve Googled “How to write a how-to book” before starting this article. Unfortunately, I didn’t mention the scammers in the last paragraph for no reason; most guides I’ve found are for creating tiny little pamphlets and then pretending they are real books.

Luckily, there’s someone who is on your side if you want to learn how to write a how-to book that won’t make your parents ashamed of you.

Sadly, it’s me.

I’ve touched on this subject before. Check out these articles:

• How Internet Marketing Scammers Can Help YOU Make Honest Money
• How To Make Honest Money Internet Marketing (Part Two): Finding Easy Niches for E-Books
• How To Create A Better Product Than Quick Internet Marketers (Part Three)

Those articles will teach you how to pick a topic to write about for your how-to book, and they’ll teach you how to research your topic and ensure that you’re creating a high-quality product that’ll make your parents proud.

What I haven’t talked about in the articles above is the next step: how to write a how-to book.

How To Write A How-To Book: Structure

I like to break my books down into several sections. That’s because different readers will buy a book for different reasons. Some want to know the “why?” Some the, “How-to” and some the “What for?” You need to answer all of these questions.

In the first few chapters, tell them the answers to the major questions. Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? What For? What If?

In the second section, you’re going to go into the meta-details. Say you’re writing a how-to book on learning to cook. You’ve already gone over why you’re reader is learning to cook and how they’re going to learn. Now you want to go over the big ideas behind cooking. Why do we have certain flavour combinations? Why do we always have meat, vegetables and a carbohydrate in our main meals? What’s the history of gastronomy?

In the third section, you’re going to go into the nuts and bolts. How do you boil an egg? How do you grill stuff? So on and so forth. Outside of the cooking example, you’re going to have to break down the information and skill you’re attempting to give your audience, and pitch it to their level. For instance, if I were writing books about writing, then “How to be a freelance writer” would be written for a different level than if I were to write “How to turn your copywriting business into a multi-million dollar operation.”

In the fourth section, you’re bringing it all together. You’ve given your people a reason for reading and learning. You’ve given them the over-arching philosophy behind the discipline. Then, you’ve given them the skills to learn the skill. Now, to finish off your how-to book, you put all that together, give them a curriculum and set them on their merry way.

That’s about all there is to the structure of a how-to book. However, we’ve still not talked about the most crucial step when it comes to how to write a how-to book: Writing it.

How To Write A How-To Book: The Writing

Notice that in the last section, I neglected to mention how many chapters each section was. I was sparing with details because the details are going to be massively dependent on what it is you’re writing a how-to book on. It’s going to take you a ton of chapters to cover cooking in general. “Cooking eggs” is probably going to require a lot less chapters.

Regardless, I like to plan my how-to books to include 20-40 chapters. Any more than that, and I need to drill down a lot more and get a specific topic. Any less than twenty chapters and you’re going to have a short book. (Unless each chapter is 4,000 words long, which it might be.)

This then makes writing a how-to book easy. You pick a figure and you constantly stick to it.

My figure for writing a how to book is five chapters a day. I don’t base it on a word count, because then you’re tempted to stop in the middle of a chapter or quit after a single chapter a day.

Writing five chapters a day means you’ll have finished your book in a week. Assuming it takes around an hour to write a 2,000 word chapter, you’ll take five hours to get it complete. That’s 20-40 hours per book. It’s easily to calculate financial figures from those numbers.

Final Thoughts On How To Write A How-To Book

That is all there is to writing a how-to book. Like most writing things, writing a how-to book is all about getting the basics right:

• Pick a topic that people are interested in
• Do your research
• Create a product that’s better than anyone else’s
• Structure it properly so your readers will learn from and enjoy it
• Write the thing until it’s complete

The only things left to do after that are creating a cover for your how-to book and publishing your how-to book. Those are a bit divorced from this topic though, so I’ll cover them another time.  Bear in mind that the success of any how-to book isn’t in the cover or the publishing, it’s in the writing.

Now you know how to write a how-to book, get to it. By the time you check back here I’ll probably have answered any questions you might have.

Speaking of questions… feel free to drop them in the comments if you have any!