Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
Turn what you already know into a finished book
A how-to book has a production line. Here it is, stage by stage, in the order the work actually happens.
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01 Before the pipeline
Start at 85 percent, not at zero
Payne borrows a rule from the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman: when you take on a goal, you should already know about 85 percent of what it needs. The remaining 15 percent is what you research along the way.
Four things belong in that 85 percent: your topic, what the finished book should look like, the phases it has to pass through, and what it will take to get it in front of readers. If you are honest and you sit lower than 85, the book still gets written, it just takes longer, and the risk of quitting during the learning goes up.
The same rule applies to your readers. Tell them in the book what level they need to be at, because a reader who starts far below your assumed baseline will not reach your promised result in your promised time.
The writer’s state of mind is a state of alert passivity, a state of mind that allows us to trust our instincts and frees us to take risks.Becca Byline, 2008
Describe those four things out loud in a couple of sentences each. Anything you stumble on is part of your 15 percent, and it goes straight onto the research list.
02 Stage one · ideation
Ideation ends with a POV, not a pile of ideas
Payne runs ideation as five steps borrowed from design thinking: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. The point of the first two is to squeeze everything you have gathered into a single sentence.
That sentence is your POV, your point of view. It follows a fixed shape: the reader needs this solution because of these reasons. It has to be narrow, specific, actionable, and different from what is already on the shelf, including your own earlier books.
Once the POV exists, brainstorming has a target. You ask How Will They questions, broad ones, narrow ones, need-related ones, until you have ten to fifteen. Those questions become your chapters. Everything after this stage is checked against the POV.
Write your POV in one sentence using the book’s shape: the reader needs this solution because of these reasons. Then brainstorm fifteen titles and fifteen subtitles, and keep the pair that fits that sentence best.
03 Stage two · research
Research closes one gap, then you stop
Research is where the 15 percent gets filled, and nothing more. Payne is blunt about the risk: over-research is the most respectable form of procrastination there is.
She names five places to look, which are internet sources, in-person observation, library books, interviews and surveys, and scientific studies. Then every source you collect has to survive the CRAAP test, a librarian’s checklist for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy and purpose. Anything that fails gets scrapped rather than squeezed in.
This is also where chapter titles get finalised, using keyword research on Amazon and Google Trends, because on both Amazon and Google Books the table of contents is often the only part a buyer sees.
Once you start writing, do not stop to look things up. Mark every unverified claim with TBR, meaning to be researched, and keep going. Come back to those marks only when the draft is finished.
04 Stage three · the draft
Your first draft is supposed to be bad
Payne calls it the first shitty draft, a phrase she picked up from Ramit Sethi. You write it deliberately badly, because you cannot edit a blank page and premature editing is what causes most writer’s block in the first place.
She leans on a 2022 study by Ahmed and Guss, who surveyed 146 fiction and nonfiction writers and sorted the causes of writer’s block into four kinds: physiological, motivational, cognitive and behavioural. Professionals and semiprofessionals reported it at much the same rate, so seniority is no protection.
What matters is that the four kinds have different cures. Matching the wrong cure to your kind of block is why willpower alone so often fails.
It might feel like you’re turning on a faucet, but the water has run out; it might feel like you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, jostling language, waiting for the words to arrive.Sean Glatch, 2020
Set a floor of ten minutes of writing a day, whatever else is happening. Then hold the rule the book insists on: you fix the whole book once it is written, not after one sentence, one paragraph, or one chapter.
05 Stage four · the fluff
Fluff has to earn its page
Fluff is Payne’s word for the illustrations, photographs and stories you add once the draft exists. She does not like the word, and she does not let any of it in for free.
Each kind carries a different bill. Illustrations help understanding and recall, which matters because most people learn visually, and they break up long stretches of text. Photographs push up printing costs and carry copyright risk, so they need a licence and a citation. Stories are the cheapest and often the strongest, provided they have the usual parts: a hero, a guide, a villain, a conflict and a resolution.
One question decides all three. Is this relevant to my readers and their experiences? A book that fails that question does not read as generous, it reads as padded, and readers say so in reviews.
Even if the nonfiction piece is interwoven with facts, figures, and statistics, the empathetic lens provided with storytelling makes factual information tangible.Nina Amir, 2020
List the fewer than ten points you want a reader to still remember a year from now. Those are the only places an illustration belongs. Everywhere else, the text carries it.
06 Stage five · editing
Editing is eight jobs, not one
Following the author coach Dave Chesson, Payne separates editing into eight kinds. They are not stages of politeness, they are different zoom levels, and hiring the wrong one wastes your money.
Developmental and structural editing work on the whole book and how chapters flow. Line editing works on style and tone. Copy editing works on grammar, spelling and punctuation. Substantive editing does all three at once and costs accordingly. Fact-checking chases claims rather than sentences, and proofreading is the last sweep before it goes out.
The eighth is the useful one when you cannot tell what you need. An editorial assessment is someone reading your book and telling you which kind of editor to pay for.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing left to take away.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quoted in the book
Before you edit anything, take a three-day break, longer if you can. Then read the whole book once without changing a word, noting the structural problems as you go. Editing starts on the second pass.
07 Stage six · publish and market
The schedule is real, but marketing starts first
Payne closes with the promise from her subtitle: thirty days from idea to published author. She also states the conditions plainly, and they are strict.
You already know the topic, you are self-publishing so nobody has to approve you, you are writing between 25,000 and 40,000 words, you have little else on, and you are not the sort of person who will over-edit. Miss those conditions and the plan still works, it just takes three months or a year instead.
The one thing that does not sit inside the thirty days is marketing. Building an audience after publication is the rookie mistake. Guest on a podcast, join the group where your readers already are, be useful there, and have people waiting on the day the book appears.
And do not stop at one book. Most readers buy from authors they already like.
Pick one place your readers already gather, a podcast, a forum, a group, and start showing up there this week. Mention that a book is coming. That is your launch list forming.
08 The whole book
Six stages, two return arrows, one finished book
The pipeline only looks linear. Every stage has a way back to the one before it, and knowing where those doors are is what stops a stalled book from becoming an abandoned one.
Outline, then research
Start at 85 percent. Squeeze the reader, their need and your insight into one POV sentence, turn it into ten to fifteen questions, then research only the gap and scrap whatever fails the CRAAP test.
Draft badly, add carefully
The first draft is meant to be bad, because you cannot fix a blank page. Match the cure to your kind of block. Then add illustrations, images and stories only where they do real work.
Edit at the right zoom, then ship
Pick the editing your book actually needs, from whole-book structure down to single words. Publish on a schedule, and have an audience waiting before you upload.
Payne’s test for the finished thing is simple and hard to argue with: if your book does not leave the reader able to do the thing, it has not done its job.
Adapted from How to Write How-to Books: 30 Days to Becoming a Published Author
Selynna Payne · © 2022 DVFZ Training Consultancy Services · 16 cited sources in the source edition