I’ve worked with traditional publishing for more than twenty years, and it’s been a real experience. I enjoy writing for publishers, but when it comes time for the royalty checks to come rolling in, they just don’t.

What cracks me up is that the editors and production people make annual salaries, and they have to be paid. But writers? They expect to get them for a song and dance because there are so many of us out there willing to do it for peanuts, just to have their names on a cover. I get that. I remember when I felt that way, but there’s a better way to do it!

Self-publish. When you do it online, it’s not terribly complicated, though you will need some tech skills, mainly with Word, creating .pdfs and if you want a good cover, graphics. You can, of course, hire people to do these things for you, but I opted to do it all. So, you may see this book in your local Amazon.com!

The Tragic Secret of Cyrus Crowe is a story about two fourteen-year-old girls that solve a haunting. I wrote it several years ago, and with all the rigamarole involved with publishing traditionally, I just never had enough time to get it sent out over the past five years. So, I decided to just do it myself.

The Tragic Secret of Cyrus Crowe is available in paperback or for Kindle.  If you have a kid between eight and ten, I know they’ll love it!

Writing a book is tricky. You have so much research, and well… You aren’t sure what you need and what you can do without when you look at it in a big heap.  It can make you crazy and scare you from writing at all.

But don’t let it!

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As you’re reading the first book or just beginning, you won’t know what’s important and what’s not, generally. If you’re writing a biography, you know right off that certain details will be important, such as the subject’s date of birth. No brainer right? Or, if you’re writing an historical piece, you’ll want to include the date it happened, who the major players are, etc. There are just some details that can’t be left out.

But what other details will you use that might or might not be important?

You’ll figure it out as you go along.

I write in the margin of my research books and highlight what I feel is important. It’s something in your brain that just finds interesting and that you feel your readers might be interested in, too. It’s a gut thing, really. But as you read more and more, you just know.

So, don’t worry about it too much to start, but as you’re going through the materials you gather, just pick out things that you know are important and that you FEEL are important. Then, by the time you get to organization, you’ll know.

Today, I’m just going to boil down the steps I take to organize research when writing a book:

1. Buy a 4-5″ 3- ring binder


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2. Insert tabbed index sheets with broad categories that apply to my work
3. Print out everything I find from reliable sources on the Internet
4. Highlight passages that I’ll want to use in the book, either for reference or for citation.
5. File each page in a general category in the binder.
6. Print out potential images and on the back, what they relate to. (My printer adds the URL to the bottom or the page where the image was found, but if you don’t have your printer set to do that, you’ll also want to record the URL.)
7. Take notes from books in a wire-bound notebook (which will be added to the binder later.  Be sure to add the book and page number where the reference was found.
8. Read back through my book notes and highlight details I’ll want to use in the book.
9. Create a spreadsheet from my book highlights.
10. Give each book read a number designation, so that entries from books are like 2-256, which means “Book 2, page 256
11. Number each printed page in the binder
12. Give each section in the binder a number and follow the same convention as with books. (4-34 means section 4, page 24).
13. Refer to the spreadsheet as I’m writing the material so that I can easily refer to it for clarity or for pulling quotes and citations.

That’s it. It’s my own system, though, and it may not work for you. Or, you may know of a bit of software that works better for you. (Let me know what that is, OK?). However, this method has helped me to write some pretty heavy-topic books and it worked very well.

Maybe you’d like to try it!

OK, OK… I know you’re like, “What so exciting about research, especially organizing it?”

Well, some of us like that. Really. I love it and have my own special means of organizing everything I find. I’m sure there are other ways, and maybe even faster ways, but the more I immerse myself in what I learn and the better I know the subject I’m writing about, the better my work turns out.

Years down the road it’s hard for me to dredge up details for an interview, if I don’t.  I’ve had Australian newspapers and radio contact me about Ralph Nader over the past few years, a British magazine about Gloria Steinem, and various other journalists and writers contact me to ask me tons of questions about things I wrote a very long time ago. And you know what? Because I became immersed in the research and really “knew” these folks (at least from research, not so much from interviewing, though that was amazing), I was able to talk about them so far down the road without getting out my cheat sheets.  It’s something to think about.

And isn’t being a celebrity fun, even if only a very minor one? So… prepare. Maybe you’ll be a major one and that will be really fun. LOL

Putting all the stuff I find together isn’t exciting, but what comes from the research that I do surely is. I can be writing about the most boring topic ever (not to suggest that either Nader or Steinem are boring — at all), and still readers come away amused by something cool they’ve learned and never knew before.

Everything I find online is printed out and put into a huge binder. Everything I find online that’s video, audio, images is kept on my hard drive, and ultimately moved to a CD. I designate a number for each book I’ve used, and then I take all of my important notes (which I highlight and tab) and put them into a control document. It tells me where I got what and where I can find it again to pull a quote or whatever. The system is fairly simple, and totally works for me.

But you really have to find your own system. Some people use index cards. Others use software (which I will totally look into the next time the need arises. I have way too much research sitting around because you can never get rid of it.), but whatever you do, find a convenient way to be able to access the best tidbits. Making reading exciting and fun for your readers is the end game.

Life is complex and writing a book is a task that can seem terribly overwhelming. And regardless of whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you have to do some research. You may think that’s not true, but think about it… If you’re writing location and get one of the details wrong, you’re bound to hear about it from one of the locals. So, never write anything without doing some homework first. If you do, your book is bound to be better than the next guy’s, even if the plot of the two books is similar — homework shines through.

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When you write a nonfiction book, the research is even more intense. You have to be absolutely certain that every detail you include in that book is backed up by not one, but at least two, reputable sources and that often takes some digging. Newspapers often get things wrong, and people don’t like it, but that’s the biz. They expect things to be wrong now and again because the creation process is so immediate. The book biz is a whole lot different.

Anyway, your research may consist of charts, magazine articles that you’ve both gleaned from the Web and that you’ve read in the library and taken notes on. You’ll have several books that you’ve read on the topic and penned notes from. You’ll have all kinds of Internet information and potential images to recommend to the editor for use in the book, and whoa… It’s pretty intimidating when you put it all together.

What I do is to make sure I take notes in one wire-bound notebook. Everything else I collect on the topic goes into one big binder.  I use a tabbed index to create different topics I want to cover. So, maybe bio notes, education, history, etc. for a biography and as I’m gathering I add print-outs and documents to each category.

After I think I have enough stuff to write, I go through an read my notes, highlighting the details that I know I want to include in my finished work.  It takes a few days to go back through everything, but it’s so worth it. You really do forget things you learn early on in the process, so this is rather like a reminder. I also tab any quotes that I might want to pull so that I can refer to them easily with some sticky tabs.

But everything is still scattered, though it’s in a notebook. So, then, I make a giant mindmap. I know what my chapters will be, so I allow them to radiate from the center and then, I fill in the details I want to use by going through the highlights I made in the last step.

I also create a spreadsheet that lists a blurb from whatever the highlight is about. I give each book a number, and then, when I refer to a page in a book, it’s like 3-287 for book 3, page 287.  I don’t really do this for magazine articles because it would just take way too long. But because everything is pretty well organized, I can usually find stuff farily easily. You may also want to tab sections of your research that you know you’ll be referring to over and over again.

After I do all that (which for a book can take up to 6 months),  I’m pretty organized, and from this road map, I can create my outline. That’s crucial! Never try to write a book or even an article or any kind of story without one. If you do, you’ll find yourself going down tangential roads that you never intended to travel. Instead, an outline gives you a clear path that you need to follow. Besides, if you do that, you don’t have to worry about what to write next, either. You simply follow the plan.

One you have the outline, it’s all downhill from there. You just write.  Write, write, write.

I actually find that to be the tedious part. I like researching and organizing much better. How crazy is that?