Nonfiction Does One Thing Fiction Cannot
Fiction moves you. Nonfiction changes what you can do tomorrow. That second thing is why I started writing and never stopped.Share on X
I love fiction and I write plenty of it. But nonfiction is where I started, and it’s still where I feel most useful. The reason is simple. Good nonfiction does something a novel cannot. It gives the reader information they can use in their actual life.
I came to it through the back door.
For years at various companies I wrote the technical manuals and user guides, the books nobody else wanted to write. That work taught me the core skill of nonfiction. That’s taking something complicated and making it clear enough that a stranger can pick it up and do it. That’s the job. Not impressing the reader. Helping them.
National Nonfiction Day lands on the first Thursday in November. It exists to remind people that the books that teach, explain, and equip us are worth celebrating too.
Watch: Teaching Nonfiction Tips with Melissa Stewart, Colby Sharp
The Books I’m Proudest Of Barely Sold
Two of my favorite books I ever wrote sold under a hundred copies combined. I’d write them again tomorrow. Some books are worth it for reasons sales never measure.Share on X
Here’s something most writing advice won’t tell you. Some of the nonfiction I’m proudest of barely sold at all.
One is Real World Survival, a family survival guide that opens with the disasters I have personally lived through. A mountain fire. A desert flash flood.
The Northridge earthquake. I didn’t write it from research alone. I wrote it from the times I needed to survive something and did. That book was a real pleasure to write, and it’s sold almost nothing.
The other is Family Cybersecurity, a plain-language guide to protecting your digital life.
Between the two of them, they’ve probably sold under a hundred copies. And I’d write both again tomorrow without hesitating, because they were passion books. They were useful, they were fun to make, and the work itself was the reward. Sales are one way to measure a book. They’re not the only way, and for some books they’re not the important one.
The Title Lesson I Learned the Hard Way
The cybersecurity book taught me something about nonfiction the embarrassing way.
I originally called it Safe Computing Is Like Safe Sex. I thought that was a brilliant title. It was clever, it was memorable, it made the point that protecting your devices takes the same everyday discipline as protecting your body. I was proud of it.
It turned people off. The word sex in the title, however cleverly I meant it, made plenty of readers skip past the book entirely. So I renamed it Family Cybersecurity. Clear, plain, and exactly what it says on the cover. The lesson stuck. In nonfiction, clever loses to clear almost every time. Your title is a promise about what the reader will get. It’s no place to show off. Say what the book does, and let the work be the clever part.
What Makes Nonfiction Good
Good nonfiction is about how much the reader can use.
The test is whether someone finishes a chapter able to do something they couldn’t do before. Understand a threat. Prepare for a disaster. Fix a problem. If a reader closes your book and their life is unchanged, the book didn’t do its job, no matter how thorough or impressive it was.
That means plain language over jargon, real examples over abstract theory, and respect for the reader’s time. It means earning the right to teach something, either by living it or by doing the work to understand it. The survival book works because I lived those disasters.
The cybersecurity book works because the advice is real and you can act on it tonight. Authority plus usefulness is the formula, and everything else is decoration.
How do you mark National Nonfiction Day?
Read something that teaches you. Pick up a book on a subject you’ve always wanted to understand and let it change what you know. That’s the simplest tribute to the genre, and you come out ahead.
If you’ve ever thought about writing nonfiction, this is your nudge.
You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert. You need to know something useful and be willing to explain it clearly to someone who doesn’t. You’ve lived through things, learned things, solved things. That’s raw material for a book that could help someone.
And if you have the knowledge but the writing itself is the wall, that’s a normal problem with a normal solution. A ghostwriter can pull the expertise out of you and shape it into a book that teaches.
But you don’t need anyone’s permission to start being useful on paper. Pick the thing you know, and write it down so someone else can use it. That’s nonfiction at its best, and it’s worth doing whether it sells a hundred thousand copies or fewer than a hundred.