How to Organize Your Non-Fiction Draft
Helpful Tips for Taming the Non-Fiction Beast!
One of the hardest moments with a new project is sorting how to organize it. After outlining and pitching it, how does the actual writing take place? Today I will share with you how I organize a multi-chapter project. My goal is to give you ideas on how you might organize your own.
Folders in the cloud - never on your physical computer - are your friend. I have an overall Writing folder. Within that, I have three main book-related folders: Active, Completed, and For Proposal. Within Active, I have Priority and Other. Within Priority, I have, for example, Meddle with My Cause, my evaluation of Anne Boleyn’s case, which is set for release later this year. This is where the real folder madness begins.
For each nonfiction book, I have six main folders. There is Research, within which I have articles, scans, notes, etc, Main MS, with MS being the abbreviation for manuscript, Index, Bibliography, Appendices, and Images. It isn’t too complicated yet.
The Main MS folder is the most important, and has the most voluminous subfolders. I make a folder for each part of a book, starting with 1.Front Matter, 2.Part I, 3. Part II, etc. Even if my finished work is not broken down into parts, I still try to divide it up that way to make it psychologically easier for myself. I put the numbers at the beginning of each folder to keep the folders in order.
Within 1.Front Matter, I put individual Word files for Dedication, Acknowledgments, Table of Contents, Introduction, and anything else that would go in the beginning, This is usually where I save my Prologue, too. I prefere having everything in separate Word documents because trying to draft several 5,000 to 7,000-word documents is way less intimidating to me than sitting down to draft a 100,000-word document.
Within the parts, I try to have five or six folders, one for each chapter. I use the same strategy as above, with a separate Word document for each chapter. This allows me to bounce around a little as the book takes shape, too. I do not typically write a book from beginning to end.
Once I have everything more or less done, I put it all in one Word document. That is my Master MS file. I read it over and edit the chapters together, making sure that the transitions are smooth. Once that is done, I say a prayer and send it over to the publisher.
I hope this post has given you insight into how you organize your approach to writing a non-fiction book. For my next post, I will explain a little about what is expected, what is preferred, what is a good idea, and what is not expected of non-fiction publishing. In the meantime, below are links to my books on Blackwell’s, which ships free to the US and UK:
If Any Person Will Meddle of My Cause: The Case of Anne Boleyn
Katharine of Aragon, Spanish Princess: ‘I am not as Simple as I May Seem’
Stuart Spouses: A Compendium of Consorts from James I of Scotland to Queen Anne of Great Britain
Children of the House of Cleves: Anna and Her Siblings
Diary of a Plague Doctor’s Wife: A Novella Set in 1720s Marseille
This brilliant mind !! 🤯👏
I approach mine in much the same way with separate files for each chapter and then separate files for all the front matter, bibliography, index, images, credits, etc. And separate folders for all the research and documents related to each book, then I have a marketing folder for each book too with social media stuff and a list of all the podcasts and blog stops I’ve done as well.