A couple weeks ago I visited a Barnes & Noble that was much larger (and farther away) than my local one. I visited the Writing/Reference section and was pleased to find a few books by The Self-Publishing Manual, 15th edition. It looked much nicer than the 8th edition sitting on my bookshelf. It was thicker too and contained much more Web-useful information (to be expected). I didn’t see anything so compelling that I needed to buy it. After all, most of my questions have been answered by this point and I’ve discovered that what questions I still need answered can’t be found in a book. But, a good resource all the same. (I also noticed that the meat of most of his chapters hadn’t changed much.)
Then I opened Writing Nonfiction. It wasn’t a thick book. I’d considered buying it several times over the past couple years but I never did. Mr. Poynter has made a very good living by writing nonfiction and that alone was enough to make me want to buy this particular book.
This was the first time I got to see the book in-hand, noticing that it was large-print in a large-sized format. As I flipped through the chapters, the words started looking very familiar. When I compared them to Chapter 2 of The Self-Publishing Manual, they looked totally familiar (Chapter 2 is “Writing Your Bookâ€). Writing Nonfiction also has a few chapters dealing with the traditional and self- publishing industries, sort of a quick summary of what The Self-Publishing Manual covers.