How to Write a Nonfiction Book: 3 Steps That Make Writing Your Natural Health Self-Help Book (Much) Easier
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains. – Steve Jobs
This quote encapsulates why you need to create a foundation for your natural health self-help book before you start writing.
If you’re a yoga teacher, an herbalist, an integrative physician, or other holistic practitioner, focusing on these three steps to build your foundation is a good place to start.
The three steps are:
1. Choosing an idea that solves a problem for your ideal reader. For example, if you’re a yoga teacher, you might want to write a book about poses that ease chronic pain. If you’re a dietitian, you could offer a Food is Medicine (FIM) approach to reduce inflammation and prevent chronic disease.
2. Defining a repeatable method, step by step plan, program or approach that gets results. You’ve used it, you know it works with your clients or patients, and you want to share it with readers.
3. Crafting a structure (typically a Table of Contents) for the contents of the book. An effective structure helps ensure that readers take a transformational journey. This gives a book narrative drive, keeps readers engaged and helps them make positive changes in their lives.
What if You Don’t Have 1, 2 or 3?
I often write and talk about these three steps because it’s what I see in the successful natural health self-help books that I’ve written, edited, and coached.
If these three elements aren’t defined, it can lead to problems. You can have trouble getting started, get stuck in the middle or not finish at all.
Get clear about all three and it will make you feel more confident and make writing your book faster and easier.
1-2-3: Natural Remedies for Mental & Emotional Health
In 2024, I co-wrote Natural Remedies for Mental & Emotional Health: Holistic Methods and Techniques for a Happy and Healthy Mind (Healing Arts Press) with Brigitte Mars, a founding member of the American Herbalists Guild and a teacher of herbal medicine at Naropa University.
The book arose organically from Brigitte’s unique and effective way of using herbal medicine and other natural remedies to help her clients deal with everything from stress and anxiety to brain fog and ADHD. She identified her ideal reader, someone who wanted natural alternatives to mental and emotional health challenges and offered them solutions.
1. The Idea
Like Brigitte, your idea should – in most cases – connect to the work that you are doing with clients or patients.
What aha! moments have you had in your work?
Has the light bulb gone off when you tried something new, a practice, method, or plan?
Does the idea reflect your unique point of view?
For example, two different experts can approach say, treating allergies in two different ways, and still get solid results. The most important thing is that you are solving a problem for the reader.
2. The Method or Plan
Once you have a workable method, plan, approach, or philosophy, you can translate this real-life experience into a book. That’s because you know that if readers put your steps into action, they will get results. In fact, this may be what prompts you to write a book in the first place.
Brigitte’s methods are based on years of effectively using herbal remedies in her own life and her work with clients. In both cases, she saw that her methods produced results. She knew that these results could be repeated.
Do you have a method, plan or approach that shows repeated positive results? Is it something that you can share with readers to help them transform their lives?
3. The Structure
With Natural Remedies for Mental & Emotional Health, the structure serves the content. Like most nonfiction books, it begins with a Foreward, in this case we were lucky enough to have herbalist Rosemary Gladstar do the honors, and an introduction.
In chapter 1, the problem and solution are defined, which in this case is using natural remedies to alleviate mental and emotional health problems.
In each chapter that follows, the reader learns how to use natural remedies to solve one of these problems from low mood and depression to insomnia and more. As a result of this, the reader is transformed in a meaningful way, the goal of all good nonfiction.
1-2-3
Keep this in mind the next time you sit down to write your natural health self-help book. As Steve Jobs said, “Simple can be harder, than complex,” but if you do the work to define your idea, method and structure it will give you the clarity and power you need to move mountains.
My new free mini course 1-2-3 Write Your Natural Health Self-Help Book Faster & More Easily can help you define your idea, method, and structure.
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