I won't like to do a ditto copy of other book, but I would like to write a book on any of the following topic.

a. evolution of feather
b. the blue moon
c. Interiors of sun

Please guide me accordingly, about book writing starting tips etc,because before this I have never tried to write a book, is all books are required to get a ISBN number, and how the book can be register there, lot of questions are there in my mind.

would you like to share any ideas!

is there a ready made software to write book which will enable to check out the mistakes and gramer and composition!

write the book in MSword
spell check it.
find a publisher who will then have it proof read
and then it will be published and get its ISBN.

simple!

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The first thing to remember about writing a book is that you must be interested in the thing you're writing about. Writing just because people online have suggested one of your topics isn't enough; if I tried that, I'd get bored pretty quickly and move on to something else. Write about what you love. Write about what you know. And, if I may suggest, either write in your native language or work really hard on improving your English before trying to write in it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I would second Gillian's point about writing it in your own language.

If you want to write in English, you have to really know English.

I don't say this to be insulting. I say it because editors and publishers have a great many manuscripts sent to them, and they have to decide which ones are worth publishing. There is a lot of pressure on them, and not much time. So, rather than read every single submission from start to finish, they will look for excuses to reject manuscripts.

Sometimes the editor or publisher will flick through a few pages to check if the author is using the correct form of "its" or "it's", and might reject the manuscript for that reason.

A book I have about writing says basically the same thing, but there is a story from an editor where he said that most of the time he decides after the first paragraph. If he has no interest in moving on to the second, the book goes to the reject pile straight away.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

Yes, I've heard that. I believe the editor is William F. Nolan, co-author of Logan's Run.

thanks for sharing the remarks here, I respect all of you in advising the material facts of writing. And as you said that writing in brief is much good in the own language, that's a really good advice, as my native language is marathi, and sometime it is very difficult to express in english ditto. Hence I am asking that is there any software which can translate the marathi into english directly alongwith the spell checks etc! Because if I am writing in pure engish the editor or publisher will throw away my script, by quoting a "great head-ache." is it not! There is a need to acquire a "enterpreter software which can solve the debacle of poor english", few people even the juniors too are very lavishly speaks and write the engish with a clean appearance and expressions and impression. So language may be one barrier, second barrier may come about through knowledge as the same is inadiquate with me, so will that book neat and good one, no not, hence I have to improve, for improvements time is require and if the time is require means I can loose the chance to write precisely.

Interpreter software is awful. If anything, your English may be better.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Have you considered writing the book in Marathi?

Besides a topic, have you thought about your potential readers (e.g., children, laypersons, technical people)?

Hi, Suntrack, I think Gillianren is right, translation software IS, unfortunately, terrible. I speak Spanish fluently, after living in the country for more than 20 years, but on the odd occasion, more out of curiosity & laziness than anything else, I've translated an article from English to Spanish using a couple of the translation services available on the internet. I've later had to correct them & it cost me almost as much time as if I'd translated them myself directly!

Earlier Gillianren posted that you must be INTERESTED in what you would like to write about. I think that's probably one of the best pieces of advice you can be given by anyone. If you are not REALLY interested you will write a poor book that will probably never get published. You will also be dissatisfied with your book & that may put you off ever writing again.

Write a book by all means but perhaps it would better if you wrote it in your own language. If it is going to be non-fiction your fellow country folk will get more benefit from it than if you were to write it in English. There are plenty of native English speakers writing books - more so than probably in any other language!

Have you thought about possibly translating FROM English into your language? Perhaps you could do more for your own people by translating English works than writing a book yourself in English.

It's no dishonour to translate another person's work, but before you publish it you must make sure you have all the correct permissions. I wrote to an English magazine, when I was living in Spain, asking them for permission to translate, & publish, articles from their magazine into Spanish. I got a nice reply giving me permission to do so as long as I mentioned the original source.

Many of Man's best works have been translated into any number of languages & mankind has benefited as a whole from their work!

So you might like to consider that as an option when thinking about writing a book.

Good luck to you, Sunil.

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Very nice post, Spacemad.

I read this and thought about some authors who write on a diverse range of topics. Asimov, for instance, writing about many different branches of science, cookery, theology, history... oh, and science fiction, fantasy and mystery. It made me appreciate him anew to think he could have been that interested!

I'd highly recommend this:
http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Handbo...6731761&sr=8-1

Doug

I have recently published a book titled "The Virtue of Heresy - Confessions of a Dissident Astronomer". It's about the bad science (mostly) that we are taught to use to try to explain what we see. It covers all three of Suntrack2's proposed topics - very lightly in two cases, and fairly comprehensively in the third.

Publishing a book, especially in the popular science genre, and even more especially one that calls some of the heroes of cosmology half-blind sissies, is a testing task, one that will take your fortitude and tenacity to the brink of collapse.

I wish you the very best of luck. As others have stated here, if you have a passion for it, do it, otherwise don't.

With kind regards
Hilton Ratcliffe
Astronomical Society of Southern Africa
Alternative Cosmology Group

From a couple other posts it sounds like you may want to write in your marathi. That's great!

If english is your choice though, I would advise skipping the translator software and go for a live person. Either find an english/marathi translator, or a native english speaker willing to work with you. You may find a student studying your language, for example, and the two of you could collaborate on the book. In the meanwhile you would both go leaps and bounds beyond what a class can teach you about a language!

Another note on english is many books have already been written on the subjects you mentioned--check that you are not going to be more "white noise" before you put so much effort into a piece of literature. Or translate one of those aforementioned books to marathi! I think that has been mentioned as well.

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None to speak of

An ex-girlfriend once commented that everyone who thinks they have a decent novel in them should read John Irving - and if they reckon they can match it, then proceed. If not? Take up painting... or write an autobiography.

I can't paint for toffee, so that leaves me...

But I'd also say that every successful book has at least a touch of entertainment about it. The libraries are full of unread books written in the driest and most correct language. Lighten yours up a little.

TW

In case no-one has said it, welcome to BAUT Tricky Woo. Irving notwithstanding, you are clearly also a student of Herriot
(edit - or Canadian Indie Rock)

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

Interesting thoughts there, TW.

Despite having been given a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meaney, I haven't read any John Irving. Perhaps I will. However, even if JI blows my socks off, I doubt I would want to limit my reading to just that one author. I think I am like most readers in that occasionally I want something a bit highbrow, occasionally I want something trashy, and various degrees in between.

In short, I agree with you about "at least a touch of entertainment". I'm currently working on my second novel (which has a long way to go before I submit it) and I do hope that if I get it published, readers will find it suspenseful, scary and moving. If it keeps them turning the pages to find out what happens next, and if it leaves them satisfied yet wanting more, I will have achieved what I set out to do. I have no idea if that is what counts as a "decent" novel!

I have pretty catholic (with a small "c," naturally) tastes, but the only Irving I've read was The Hotel New Hampshire, and I wasn't overly impressed. I do, however, agree that you needn't set your standards all that high before you decide to write something. Writing for publication is one thing, but I've written a lot that isn't great. Heck, even my movie reviews, which are online for all to see, are things that generally take me half an hour tops to write; every once in a while, when I'm reading back over them, I have to go fix typos. Heck, I own the complete set of Quantum Leap novels, and some of those are very bad.

Entertainment is important, yes. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, but I've stopped reading a fair amount because of dryness of style.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

After mentioning them in another thread, I felt compelled to go re-read a childhood favorite, the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. I have to say, as fond of them as my memories were, it's not the most beautiful prose I've ever read. But the stories are okay, and still keep me turning the pages.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Oh, yeah. I did the same over the Christmas holiday last year. Well, I tried. It's probably best not to ruin Redwall for myself like that.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

If I may recommend a tool for writing novels, I would recommend "ywriter". It's perfect for organizing large blocks of text and it is free.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html

It runs on windows, linux, and, if you're savvy enough, mac os.

Good luck!
M74

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I pray to no one.

Does 'ywriter' convert text into .pdf form, or does it allow that conversion easily? For the next OA book, I'm thinking that it might save editing time if we convert the text into .pdf format before sending it off to the publishers. Easier to convert into an e-book format too, no doubt.

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

Unless it's a direct to print, vanity press type of thing, you can be rather sure the publisher would hate you for using .pdf.

What they're likely to want is a non-formatted text-only format that can be easily edited to fix your spelling and grammar mistakes, and can be broken up in pages based on their decisions on fonts and page sizes.
Possibly one with functional rather than layout based markup.

They definitely don't want you to force the layout decisions, especially for something that might be published in different layouts.

Converting from .pdf is a hellish nightmare compared to a clean textbased markup format.

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

eburacum, the best format to deliver something in sounds like a question you should ask your publisher. While your intentions may be good, you could end up making much more work for them.

It would be nice to have more control over layout and so on, but perhaps I'll have to take advice on this one.

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

I am trying to be helpful here-- obviously so-- I attempted to learn LaTeX and that may be an option -- the font and control afforded to the writer seem superior to almost anything that I have experienced.

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"The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."
---Carl Sagan

I agree with you there, but it's not kind of annoying to use for something that doesn't incorporate figures, equations, and stuff.

M74

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I pray to no one.