Researching a Non-Fiction Book

I’ve just started work on my new book project New Trends in International Public Relations. As you can guess from the title, it’s not a thriller or a novel. It’s a non-fiction book aimed at business communicators, PR practitioners and marketeers.

This is my first non-fiction book and it’s an exciting challenge - but also a little daunting.

As with my two novels, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I started with putting together an outline. We then sent this to our commissioning publisher Kogan Page for them to approve it before we started any other work. Now that they’ve given us the go-ahead, stage two is the research.

I also started the writing process for my novels with research.

For The Flame Tree, I learnt all about geology and construction to make the central development project in the story - and the ultimate disaster at the heart of the book - as believable as possible. For Mindgame, I researched mind manipulation techniques and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (the brain disease that is generally known as “mad cow”).

But the great thing about fiction is that you can take the key elements of your research and blend it with your imagination to re-create hard facts and reality into the fictional world that you’re imagining. You can bend the scientific facts so long as the outcome is within the realms of possibility. You can also use verbal sleight-of-hand - for example, in The Flame Tree I needed the hero Luke to discover a fatal flaw in the construction project that would mean that it is unstable and likely to collapse. In a short paragraph, Luke works on the data he has found and through clever calculations, he finds discrepancies and realises that the foundations are too shallow and the blueprints for the building have been falsified. That’s all I need to say - I don’t need to prove to you his calculations.

In a non-fiction book, I have to prove everything. Every statement I make has to be based on some authority and I need to cite the source. Yikes.

So my research process for this new book project is much more meticulous and I am careful to keep a note of the web link, the name and contact details of anyone I have approached for their input, the name and page number of any book I refer to. Interestingly, blogging has really helped me in this process - without thinking about it, when I blog, I always add links to sources where I’ve derived some information or to other websites where you could find further writing on a particular subject. Non-fiction citations are similar, I guess - the main difference is that instead of a link, I would add a footnote.

If you’re interested to see how the book is going, I’ve posted my first bit of research for the book on my communications and social media blog, ZenGuide - it’s part of the introductory chapter and tells you all about the world’s first website.

Related posts

Nicola Stevens on Writing Business Books

Photo: thanks to lancs.ac.uk