Wanna Write a Tiny NONFICTION Book? This Book Can Help.

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You’d like to publish a tiny nonfiction book, right?

Then I recommend reading Very Good Copy: 207 Micro-Lessons on Thinking and Writing Like a Copywriter by Eddie Shleyner.

From Wikipedia:

“Copywriting is the act or occupation of writing text for the purpose of advertising or other forms of marketing. Copywriting is aimed at selling products or services.”

You may say, “I’m not writing a tiny book to sell a product or service.”

Neither am I.

But one of the meanings of the verb “to sell” is “to persuade somebody that something is a good idea,” and you’re almost certainly writing a tiny book to sell an idea. Your idea.

So, as tiny book authors, we are all—in a way—copywriters.

In Very Good Copy, you’ll find lots of stories about inspiration, writer’s block, creativity, brevity, editing, writing “in images,” and other writing techniques.

Here’s the beginning of one of Eddie’s micro-lessons.

Writing short, but thorough

Usually, short content isn’t thorough—and thorough content isn’t short—but there’s a way to marry the two.

This is my process:

  1. Commit to a final word count (say, 318 words).

  2. Brain dump a 4X first draft (1272 words).

  3. Cut the first draft in half (636 words).

  4. Cut the second draft in half (318 words).

Take it a sentence at a time, using a few pointed questions to help guide your editing decisions. Ask yourself:

“Does this edit express the same idea, but faster?”

If you can say the same thing in fewer words, you’ve made your writing better.

“It’s my ambition,” said Friedrich Nietzsche, “to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

Let this be your ambition, too. Fetishize brevity.

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There’s even a chapter titled “Authors who write like copywriters”!

Also, the book isn’t tiny (it’s 450+ pages), but it gives you a good model of a format you can use for your own tiny book: logically sequenced short chapters around a theme. The first half of the book is about one theme (“thinking”); the second is about the other (“writing”).

Your tiny book doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Okay, go check out the book, and enjoy it if you decide to read it.

If not, buy mine. 😂

Click on my glass of beer to sign up for Tiny Authors, my private email list. It's on Substack and it's free. I send one email a week to help you write and self-publish your first tiny nonfiction book. No aggressive selling.