Make Your Nonfiction Book a Page-Turner

When’s the last time you couldn’t put a book down — and it wasn’t a novel? I just completed a Manuscript Evaluation for an author, and I noticed that each chapter ends with a good, summarizing conclusion, but the summaries were so final, they made me want to put the book down instead of keep reading.

So, we discussed how authors make each chapter feel self-contained and complete, plus still make the reader want to know more and stay engaged with your book. To do so, I borrow from editing tips I learned in fiction writing workshops. Here’s what we did to make her nonfiction book a page-turner: know the conflict, build suspense, close open loops, and keep it simple. Let’s dive into each change and how it made her book more engaging.

1. Know the Conflict

In fiction, there must be a conflict or there’s no story. There can’t just be a character. Some action has to happen, and that something has to be clear to the reader so they will care about what’s at stake.

In nonfiction, you need to know what problem you’re solving. What’s the conflict that drives the reader to your material? What’s their pain point? What’s your purpose in writing about this topic right now? Dig deeper if your information is too surface-level. Nuance and surprises keep readers wanting to know more, and that happens with conflict or friction.

For my client, we eliminated some information the reader would already know and made the problem she solves more evident because originally the manuscript was just teaching the information without telling the reader why it mattered and overcoming their questions and objections. In pointing out the applications of her teaching to specific conflicts the readers might face and having conversations with the readers’ likely responses, the book became much more lively and urgent.

When I think of nonfiction authors that know their conflict perfectly, Dan Kennedy comes to mind. I can read his books in one sitting and never want to put them down because I feel so engaged with what he’s teaching and the relevant-to-me problems he’s solving. Check out The Ultimate Sales Letter (2011) for a classic example. Throughout the book, he doesn’t teach anything without first making the problem he’s solving clear to the reader so you know what’s in it for you to read that section and solve that problem for yourself.

2. Build Suspense

In fiction, you strategically reveal information in a way that trusts the reader’s intelligence and keeps them guessing. You withhold big details and make sure that when you make the big reveal, it’s satisfying for the reader and meets expectations.

We do the same thing with marketing campaigns, right? The strategic reveal. Whether it’s an upcoming blog or webinar. In nonfiction books, this looks like making sure the information is building up to something and supports the overall theme. You tease the reader and make them want to know what’s next. You should be doing this at the beginning and end of each chapter, as well as at the start and finish of the sections within the chapter. When you start looking for books that do this well, you’ll start seeing suspense everywhere.

I built suspense in my client’s book by adding introductions to each chapter and left each one ending with a cliffhanger. Her book isn’t published yet, so I want to show you some good cliffhangers in a book I read recently, The Alter Ego Effect (2019), by Todd Herman:

· “Now that you’ve built an Alter Ego, named it, and connected it with the mission and Origin Story, it’s time to activate it.”

· “And the source of that great power she was explaining you’ll find in the next chapter.”

· “Just like the Hulk, Wonder Woman, or Thor, you need a Ground Punch. So, let’s get one…”

All three examples illustrate different ways you can make an explicit bridge to the next chapter or an implicit bridge to link what you just told me to what you’re about to tell me.

3. Close the Loops

If there’s a gun in Act 1, it should go off in Act 4, according to Russian dramatist, Anton Chekov. He’s totally right. If you introduce a gun and it doesn’t go off, you let the readers down. They don’t like to be tricked by writers.

Likewise, if you promise to teach something, teach it. If you say you can solve a problem, give the answer. This is how you open and close your loops. Edit your work carefully because sometimes in the introduction you might think the writing will go in one direction, but then it goes in a different direction. That’s fine, but go back and find those guns that don’t go off and delete them.

There was a section in my client’s book that looked at the same topic in two different ways. For the first way, the writer began telling a story that had a cliffhanger. But, in the second part of the discussion, the other story wasn’t brought up again or resolved. So, the reader was left hanging. In the rewrite, we wove the rest of the story into the second point the writer was making, and the issue was resolved.

Elizabeth Gilbert does a very good job of this with her story about a novel she never finished writing in Big Magic (2016). She first tells us about getting the idea for the story and getting started on the writing, then having an interruption in her life. That also interrupts the telling of the story about the novel. She returns to what happened with that novel several times throughout the book, so by the end, you know she’ll never finish that novel and why she feels great about that and really, we might as well feel great about it, too. After all, that’s part of the big magic.

In this way, you might introduce a conflict that gets resolved within a section or chapter or across a book as a whole. The important thing is to keep track of those conflicts and resolve them or at least give the reader a sense that you’ve exhausted that inquiry or where to look for deeper information.

4. Don’t Be Overly Lyrical

People tend to think they should sound poetic when they write, and this might be you. Do you face writer’s block because you are afraid your writing isn’t pretty enough? If so, here’s some good news. Flowery writing is hard to read, whether fiction or nonfiction. You’ll lose a lot of engagement if you aren’t clear with what you need to say. Sometimes this means you will write a beautiful paragraph and need to delete it. In fact, I deleted one from this blog, so it’s okay. The writing will be stronger without those extra adverbs and complicated metaphors or allusion to obscure references that alienate readers.

A lot of times, as in the case with my client’s book, in trying to be overly formal or flowery, writing also becomes weaker because of an overuse of “-ing” verbs and a lack of clear subjects that leads to more passive sentences. I did a search in the document for “-ing” to find all those verbs and review whether they were appropriate or could be revised to make stronger sentences. I also made editing choices that sometimes included saying “I” and “you” more to make the writing clearer and stronger and clear up the weak, passive sentences.

You can learn more about how to write well without doing these things and read writing that avoids these traps in Peter Roy Clark’s Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Author (2008). In most cases, writers are relieved to learn they don’t have to be highly stylized and can be yourself in your writing, right down to using more casual and familiar tones.

Now go write something amazing! Let me know if you find these tips helpful or have a question about how this can work for your writing project. If you want to speak more about more writing and editing tips from me, sign up for my twice-weekly newsletter.