How I Wrote a Book on Medium
A semi-methodical approach to creating a work of nonfiction, article by article, chapter by chapter
Wow, oh wow. Am I ever excited to finally hold the paperback version of this book, written by some guy who used to work in a sawmill and eventually got a college degree then spent 30 years reporting on science and health before finding the inspiration to pen 300 pages he hopes will inspire others to find better physical, mental and emotional health and greater happiness.
I could not have done it without Medium.
Since Jan. 1, 2019 I’ve been writing about health and wellness on this ad-free platform, where I retain copyright to my articles and am free to reuse them as I wish. Then suddenly one day I realized I had a book on my hands. Well, not literally on my hands yet, but right there in front of me, a bunch of “chapters” already written, amid the more than 300 news and feature stories I’d published. In truth, the epiphany was not a total accident. Instead, it was the half-ass planned result of nearly four years pursuing a wide range of subjects that interested me and generated interest among readers.
The lesson learned: If you are a talented blogger, a solid journalist, or any sort of topical expert able to pen informative, engaging articles, then you can develop a nonfiction book.
All you need is a heavy dose of discipline, and, of course, a book idea.
Not sure exactly what the book idea is yet? That’s OK. By writing about a topic regularly, in bits and pieces published as articles, the book idea will come to you, perhaps as an epiphany like the one I experienced.
Your path to publishing a non-fiction book will be a unique experience, and nobody can offer a formula for getting there. But this is a story about how my book happened, followed by some concrete suggestions for latching onto a topic, beating it to death on Medium, then wringing a book out of it, article by article, chapter by chapter.
Part 1: The epiphany
My epiphany came unexpectedly, on the one hand, but it was also part of the plan.
When I started writing on Medium nearly four years ago, after three decades in journalism, I was on a quest to learn more about the body and mind and help others understand what good health can look like and what anyone can do to increase the chances of living long and being well along the way.
I didn’t set out primarily to make money on Medium. I just wanted to write. If the effort generated some income, great. Ultimately, I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t start out knowing what it would be about.
For a few months I expected the writing might lead to a book about happiness — what it is and how to get some. I’d focused intensely on the topic from the outset. But a funny thing happened: The more I wrote about happiness, the more I realized that the pursuit of it is a fool’s errand. Happiness, I came to understand, results (or doesn’t) from all the healthy and unhealthy behaviors and activities we pursue, whether purposefully or absentmindedly. I learned a lot, but no book idea had taken shape. So I just kept writing.
Meanwhile, I was exploring and explaining many important aspects of physical, mental and emotional wellness, specifically how physical activity, diet, alcohol, sleep, and a range of other key factors affect stress, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, productivity, relationships, life satisfaction and, in a word, happiness. Any one of these topics seemed good fodder for a book, narrower and more manageable than trying to tackle something so broad and ill-defined as happiness.
All the while I was building an audience, having a blast, and even making a little money. But as anyone who’s genuinely curious will eventually figure out, the more I learned about each of these topics, the less it seemed I knew. So I just kept writing.
Every now and then I’d get a good idea for a book. I’d suss it out in my head, maybe jot down a few notes or make a lit of possible chapters, perhaps even express the idea with all confidence and certainty to my wife, only to have it crash into some mental roadblock. Either I’d realize I didn’t yet have enough knowledge on the topic yet, or I’d struggle to find the nut of the book, the key point around which every chapter would revolve. Something one might call the title. So I just kept writing.
One idea, a book on how to age well, kept popping up as I wrote multiple articles themed around staying physically and mentally fit as we get older. I wrote an extensive outline for it, but the topic seemed so broad it never crystallized into a clear idea for a unique book that I could imagine people wanting to read. So I just kept writing.
Then late one morning — Aug. 8, 2022 — the epiphany: I didn’t have to write a 300-page opus, and I didn’t have to put myself through the lengthy, arduous and uncertain process of finding an agent and a publisher. I could self-publish a short ebook on how to improve on one important aspect of overall wellness. I had several themes to choose from, subjects on which I’d written several articles each. It could be what Amazon calls a Short Read, generally something under 25,000 words but as few as 1,500. My mind was buzzing with anticipation, my fingers poised to crank this thing out within a week or two.
The best-laid book plans, I quickly learned, get better with some serious revising.
I wrote down four “how to boost your…” topics whose science I’d become deeply familiar with: sleep, mood, diet, body. Because I’d written so much about each, the “writing” could mostly involve gathering what I’d already written. Articles would become chapters, I figured. I’d glue them together, sand off the edges and add some fresh paint to create a coherent, readable flow. This’ll be easy!
I had four ideas. A series. But which one to tackle first? I pawed through my Medium stats dashboard and made a list of all the articles I’d written on each topic. It quickly became clear that improving mood, diet, and the body overall were all paths to improving sleep and were themselves improved by better sleep. There were tremendous overlaps in my existing body of work. Each article I’d written about any of these four topics invariably touched on one or more of the other topics. At the center of it all: better sleep, both as a cause and effect.
I had my book topic, at least in a rough sense: How to sleep better, and how better sleep can improve everything in your life. A virtuous, irresistible cycle that could be achieved with surprisingly modest intention and effort, once you understood the science. I’d also become well aware that sleep advice is riddled with myths and misconceptions, and I was delighted at the prospect of dispelling them once and for all.
Part 2: The hard part
Whenever someone asks how long a story should be, my favorite answer (print-publication inch constraints notwithstanding) is this: as long as it needs to be.
Any story can be told in 140 characters, or a 300-word brief, or a 2,000-word feature, or a lengthy book. How long any given story should be depends on the type of publication, audience needs and desires, and the depth of research and storytelling a writer aims to undertake or is assigned.
I was aiming for a short book. I figured it’d be 12,000 to 20,000 words.
Then — we’re still on Aug. 8, now late afternoon — I created the first draft of a simple outline, as I always do before writing any story longer than a tweet. A problem quickly developed. The outline, which was a hodge-podge of poorly organized chapter ideas in an utterly incomplete table of contents, grew.
The sun sank low in the West. The outline grew and grew.
This turned out to be a wonderful problem, one that outlines are adept at solving. The core of the outline started with a list of about 15 sleep articles I’d published, plus a long list of other articles that weren’t primarily about sleep but touched on it. Several of the articles begged questions, begetting additional chapter ideas. Other vital aspects of sleep that I’d never written about popped into my head. Soon I had more than 30 chapter ideas in the outline, and I was pretty sure there’d be more as I continued fleshing the concept out and asking friends and family for input. At that point I broke the list of chapters into three sections — three “parts” in a table of contents — to provide some much-needed structure and suggest a flow.
As darkness set in, it was clear this would not be a short book. I had the makings of a real book on my hands. Perhaps still relatively slim — maybe 40,000 or 50,000 words and a couple-hundred pages, much of which would actually have to be researched and written from scratch, or significantly rewritten. But the idea had crystallized. It was all right there in front of me, and I was eager to pursue it, no reservations about whether I could do it. As I wrote subsequently, in the actual book about the importance of sleep and the stupid things we often do to sabotage it:
The evening when I’d pinned down the basic idea and approach to this book, I was so excited I celebrated with my wife. I had a few too many drinks, stayed up way past my normal bedtime, slept poorly, and woke before dawn after just four hours of sleep. Then I wrote for 13 straight, really productive hours sitting on my ass. The irony isn’t lost on me.
The plan was still to whip this thing into shape quickly, perhaps over the course of three or four weeks. Ha, ha, ha.
In two weeks, I’d created the first drafts of an introduction and a few chapters written from scratch, and pulled in previously written articles and edited them as needed to make sense in the flow of a book. I showed the chapter outline and the early, rough bits of writing to a few friends, family members and journalism colleagues, inviting the harshest criticisms they could muster.
And boy, did they.
Suggestions ranged from “too many chapters” to “not enough chapters” to “the chapters aren’t organized in a way that makes sense to me” to “you totally forgot X or Y or Z (or all of the above).” The suggestions were incredibly helpful. The book would never have been worthy of publication without all the constructive criticism I received at that juncture. Our oldest son, who has sleep apnea, convinced me I needed a chapter about it (duh!). Someone else pointed out that “superpower,” a word I’d used in the introduction, was a pretty powerful concept, and thanks to that individual, it ended up in the book’s title and reverberated throughout.
The most helpful feedback came from my wife, who is also a journalist and particularly skilled at fleshing out a story idea by determining who it’s for (an audience that included her, by the way, since she’s a life-long night owl who, unlike me, often struggled to sleep well). The book was starting to meander, she said. It was more a collection of writings more than a book unto itself. It wasn’t telling a story, and it wasn’t clear who the audience was. The book was not revolving around a clear purpose.
She was right. I was nearly devastated.
But I did what any wise writer reluctantly does. I listened to the editor. I thought deep about who this book was for. It was not primarily for people interested in sleep, nor people who wanted to sleep better. Those motivations were too vague. Instead, I wanted to reach people who don’t realize how vastly important good sleep is, and how it can improve every aspect of their lives, and who would be motivated to learn how. I wrote the beginning of the book’s introduction as a pitch to that audience:
Like breathing and eating, sleep is necessary for survival. It’s also the most underrated and ignored activity that affects physical well-being, energy level, mood, memory and thinking skills, your immune system, and how long you’ll live.
Better sleep will put you in charge of your emotions, your actions and reactions, your productivity, your entire day.
Whether you’re a college student, an entrepreneur, an athlete, an artist, a parent, a teacher, a 9–5 worker or a 5–9 workaholic, a Millennial or a Boomer, improving your sleep on any single night will make you better at what you have to do and what you love to do. Sleeping better as a routine, over days and weeks, will transform your existence.
Better sleep can be your superpower. It can make you…dare we say…happier.
I didn’t exactly rip up the table of contents at that point, but I recrafted it significantly, so that every aspect aimed to support the premise.
In doing this, the material from the original articles I’d written for Medium were in many cases hacked apart and sprinkled into the chapters where they belonged, accompanied by all the new material researched specifically for the book, and yet more research that would need to be done.
Slowing down and thoughtfully reorganizing in this manner spawned yet more chapters and insights, along with better structure and flow. Turned out I had 20 science-backed, really helpful, highly actionable suggestions for how to improve sleep, and each deserved its own short chapter. The fresh thinking about my target audience helped me realize that readers needed a strategy for selecting just a handful of new behaviors and a way to measure their effect. So I created the 3x3 Sleep Challenge: Pick three tactics best suited to battling your sleep kryptonite, employ them for three days and nights, and measure the before-and-after results with a Sleep Score (rating your sleep success based on five factors).
None of these vital components, nor the overall structure, focus and flow, would have been achieved without seeking input and criticism early on, without challenging but ultimately rewarding iteration.
Part 3: Lessons learned
By September 22 the “final” draft of the entire book was done and sent off to a proofreader. My “short” ebook had burgeoned beyond 70,000 words by the time it was published in Kindle format on Nov. 1 with five parts and 61 concise chapters, and shortly thereafter as a 300-page paperback with more than 300 footnotes. I still think my original idea for a very short ebook was a good one, and I’m considering that approach for a future book of tidier scope.
A short ebook might be the perfect approach for you. A story, remember, can be any length.
Whatever its length, getting a manuscript edited and preparing it for publication is a whole ’nother nuts-and-bolts story beyond the scope of this one. If you have the motivation to get this far, you’ll have the necessary skills and gumption to find helpful online resources to guide you through the publication process. Maybe I’ll write about it someday.
But yeah, you have to get this far. So here’s what I can suggest to you about writing a book (mostly) on Medium:
Explore what interests you. If you think you have a non-fiction book in you but you’re not yet sure exactly what it is, or even if you have a pretty good idea, start researching and writing about the things you’re interested in. That seems obvious, but it’s different than writing what you think will make you money, or what you think someone expects of you, or simply trying to actually write book chapters. Find your passion and embrace it. Let your mind wander. Explore related concepts. See where things go.
Cover every conceivable angle. Ask and answer all the questions that any inquisitive person might consider regarding your core topic or topics, and even those they would not. Write about the news related to these subjects, the trends, the history, the related phenomena that influence it or that it influences.
Write what you know, and what you don’t. If you want to write a nonfiction book, you need a heavy dose of humility. Even if you have deep knowledge of a subject, knowledge changes fast these days, and you’ll want to immerse yourself in the latest developments. Also, what you know and what readers may wish to know are not always aligned. Your job is not just to spout what you know, but to figure out what people are interested in, what will inform, enlighten and even entertain them, and deliver it.
Become a topical expert. You can be humble and also accumulate more knowledge in a subject area than most people. And you must. You’ve got to understand your topic inside and out even as you admit there’s always more to learn.
Don’t try to tell the whole story at once. Articles that do well on Medium, or any mainstream publication for that matter, are highly focused. The headline makes a promise, and the article fulfills it. It does not meander off on tangents. There’s no magic word count, but I’ve found that 500 to 1,500 is a good range for most articles aimed at a broad, lay readership, and staying in that range is one way to help an article remain focused (coincidentally, it’s a good range for chapter length, too). When you feel a tangent coming — as I do during the writing of every piece — give it a headline, put it in your idea file, and make it a separate article later on.
Publish often and routinely. Make a habit of writing and publishing weekly at least — more often if your schedule permits. I committed myself to publishing at least one article per week, and because I love what I do and the ideas keep presenting themselves, it’s often two or three. If I want to take a week off, I usually prepare an article in advance. Rhythm and routine are vital to staying on track.
Don’t let great get in the way of good enough. A great book can emerge from good writing. But every article you publish doesn’t have to be a blockbuster. You are exploring a topic, not mastering it all in one day. Some of your articles might become awesome book chapters; others will never deserve revisiting, some might one day embarrass you. You’ve got to be OK with a little mediocrity now and then, even failure. Keep exploring.
Wait for your epiphany. If you do all of the above, the book idea will come to you. Be patient, but always have your mind open to the big idea, and never stop kicking around possibilities, themes, and titles. At worst, the exercise will generate articles, which might one day become chapters.
Determine the primary target audience. When a book idea strikes, the first question to ask yourself is, “Who will want to read it?” If you say “everybody,” then you don’t understand the term “target audience.” You cannot speak to everyone, nor even most people. Draw up a list of characteristics of your ideal customer for the book. Who is this person? What do they do in life? What matters to them? Where do they get their information? Do they even read books? Depending on your subject matter, take this exercise as deep as you can, possibly even considering gender, socioeconomic status or other demographic factors of your most likely readers. If you can get excited on behalf of your target audience, you’ve got something worth pursuing.
Create an outline. Before you do any actual book writing, an outline is imperative. With non-fiction, an outline can take the form of your table of contents. Make one, even if you’re not sure what exactly to call the chapters yet, nor precisely what they’ll cover, nor how many chapters you’ll ultimately need. You might tweak and add to the chapters and other aspects of your plan as you go, but if you have not already done enough research and ideating to create a rough table of contents, you’re not ready to write.
Write every day. With a good outline, writing your book can now involve the far-less daunting task of writing a series of chapters, which you can think of as articles — and you know how to write articles! Put some energy into your book every day, even if it’s just an hour. If you’re not feeling it on one chapter, hop to another. Or write an article for Medium, covering an aspect or angle of the chapter, maybe exploring an obvious or even an obscure question, and let the chapter itself percolate. On days when you can’t muster writing energy, read, revise and polish chapters you’ve written.
Seek lots of criticism. At various stages of the project, enlist family, friends and colleagues to offer edits and constructive criticism. Lean on people who are most apt to be critical, not people who’ll be nice. You need constructive criticism and negative feedback. You need to know what’s confusing, boring, missing or otherwise not working. It’s not practical to expect most people to read your whole draft, so seek input on specific chapters, or sections, or the outline. Spread the burden.
Slow down at the end. Ideally, when you’ve made all the edits and corrections and run spell check a final time and are certain the book is done, stop. Seek out one individual for a final proofread, someone who has not seen the work in progress. While they’re proofing your book, walk away. Let a week or two go by without looking at it. Then after you make the final proof corrections, give your book one more last and final read, for typos only. You will find plenty of them, I promise. And then, only then, you’ll have written a book that’s ready for publication.
You can do this
Writing a non-fiction book is a lot like writing an article, I learned, just on a grander scale. As with any form of writing, there’s no straight path from idea to publication. It’s more like circling around a target, adding and subtracting and rethinking as you spiral inward until bingo, the book is done. Well, not done done, but ready to be edited and perhaps rewritten.
Doing this from scratch would’ve been a colossal challenge for me. I prefer smallish, tidy projects I can finish in short periods of time. By writing articles — lots of articles — and eventually turning them into chapters or using them as nuggets to spawn chapters, a book became a manageable task, in fact it became an inevitable project that I could not ignore.
If you have confidence in your writing, if you can latch on passionately to a topic that begs multiple articles, if you get positive feedback from readers suggesting you’re on to something, and if you’re not afraid of a little work, then you can write a nonfiction book. Let me know when it’s published.
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I’m the author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: A Guide to Greater Health, Happiness & Productivity and 5 Days to Landfall, a science-based thriller. You can sign up for emails when I publish on Medium, or join Medium to directly support me and gain full access to all Medium stories. Find me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin. — Rob
