How to Write a Book, Step by Step

1. 1

   Say what it's about

   Write your book's premise or promise in one sentence. If you can't yet, that's your first job.

2. 2

   Pick your genre, reader and length

   Name the shelf your book belongs on and the word count readers of that shelf expect.

3. 3

   Plan the chapters

   Sketch an outline, anywhere from a few turning points to one line per chapter.

4. 4

   Build characters, world or research

   Know what your people want and how your world works, or gather the proof each chapter needs.

5. 5

   Set a routine

   Pick a word target you can hit on a bad day, and a date to finish the draft.

6. 6

   Write the whole first draft

   Keep moving forward. Leave notes for problems and fix them later.

7. 7

   Revise from big to small

   Fix the structure first, then scenes, then sentences, then typos.

8. 8

   Get feedback from readers

   Give the revised draft to a few readers of your genre and ask them specific questions.

9. 9

   Choose how to publish

   Query literary agents or publish it yourself, and prepare what that path needs.

Fiction and nonfiction follow the same steps with one big difference: most nonfiction is sold before it's written. Step 2 explains when that applies to you.

Before you plan anything, write one sentence that holds the whole book. For a novel, that's the premise: who the story follows, what they want, what stands in the way, and what they lose if they fail. For nonfiction, it's the promise: who the book is for, and what they'll be able to do or understand by the last page.

This sentence is your compass. When you can't decide whether a scene or chapter belongs, check it against the sentence. If you have a feeling and a setting but no story yet, the plot generator gives you five complete plots in your genre to react to. Even the ones you reject tell you what you want.

Your genre tells you what readers expect: a mystery needs a solution, a romance needs a happy ending, and a how-to book needs steps that work. It also tells you how long the book should be. Agents check word count early, and a first novel far outside its genre's range is a harder sell.

For every genre, with newer sources side by side, see our novel word count guide.

Nonfiction works differently. As Jane Friedman explains, most adult nonfiction is sold with a book proposal, a business case for the book, and the publisher then pays you to write it. Memoir is the exception, since a first-time memoirist usually needs to finish the book first. Our memoir guide covers that path in detail.

Writers plan in very different amounts. Some outline every chapter before they begin; discovery writers, also called pantsers, start with a situation and find the story as they go. Most land in between: they know the opening, a few big turns and roughly how it ends. Choose the amount of planning that keeps you writing, not the one that sounds most serious.

If this is your first book, a little structure helps more than it hurts. A three-act shape gives you a beginning that sets up the problem, a long middle where things get worse, and an ending that resolves it. Our novel outline template lays that out over 20 chapters, each with one plain job. For nonfiction, give each chapter one question your reader has, in the order they'd ask it; the nonfiction book outline template has room for each chapter's takeaway and the story or proof behind it.

Fiction runs on characters who want something. For each main character, know what they want, what they're afraid of, a belief of theirs that isn't true, and what they'd never do. Drafting will teach you more, but those four answers keep the early chapters from drifting.

Names do more work than they seem to. A name hints at a character's age, place and background, and two names that start with the same letter blur together on the page. The character name generator suggests names that fit a character's era, place and role.

Keep the facts in one place as you invent them: ages, eye colors, the layout of the town, how the magic works, who knows the secret by which chapter. A story bible, one document with the cast, places, rules and open questions for the book, saves you from rereading 200 pages to check a detail.

For nonfiction, this step is research. Gather the stories, examples, numbers and quotes each chapter needs, and write down where each one came from as you collect it, so you aren't hunting for a source the week before you send the book out.

Books get finished in small amounts done often. Choose a target you can hit on a bad day, in words or in minutes, and put your writing sessions in the calendar like appointments. Then find your finish date in the table below and write it down somewhere you'll see it.

A first draft has one job: to exist from the first page to the last. It will be uneven, and that's what drafts are for. Rereading and polishing early chapters feels like progress, but it's an easy way for a first book to stall, because a chapter can always be better and the ending never gets written.

When you hit a problem, leave a note in square brackets and keep going: a name you haven't chosen, a fact to check, a scene to come back to. Search for the brackets when you revise. You don't have to write in order, either. If the ending is vivid in your head and chapter 9 isn't, write the ending.

Dialogue is where many first drafts feel stiffest. Get the conversation down first, then fix it in revision; our guide to writing dialogue covers the punctuation, when to drop the tag, and how to make each character sound like themselves.

Put the finished draft away for a few weeks before you read it. Distance lets you see what's on the page rather than what you meant. Then read it straight through, as a reader would, making notes but no fixes.

Revise in passes, biggest problems first. There's no point polishing a sentence in a chapter you'll later cut, so leave line edits and typos until the structure holds. Professional editing follows the same order, from developmental editing to proofreading; our guide to the types of editing explains each one and what it costs if you hire help.

For a second opinion on the structure before you spend money, the AI book editor reads a chapter and writes you an editor's letter on stakes, the turn and what to cut, without rewriting a word of it.

Once you've revised, you need readers who don't know what you meant. Beta readers read a full draft and tell you how it felt: where they got bored, what confused them, which characters they cared about. Choose people who read your genre, and include at least one who isn't a friend or relative, since people who love you soften what they say.

If you don't have readers nearby, critique communities such as Critique Circle and Scribophile run on a trade: you critique other members' writing to earn credits or points, then spend them to post your own. Give readers specific questions rather than asking what they thought.

There are two main roads. In traditional publishing, the publisher pays the costs and pays you an advance and royalties. To reach the big publishers you need a literary agent first, as Jane Friedman's guide to getting published explains, and a first novel should be finished and revised before you approach one. In self-publishing, you're the publisher: you hire the editing and cover, set the price and keep control.

If you're going the agent route, our guide on how to get a literary agent walks through the query, the agent list and the offer. If you're self-publishing on Amazon, Publish a Book on Amazon drafts the description, seven keywords, categories and author bio KDP asks for, from your manuscript.