As I  mentioned recently , not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series. In the first part of this series I looked at deciding whether your idea was really a book - to do this I recommended listing around 10 headings that would set out your basic structure. Now we're going to flesh those out. What we'll get is the biggest part of a book proposal - the document you send to a publisher to sell your idea. It's also extremely valuable once you starting writing the book. What you will do next is, for each heading, fill in some detail. I'm going to show you two ways to do this - but before I do, I ought to warn you that putting together the outline is the hardest part of writing a book. It can be agony. If you do it pro...

Some subscribe to the view that creativity is only about the arts - but this is to misunderstand the nature of creativity. There is a huge amount of creativity in the sciences, yet we rarely seen any guidance on improving it. (Creativity is also important to business, but that has a solid literature.) How to be Creative does what it says on the cover - unlike some books on creativity, it’s a practical guide, easy to read and apply. The authors start with a brief introduction to the nature of creativity and the reality of engaging creativity on demand. They then look at the basic structure of a creativity session, particularly one that's team oriented (the quick version is 'don't do anything they do on The Apprentice when attempting brainstorming’). We then get a good chapter expanding on possible creativity techniques.  So far, the topics covered have been general purpose problem solving and idea generation techniques, but the most novel content is the next chapter which is...

As I mentioned recently , not everyone is a writer - but plenty of people would like to write a book. I've had over 50 books commercially published, so thought it might be useful to do a short series on the essentials of writing a non-fiction book and getting it published. See the end of this post for a summary of the series. The good thing about writing non-fiction is that, if successful, you sell the book to a publisher before you write it. By contrast, fiction has to be written first, and in most cases has to be presented to publishers via an agent. But even if you intend to self-publish (more on this later), it's still crucial to establish whether or not you have an idea for a book before putting too much effort into it. The chances are, the topic is something you are enthusiastic about - and that's great. When an author loves their topic, it can come through very effectively to the reader. However, this doesn't mean that there is a readership out there that will be...

Writers are more prone than most to search for themselves on Google , if only to keep an eye out for reviews. For many years I've had a friendly rivalry with Brian Clegg art supplies as to who comes out on top in those searches - but now, I'm sad to learn that the company has gone into receivership .  The firm dates back to 1973, and for years has been a leading supplier of art materials to British primary schools and beyond. What's more, it was established in the town where I lived for my first 22 years, Rochdale in Lancashire - a town that has suffered more than most in a post-industrial world, and will be hit hard by the redundancies. Inevitably we sometimes get confused with each other. I occasionally get emails about paint, and an old work colleague just the other day emailed to say he was impressed to see my paint-based sideline. I might have sometimes moaned in the past when they beat me to that top spot (when I looked just now they were still there)... but it's...