I’m often approached by potential clients who want to write a non-fiction self-help book, or have me ghostwrite a book for them. Sometimes the author has a very good idea of what they want, and sometimes they have no idea. While authors in the latter category are often eager to start, I always ask them to slow down and start from the beginning.

Writing a book is like building a house. You need to have a plan, and you need to know how you’re going to execute your plan. It can be disastrous to hire a ghostwriter without a set of specific and measurable goals. Here are some of the questions every self-help book author needs to resolve before setting pen to paper:

1. What is the problem you are proposing to solve? Every self-help book solves a problem. It could be how to make more money, how to be happy, how to take care of a hamster, how to avoid foods to which you’re allergic – the possibilities are endless.

2. Who will read your book? What is your target audience? If you’re writing about food allergies, obviously your target audience consists of people who have food allergies. If you’re writing a book on how to get your invention patented, then your audience consists of people who invent things. Whoever they are, you need to speak their language.

3. What’s the length of your book? I often hear from clients that they want their book to be 150 pages, or 200 pages. As a method of measurement, this is not very useful. On a Kindle, there really aren’t any pages. And in a paperback book, you can inflate the page count by using a large font, wide margins, and lots of graphics. The only universal method of measuring the length of a book is by the word count. Most self-help books are in the range of 40,000 words. Ebooks and pdf downloads can be as short as 10,000 words.

4. How do you plan to distribute your book? This ties in with #3, above. If you want a paperback book, you’ll need at least 30,000 words, otherwise your book will seem thin and skimpy – unless, of course, you make it small in size and use wide margins! The cool thing about Amazon Createspace and many other platforms is that you can easily produce both an ebook and a paperback print-on-demand (POD) paperback.

5. Have you got an outline? The foundation of any non-fiction book is the outline. It needs to be specific and it needs to list every important point the author wants to make. With a good outline, the ghostwriter can move ahead with confidence, and there will be no awkward surprises for the client!

– Thomas Hauck is a leading ghostwriter and book editor serving both published and emerging authors. For your free consultation, contact Thomas today.