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 is still where I feel most useful. The reason is simple. Good nonfiction does something a novel cannot. It hands 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, which is taking something complicated and making it clear enough that a stranger can pick it up and do it. That is the whole 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, not just the ones that entertain.
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 is something most writing advice will not tell you. Some of the nonfiction I am 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 did not write it from research alone. I wrote it from the times I needed to survive something and did. That book was a genuine pleasure to write, and it has sold almost nothing.
The other is Family Cybersecurity, a plain-language guide to protecting your digital life. Between the two of them, they have probably sold under a hundred copies. And I would 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 are not the only way, and for some books they are 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 quietly 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, not a place to show off. Say what the book does, and let the work be the clever part.
What Makes Nonfiction Actually Good
Good nonfiction is not about how much you know. It is about how much the reader can use.
The test is whether someone finishes a chapter able to do something they could not 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 did not 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 truly 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 whole formula, and everything else is decoration.
How to Mark National Nonfiction Day
Read something that teaches you. Pick up a book on a subject you have always wanted to understand and let it change what you know. That is the simplest tribute to the genre, and you come out ahead.
If you have ever thought about writing nonfiction, this is your nudge. You do not need to be the world’s leading expert. You need to know something useful and be willing to explain it clearly to someone who does not. You have lived through things, learned things, solved things. That is raw material for a book that could genuinely help someone.
And if you have the knowledge but the writing itself is the wall, that is 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 do not 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 is nonfiction at its best, and it is worth doing whether it sells a hundred thousand copies or fewer than a hundred.