Writing Non-Fiction: The Essential Guide

This lesson looks at some of the ways you can start to generate ideas for your articles. It links to the next lesson, which is a writing exercise to help you focus on your own experience and knowledge and how you might turn this into saleable articles.

This exercise accompanies Lecture 3 - Finding Ideas - and will get you thinking about the experiences you could draw on to create non-fiction articles and fillers. You may want to download the PDF version and complete the exercise offline at a time that best suits you.

This lecture will help you understand the importance of finding a target market BEFORE you start to write your article. It also explains some of the ways in which you can explore potential writing markets and find out what their requirements are.

This list of markets for non-fiction articles is by no means comprehensive, but it will give you a good idea about the range of opportunities that are available for freelance writers and prompt you to research markets that relate to your own area of interest.

By adapting your ideas and topics so that they meet the needs of specific and very different markets, you can maximise your chances of selling your articles and increase your writing income. This video looks at the example of how a keen gardener could use the subject of 'gardening' to write numerous articles for very different magazines and readers.

This is a really useful exercise to get you thinking about how you can expand your reach with your article ideas.

This video explains the difference between a commissioned article, an unsolicited manuscript and a query letter. A sample query letter is included as a handout with this lesson.

In this video we consider some of the different ways of making money from non-fiction, from short fillers, readers letters and photographs, through to opinion pieces, reviews and feature articles.

In this lesson, we recap briefly on what we've learned in the course so far.

This lesson looks at what you will need to consider as you prepare to write your article.

The most obvious place to start your article is the beginning. This lesson discusses some of the ways to start writing.

This lesson looks at various ways to structure your article.

This lesson explains what sidebars are, why they are used and how you can create them.

You'll stand a much better chance of selling an article if you can provide photographs or other images to illustrate it. This short video considers some of the important points you'll need to remember if you intend to supply photos.

Editing is an important part of the writing process. This video discusses why it's so important. A downloadable Editing Tips handout is included.

This editing exercise will help you to start thinking about how to trim and tighten your writing to make it the best it can be.

Proofreading is an important task that many writers overlook. This lesson considers why it's so important to present your work professionally. A downloadable proofreading tips handout is included.

Test your proofreading skills with this quick proofreading exercise.

Take a look at an example article and read about the initial idea, the target market and the article outline.

You've planned, researched and written your article. This video will help you understand the process of submitting it to an editor.

So, you've written your article and sent it off. What happens next?

Once you start to write, it's important to keep going and to develop a regular writing routine. This video looks at some of the ways to do this.

Now that you've completed the course, you can use this 12-Step Action Plan as a prompt as you write your non-fiction articles.