How to Write Non-Fiction: Research, interviews, surveys, and social listening
While you will probably be writing much of your book based on your knowledge and experience, it’s always a good idea to augment that with research and other inputs that will make your book even better. These additional elements might spark new ideas and open up areas of the book you hadn’t considered before. Here are some ways you might expand your scope.
Read books and take notes
“Books are made out of books.”
—Cormac McCarthy
Reading or listening to books, podcasts, and articles by other authors on the same or tangential topics will help you add to your material. Originality and creativity are often not found in brand new ideas, but more in your personal take on a topic that builds on what others have discussed before.
Some authors worry they may inadvertently plagiarise other authors, but there’s an easy way to avoid this. Never copy and paste whole segments from other people’s work into your manuscript or even your notes. Instead, paraphrase as you go, or if you want to quote directly, use quotation marks around the text and note the name of the person and where you read or heard the quote.
In an age of generative AI and misinformation, citing your sources is more important than ever, but if you keep good records, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is the Way and other books on Stoicism, uses index cards to take notes on the books he reads. Over time, he gathers together blocks of cards which he uses to shape his own books.
Ryan described his process in an interview on The Creative Penn Podcast.
When I read a book, I usually have a pen, or I fold and mark the things that I think were important. Then, a couple of weeks later, I go back through the book, I take notes, and transfer those to notecards… then those notecards are organised by theme in boxes, and each book is normally its own box. That’s my personal system.
You can find more help on this in Research Like a Librarian: Research Help and Tips for Writers for Researching in the Digital Age by Vikki J. Carter.
Conduct interviews
“My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.”
—Malcolm Gladwell
You can bring a whole new level of depth to a book if you include excerpts from interviews or anecdotes and tips from people who have been through the transformation or experience you are focusing on.
Steven Pressfield spent months in Israel interviewing veterans from the Six Day War for his book The Lion’s Gate and talked about his interview process on The Creative Penn:
The history was still there. So I went over to Israel, and I interviewed 67 or something veterans, fighter pilots, tankers, men and women, and I had 400 hours of interviews.
You can also include the interviews in a podcast or series of audio or video extras that go alongside the book. This can be extra marketing, bonus content, or the basis of a multi-media course.
Conduct a survey
If you have an audience already, doing a survey can be a powerful way to discover the problems and questions of people in your target market.
You can use free Google Forms for surveys, but you can also use a premium site like SurveyMonkey, which has more extended functionality.
I surveyed my audience before co-writing The Healthy Writer with medical doctor Euan Lawson, and the experiences of respondents shaped the table of contents as well as giving us ideas for extra chapters we hadn’t considered. We also included quotes throughout the book from writers suffering various health issues.
If you conduct an original survey, you could also use the results as a marketing asset. Traditional media is always interested in a survey that reveals new insights about a group of people, particularly if it indicates a headline that makes people click to read more.
Consider how you might word your survey questions to make the information usable in multiple ways later.
You can use ChatGPT or Claude to help you come up with questions for a target market or paste your ideas in and ask it for feedback and additional suggestions.
Consent and permission
With surveys and interviews, include a section about consent so you can use the gathered material in your book and for marketing purposes. This can just be a checkbox that indicates permission or something more extensive, depending on the topic and intended use.
Social listening
Social listening is about monitoring conversations across social media, blogs, forums, and other online platforms to find insights into specific topics, industries, or keywords.
When writing a non-fiction book, social listening can be a powerful tool for staying relevant and understanding what your target audience cares about. By tracking discussions, you can identify trending topics, validate book ideas, and align your content with demand. You might follow relevant hashtags on Instagram or TikTok, research LinkedIn topics, or monitor search terms. You can also ask ChatGPT or Claude to help you identify the best ways to conduct social listening for your niche.
This kind of social listening helps you understand the language, tone, and pain points of your readers, enabling you to write a book that resonates with their needs and interests.
It can also offer insights into the competitive landscape by showing what other authors and content creators are doing. You will be able to spot gaps in the market and differentiate your work, as well as identify key influencers in your niche who may provide opportunities for collaboration or promotion when you’re in marketing mode.
Organising your material so you’re ready to write
There are lots of ways to organise your notes prior to writing.
You might use a physical box or files of printed material, or a folder on your computer or cloud service, or organisational software like Notion.
It doesn’t matter what it is as long as you use something to organise your material. Otherwise, non-fiction projects can swiftly feel like they’re out of control and too unwieldy to work on.
I use Dropbox to sync all my computer files with the cloud, and I have one folder per book project.
I use Scrivener to organise my material. I start a new project file when I have an idea for a book and throw everything in there: one-liners of ideas or quotes, links to articles, notes on books, transcripts, and more.
In terms of AI tools, Google NotebookLM is useful as you can ‘chat’ with your gathered material across multiple sources. It can give you new insights into your work, surfacing themes and key topics, as well as provide a briefing document and even a podcast discussion about your material, which may spark new ideas.
When to stop researching
While it’s important to research around your topic, beware of procrastination and analysis paralysis. You can do just-in-time research as you write, as well as starting from scratch and filling parts in later. You probably know more than you think, and a lack of self-confidence may keep you in the research phase too long.
How much is too much?
That depends on your project and the scope of your book, but setting a deadline for the end of the research phase can be a good start for controlling the time spent.
Don’t get lost in the weeds. Make sure you stop researching and start writing!
Questions:
• How can you expand on your initial thoughts and material with these research methods?
• Have you asked for appropriate permissions and consent for using survey information or quotes in your book?
• How can you prevent yourself from being lost in analysis paralysis?
Resources:
• The Author Mindset. Researching and Marketing Non-Fiction. The Obstacle is the Way with Ryan Holiday, The Creative Penn Podcast — www.TheCreativePenn.com/ryan1
• The Lion’s Gate, Fighting Resistance and Mental Toughness For Writers with Steven Pressfield, The Creative Penn Podcast — www.TheCreativePenn.com/pressfield1
• Research Like a Librarian: Research Help and Tips for Writers for Researching in the Digital Age — Vikki J. Carter
• How to Research Your Book with Vikki Carter, The Author’s Librarian, The Creative Penn Podcast — www.TheCreativePenn.com/research
• Google Forms: docs.google.com/forms
• Survey Monkey: www.SurveyMonkey.com
• “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction,” The New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992, Retrieved 21 October 2024 — https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html
• Malcolm Gladwell, quoted in “Malcolm Gladwell: By the Book,” New York Times, 3 October 2013, Retrieved 21 October 2024 — https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/books/review/malcolm-gladwell-by-the-book.html
• Dropbox for storing files in the cloud and syncing across devices — www.dropbox.com
• Scrivener for organising research and writing — www.TheCreativePenn.com/scrivenersoftware
• Google NotebookLM — notebooklm.google.com
