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11 practical or unusual books for professional – and aspiring – writers

Writers really like to talk about what they do. Because of this, there’s a whole sub-genre of books about writing out there. The vast majority of them are self-help tomes dedicated to helping you find your artistic voice. And there’s a wide range of them: At one end of the self-help spectrum, there are New Agey books that promise to help you find healing in language. At the other, there are humorous, self-deprecating books that provide insights into the writer’s psyche and attempt to demystify writing craft. Anne Lamott’s classic "Bird by Bird" is one of the better of these.

And then there are practical writing manuals: These contain rules, industry standards, organizational techniques, survival tools, and other things novice writers don’t always know. Maybe you’re an English major trying to break into journalism, or an academic interested in writing for a broader audience. Maybe you’ve always wanted to write a novel and need some practical guidance on structure and story-telling. Maybe you’re a seasoned professional journalist looking to freelance or diversify your beat.

Here are some of the best of the practical books out there today – plus a few less practical ones for writers and readers that provide a creative, intellectual, or novel approach.

1. "The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It… Successfully!," by Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry

  • By Kristin Rawls

I’m almost always reluctant to give anything calling itself an “essential guide” the time of day (See also: Anything calling itself a “Bible.”) But if you’ve never published a book, chances are you know almost nothing about how to proceed. Sure, you may be one of those romantic scribes who writes because you feel possessed to do so. New Agey books for writers often insist that real writers write because they “must”—that is, not because they must earn a living, but because a seemingly external force known as the “artistic temperament” or “soul of a writer” compels them to do it. I’ve always harbored doubts about the alleged ubiquity of the so-called writer’s soul and longed for practical advice about things like: What to include in a nonfiction book proposal or how to find an agent or how to pitch your novel.

Enter The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published by industry veterans Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. It’s a thorough update of their earlier guide, "How to Put Your Passion into Print," and it’s got all those practical nuts and bolts you’ll need to make your book successful, whether you want to self-publish or work with a large publishing house or an academic press. Trust me on this one.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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