Several of my clients have started nonfiction works recently and asked if they should go the memoir route or the how-to route. I pushed a couple of them toward a memoir-heavy blend.

If you’re in an industry with an established audience and are approached as one who could make an “easy sell” or if you’re young but swear you came up with this BRILLIANT idea for a nonfiction book, don’t let it go to your head.

Take a breath, back up, and think:

If you want to write good how-to or good nonfiction based on some principle you hope to teach, you’ll need a year or more of solid research. Every good piece of nonfiction from Good-to-Great to Blink required their authors to hit the books and crunch numbers.

Don’t have the time?

Then pepper your hard-earned, experiential advice into a memoir-like read.

The best example I’ve given of suitable form is King’s “On Writing.” Set aside his great advice on the craft and think about his form: the book is 40% memoir of how he came to be a famous author, followed by 20% advice on the craft, followed by 40% memoir on his experience writing the book itself, which included getting hit by a van.

A book fashioned along those lines (minus the near-death experience) works great for first-time nonfiction authors who have only enough time to write the dang thing and no time to do research. It also keeps you from writing the equivalent of Nurbmashing for Dummies or whatever.