I want to believe that most people do have a book in them. But, since anyone can now simply use prompts to generate a nonfiction book in hours, I'm forced to draw some boundaries. Everyone might have a book in them, but it takes a little something extra to actually make that book worth reading.

There are three considerations when actually getting the book out of yourself, and a further four questions I want you to ask yourself before you do.

The considerations:

• Your own health and well-being as the prospective writer.
• The benefits of the readers who will find your book.
• How your book contributes to the ecosystem of other writers and experts in your area of expertise.

These considerations aren't so heavy in fiction—that's an area where you can have fun telling stories and using your imagination (although it comes with its own set of considerations and cautions that are outside the scope of this episode). As a nonfiction writer, however, you have a little more responsibility.

The book that is in you could be incredible, but that doesn't mean it's ready to come out fully formed and speaking in complete sentences. This series will help you make an informed choice and lay out a vision for the way for you to make your mark on the world.

Welcome to the Hybrid Pub Scout podcast, helping you navigate the

publishing landscape. I'm M. Einolander, and I share insights so authors can be successful and

safe as they pursue publishing. Most people feel at one point or another in their lives that

they've got a book in them, and with the whole spectrum of human experience being lived on this

planet every single day, a lot of them do. If we just keep to the category of nonfiction,

we're talking about true stories of people who travel, uncover secrets, or overcome major

struggles during their time on Earth. We're talking about people who know areas of science

and history and culture that you've never even heard of, or the best cooks in the world, or

people who want to share knowledge about dying crafts and hobbies, and you know, not dying

ones. You might be one of these people. You might dream of writing a book one day to leave

a legacy, or give something back to humanity, or just share something you think is cool. But

as much as I love human creation and personal exploration, I think people should be way more

circumspect about having a book in them and actually writing it, and that's for several reasons.

One is a consideration for the aspiring writer themselves. Writing books is really, really

hard. It takes time and a whole set of skills you might not have developed yet, no matter how

much work you might have done to develop your other skills and knowledge. The other is a

consideration for the whole world of readers out there drowning in content and

struggling to find quality. Our inboxes are stuffed with more updates than we'll ever be able

to read, and our social media feeds are seas of people all screaming about the same things.

We might be interested in topics, but the screaming-the screaming takes up all the real

estate in our heads that might otherwise be filled with actually helpful insights that

make our lives richer. And yet another consideration is for the writers who actually create

excellent work and struggle to have it discovered in a saturated market. Yeah, boo hoo.

That's the way the market is. You might be thinking. Sure, you're right. Nobody is owed a

readership, but I do happen to think a lot of important stuff gets overlooked due to the fact

that they're just too hard to find. They're buried, especially in our current tech landscape.

People think that the so-called book in them will be a lot easier to write, and on the

surface, I can't argue with that. If you can throw some info into Claude and be like, make

this sound good, that is empirically easy. But if that's what you do, was that really the

book that was in you, or is that the book in the collective unconscious of the scraped

internet and destroyed books? Will it be written in your actual voice or in the universal

voice that we've all compressed into like a collapsing star system, whether we actually use

AI or not? Will what's written in your book, be true, or did it just borrow from people who were

talking out of their asses on Reddit? And if you didn't take the time to actually fact check

or develop your voice and ideas, is it really yours at all? And don't get me wrong, it's not

just an AI thing. I've said it before: the slop was coming from inside the house. The sheer

volume of books we've been producing, especially since self-publishing became so

accessible, has exploded. And let's be real, a lot of it's trash. I'm not saying your baby

is ugly. I'm saying people have been slapping things together with no eye for quality and

throwing them online since long before they started writing books with LLMs, although you

know what, I won't sugarcoat it. If you're not putting in the work on your craft, checking

your sources, and getting helpful feedback and collaborating to make a good

product, your baby is ugly. So, is that the kind of book and content culture you want to be

part of, just make some trash to ostensibly make some money, and by some money I mean maybe $100

if you're lucky. If you're actually listening to this, I really doubt that's what you

want for yourself. If nonfiction is your thing, dear listener.

I imagine you want to make or read or help someone else make books that people read and

benefit from. That could be learning something applicable to their lives, giving them an

emotional experience with yours or someone else's compelling life story, or just fulfilling

someone's curiosity and giving them the opportunity to connect with subjects beyond themselves,

and it's both easier and harder to do than ever. You get more help finding sources, but you

can't trust without verifying, and that process of verifying takes a lot of willpower and

stick to itiveness. There are talented designers and editors everywhere, but they do need to

be paid. There are tools that you can use yourself to create the books and the marketing work

that you must do to promote them, but those cost money too and often require you to develop

new skills. But if doing this really matters to you, if you really want to go to the trouble

of writing and publishing nonfiction, ask yourself the following questions: Number one,

why? Why do you want to publish a nonfiction book? Number two, are you willing to put in the

time, money, and energy it takes to get it done. Number three, how far are you willing to go to

put out worthwhile and accurate information? And number four, and maybe this should be the

question you ask before a lot of those other ones: Who do you want to read it, and what value

would it actually bring them? The next several episodes are going to be deeper dives into

answering some of those questions, which will hopefully give you clarity as you decide

whether and how you want to write nonfiction. Let's talk about why first. Nonfiction

isn't just about quote unquote learning something, and learning something isn't just a function

of nonfiction. If you've never learned anything from fiction, I simply don't believe you. It's a

wide-ranging category, definitely not a single genre. As I'm looking for a way to

define it, in fact, I'm struggling to find a definition I agree with. I started on

Wikipedia, and it said, "Nonfiction is any document or media content that attempts, in

good faith, to convey information only about the real world rather than being grounded

in imagination. I can't even accept that because a lot of nonfiction is written in bad

faith, and not all of it is about the real world, or the real world happens to be a

matter of opinion. Merriam-Webster says writing or cinema that is about facts and

real events, and I am dubious of that definition as well. You always have to ask according to

who at the end of this definition, but definitions aside, there are a lot of types

of nonfiction and reasons to write it. Narrative nonfiction, like memoir and journalistic

pieces full of interviews and connected threads, prescriptive fiction that gives you tools to

learn new practical skills or heal from trauma, even joke books and trivia books and all

those fun little morsels that your dad used to keep next to the toilet. But let's focus on

the motivation for writing. One is that you have an idea you want to expand. You see

connections between different topics that you believe are all wired together, and you want to

unscrew the cover and show that circuit board to the world. There's a lot of love in making

those connections for people, and it takes a lot of work. You could be a physical scientist

trying to break down complex ideas for lay people, or a sociologist connecting different

phenomenon into a way to help readers make sense of human behavior, or you might just want

to share everything you know about your favorite movie subgenre. This is nonfiction

that's based on curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Whether it's just to feed

interest or help readers know more about the way the world works as you see it, your

primary interest here is to inform and enlighten. Another motivation is you have a message

to send. Your biggest priority is a clear call to action. Religious or not, you're

evangelizing for a cause. You're trying to prove to people why they should care about

something. Arguably, you can make that thing they care about you, like you personally.

If anyone has ever encouraged you to use your book as a business card, and yes, those

words have come out of my mouth and my fingers before. That's a form of message: political

books, self-help, spiritual nonfiction. They're all based on shared. A message, and at least

over the last decade, it's been the most popular type of nonfiction. But it's also the

type where I'd start getting dubious of the facts and real events claim. The next

motivation for writing nonfiction is that you're driven to tell a story, a true story

about yourself or someone else. Memoirs and biographies and histories are examples, and

maybe it's to inspire people, or to warn them, or to inform or unite them. Which brings me to

my next point: with nonfiction, a lot of these motivations overlap. Sometimes narrative and

prescription overlap. You may have all of it in your book. You may want to connect ideas

regarding historical events to call people to action. You might want to tell stories of

different activists whose work intersects. Hell, you may just want to share all the hiking

trails in a particular area, informing people so they can spend more time out in nature,

and use the stories of your own hiking adventures to frame them all. Writing nonfiction involves

a lot of thinking across a lot of domains, and to keep from making the whole process

miserable for yourself, you've got to have at least one of those motivations driving you.

So let's talk about the whole writing is hard thing. It's stating the obvious. Esoteric

parts aren't the only reason. The mechanics and practicalities themselves are difficult for a

lot of people, and at this point that includes me, they are the most difficult part of all.

First, if you've got a day job and also want to write, you're going to have to make sacrifices

and create strategies. And if you have some kind of neurodivergence or chronic

illness or anything that causes brain fog or makes you get tired faster, it's going to take you

some work to figure out how to manage your energy and pin down a time where you can actually

write. Even task switching takes energy before you start the writing process. And with

nonfiction, you can't really just sit down and start writing the story in your head and see

where the wind takes you. Not even fiction writers can always do that. Before you can even get

started, you need to have your ducks in a row. You need to have a theme. You need to do

research, which could mean anything from finding books, primary sources, or scheduling

interviews. You'd be amazed at the true detective, or depending on your preferred genre, Pepe

Sylvia boards that nonfiction writers put on their walls over the course of their writing

lives, some people will spend hundreds of dollars on post-it notes. And here's something

people don't talk about, but is very real: actual physical pain. I ghostwrite and copy-edit

nonfiction daily. I write fiction in podcast scripts and newsletters, and I now work and

sleep in wrist braces 100% of the time I'm sleeping or working. Sometimes I have to

take the night off with the heating pad wrapped around my forearm. Repetitive stress

injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome are real problems, and they hurt. And if you spend

enough time typing, you'll get something going on with you, no matter how ergonomic you're set

up, just dictate. Then, if that's a problem for you, you might say, "Okay, but it's not

like you can just pick up a microphone and start dictating. If you don't write very much

otherwise, dictating can be a great way to get your thoughts down. But if you do write a lot,

you might find speaking uses a completely different set of cognitive skills, which is my

issue, and that's not to mention the transcription errors. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I love to

post the things that my transcription programs think I said, and then there's the

software, which is boring. Yeah, but just because you have a computer doesn't mean this is

all for free, and if you're not paying with your money, you are paying with your data and the

technological hoops you have to jump through in this age of enshitification. But we've

talked about that plenty, haven't we?

And here's a question: If you are an ethical person, how far are you willing to go to put out

worthwhile and accurate information. Right now on Amazon, there is a glut of

self-published reference books that are fully AI generated. It seems like people have kind of

forgotten what supply and demand mean. So just a little reminder: what usually happens when there

is a high volume of identical products, the price goes down. I know. Imagine prices going down.

So people who are creating AI-generated books need to produce a lot of them to see any

actual profits. Most of the people who post these books are not fact-checking. Why would

they? The whole point of this is that they don't want. To do any work, you as the writer are

responsible for supplying us with the correct information, and I mean us as readers, but I

also mean us as people who work in publishing. There is no real gate a book has to pass through

that requires accurate information before it's posted online, not for self-published

books at least. A nonfiction book, particularly a self-published one, can just be

put up online, no matter whether or not the information is true. If this is a reference book,

that can be a disaster because people aren't just using nonfiction to write reports;

they're also using it for activities that might actually pose danger if done wrong. Back

to the AI slop example, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna tell a story in their book *The AI Con*

about how machine-generated books can literally be dangerous. Members of a

mycological society in New York-that's a mushroom foraging organization noticed a lot more

books being posted online about foraging. That's not something you just pack up and do

risk-free. Mushrooms famously can be extremely poisonous, which most people know,

including I assume whoever posted these AI-generated books. But Reddit posters have talked

about how trusting these AI-generated foraging books have sent them and often their entire

families to the hospital. This rise in AI-generated self-publishing books means LLMs

are asked for information about things that can affect people's lives and health. Fortunately

for real experts, that means that more than ever, readers need nonfiction they can trust

from people who know what they're talking about. And as for traditional publishing,

while some legal departments are very careful about fact-checking what makes it onto the market,

there often aren't provisions in a contract saying the company will fact-check for you, which

is something I'd like to talk about more in a future episode. The bottom line: presenting

accurate information is, in fact, your responsibility as the writer. And even if the

publishing company gets a little embarrassed, the author is going to bear the brunt of any

repercussions that come from inaccuracies. It might be from readers. It's often from

journalists. And unless you're already some well-regarded author who can go hide for a

while and lick their wounds and make a comeback, it could cost you a future book deal. And the

last question of the day is: Who do you want to read this book, and what value would it bring

them? Writers are often accused of being self-focused, even self-absorbed. That's

understandable. We live in our heads a lot of the time, and when we're trying to constantly

develop ideas, it can be hard to get out. In fiction, we can easily advise people write for

yourself to get the stories out that means so much to them. That's part of why fan fiction

is a thing. A lot of people just write for the fun of it. Unless we're talking about memoirs,

it's not really the same for nonfiction. For nonfiction, with few exceptions, the motivation

has to point outwards. When you're thinking about the why behind your nonfiction book and

the process of selling them and marketing them. It's not just about you anymore. As a

nonfiction writer, your category implies expertise to readers. But anyone can write a book, and

now anyone can put them up online as well. Those facts and true events come with a big

asterisk. If you've got human integrity and expertise, you have a responsibility to make

your book actually valuable to people, or at least that's what I think. The very fact that the

market is so saturated means that if you really know what you're talking about, people

need your nonfiction.

They need your high-quality, well-researched, experience and expertise-driven nonfiction.

Writing for the quick buck isn't enough. You won't even get one. You can get anything for 199 on

Amazon or for free with the right ChatGPT prompt. But what sets you apart are the ideas in

your brain, the way you connect them, and the research and rigor you are willing to put in an LLM

is only going to produce what a person can think to ask. People don't know what they don't know,

but you do. LLMs cannot offer up the connections that people don't think to ask about. That

is up to you. So you have to ask yourself what matters to you more than the money. In fact,

I'd say that you shouldn't expect to make money doing it at all. And damn, do I wish it

weren't like that, but it is. If you do want to make money without committing to being a

grifter, because grifting is a commitment, you need to think about. What the reader will gain

from reading your book, and if you do want to make it part of your career, you'll need to

figure out how to use that book in combination with your other activities in order to do that.

Think about how it will help people understand the world better, how it will make them

understand themselves better, how will it help them get the outcomes they want, or make

peace with the things that scare them or confuse them? How will it help them bring meaning into

their lives? Because if it's bringing them meaning and clarity, it's going to do the

same thing for you in the process. So we're far from done here. Over the coming episodes,

we're going to explore different topics and concerns in nonfiction and the challenges

that each of these things present. We're going to dig into the subjects I mentioned,

talking about timeless writing topics like propaganda and misinformation, research

processes, interviewing, and fact checking, but we're also going to dig into why writing a

nonfiction book even matters when people have podcasts to listen to, and YouTube videos to

watch, and ChatGPT to consult, and when there's a glut in the market and a rise in

anti-intellectualism and book banning. Lots of kind, optimistic people believe that

everyone has a book in them. I want to be one of those people, but for my part, I think I need

to throw some caveats in there. Unless you have an entire self-contained encyclopedia of a

brain, the book that is in you isn't completely in you right now. Some of that book is still

outside of you. It needs to be fed into you and built into you, like you're an intellectual

cyborg. And maybe it needs to get out of you and go into an incubator so you can get a good

look at it and figure out how to complete it. Develop and solidify your ideas. Take that

unfinished book from something squishy to something with structure and a respiratory and

circulatory system, that might require you to grow as a person, to travel, to get input from the

outside world, so you eventually have something to show for all that growth. And then, when it's

finally done, you need to be ready for it not to belong to you anymore. You can influence

it and direct where it goes, but it's now part of that growing cavalcade of books that makes up

the information we swim in daily. You want it to float on top of that sea of screaming.

The first step to turning that intellectual fetus into a full-grown book is to decide how

much you're ready to commit, but unlike a child, your book really is an extension of you. Do

whatever you need to to make it good. Check out the show notes and my website

hybridpubscout.com for research links, related materials, and book recommendations through my

affiliate shop on bookshop.org. If you have thoughts on this topic or other ones you'd like

me to talk about, you can email me at emily at hybridpubscout.com. Find me on

LinkedIn as minolander or follow me on Blue Sky at Emilyino. Thanks for listening, and go

read a book for all our sakes.