Writing Successful Self-help and How-to Books (Wiley books for writers) Book

Jean Marie Stine has created perhaps the ultimate how-to book: Writing Successful Self-Help and How-To Books. Among the many editorial positions Stine has held in her 15 years as an editor (and sometimes ghostwriter) of self-help and how-to books is editor in chief at the esteemed self-help publisher Jeremy P. Tarcher. She edited more than 50 self-help titles, including Women Who Love Too Much and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If an author's qualifications, as Stine says in her book, are of utmost importance for a book's credibility, she is supremely qualified to write such a book.

Writing Successful Self-Help and How-To Books is less about writing than about every other element that goes into making a successful self-help/how-to book. Since "publishers," as Stine says here, "buy 90 percent of their books based on proposals," she addresses in detail every element of the book proposal, from overview ("mak[e] your book sound like a must-have") and analysis of the competition to sample chapter and annotated table of contents. Her insider information on everything from title creation--"the right title alone," she confides, "can make your book a success"--to the importance of including interactive elements such as checklists, quizzes, and exercises is invaluable. Still, for the beginning writer--and Stine seems to assume that the reader of this book is an expert in a field other than writing--there is surprising little, given the book's title, about the writing process itself. --Jane Steinberg