Before You Start, Think Like An Editor

To do anything well in life, you must begin by knowing what the critics of your work will object to, what they will turn away from, and what they will buy. Nonfiction writing is no different. Before you begin writing and submitting your work to an editor, you must understand the viewpoint of most editors and what prompts them to take interest in your work. Young and inexperienced writers often fill their walls with rejection letters because they don't have an understanding of the editor's criteria. This lesson will help you to better understand what an editor looks for and why, if these things are missing, you will receive a standard rejection letter.

Your Subject and Your Treatment of Your Subject

The subject matter of your book or nonfiction article must be timely and relevant to its target market. In many ways, timing is everything. Timing matters in terms of the editor's view of your book's marketability and ultimate success. Are you on top of something that is a current concern or an upcoming trend? If you are covering a controversial subject, are you on the front end of a trend that will develop and blossom creating an ever increasing interest in your book?

If you are too early on a subject, then your book will sit for a while before producing results. If you wait too long to address the topic, then the bulk of potential sales may be lost due to market saturation or loss of interest. Before you write, you will want to consider the timeliness of your subject. Of course, the best subjects are those which are timeless and always in demand. For instance, love, relationships, and faith are always needed by the human race and material which helps people in these areas is always marketable.

The treatment of your subject must be realistic in order for the work to qualify as nonfiction. In other words, fantasy romance novels are not nonfiction, they are fiction. Keep your treatment of the subject real. Editors often reject material that fails to treat the subject in a fair, balanced, and real manner.

If you are writing about a group of people, are you writing about them in a fair minded way? Inhumane writing is not a form of nonfiction, it is hate. Few editors want to promote hatred among groups of people or hateful ideas that create violence or distrust among readers.

Sometimes writing nonfiction may include revealing or emphasizing hateful experiences of one group of people at the subjection of another group of people, American slavery comes to mind. It is not an unfair treatment of the subject to reveal such factual experiences as long as those experiences are not written in a manner or with intent to provoke the subjecting group by unfairly portraying them or exaggerating their behavior beyond belief. When writing on such topics it is best to keep it factual rather than embellishing so that your reader does not wind up with the opposite conclusion of what you intend to show; and so your editor does not patently reject the work.

The point here is to remember that nonfiction writing is characterized by reality, believability, and fair treatment of the subject matter. It can be opinionated and often is, even in the best of books. But having a perspective and viewpoint is not incongruent with nonfiction. After all, we have all seen or experienced a car accident in which ten bystanders each gave a different account. The difference in their stories does not, by definition, make nine of them fiction writers; it accounts for their different, and valid, points of view. ]]>