Struggling with how to write a good introduction for a book? After helping authors with their nonfiction books for more than a decade, I’ve realized that so many people have this problem. The beginning of the book is their biggest challenge. I get questions like: Do I need a foreword, preface, introduction, or a combination of those sections? Are these sections different from one another? What kind of information belongs in each?
Beginnings can be confusing, but in this video, I explain the content strategy for the various sections you can choose to include in your book. (And to answer that earlier question: Yes, they’re all different!)
Follow this advice to learn how to write a good introduction for a book. A strong beginning will help your reader get their bearings, while keeping them entertained and excited to keep reading.
If you’re ready to get started writing your own book, contact us today!
Transcript: Hi. I’m Amelia Forczak, and I’m with Pithy Wordsmithery. Today I’m going to be talking about how to write a good introduction to your nonfiction book. So I get this question a lot, and the first thing I want to say is that beginnings are hard to write, so I personally write them last. It’s the last thing I do when I’m done writing a book. So if you’re not completely sure what you’re going to put in the introduction when you’re starting out the book, I think that’s fine. Just skip it. I like to start in the middle. By the time you’re done with finish, you finish most of the book, you come back to the beginning, and it becomes a lot easier to finish it. Okay? So with that in mind, I think the first thing to discuss is preface versus introduction. So they’re two different things. They serve different purposes. They’re both technically optional. If you’re only going to do one, you should do the introduction. But I think the preface is also really nice. So the preface, unlike the foreword, is written by the author. It usually tells readers how and why the book came into creation. So a lot of authors like to set the scene by telling a story, maybe something that happened to them, that illustrates like part of their journey, and, you know, shows why they’re an expert in their field. So again, we’re talking we’re talking about nonfiction books. That’s usually what we do at pithy so this is a chance to introduce yourself to the readers, show why you have expertise. And it’s kind of just a nice way to talk about yourself without it getting in the way of your content. Some readers like to hear about that backstory from the author, and some people like to skip it and just get right into the book. For the people who want to skip it, you don’t want to put all that material at the front of the book, because sometimes it might sort of like slow down the pace and make people not want to keep reading. So the preface is a great spot to put the personal story. When you get to the intro, this content is much more closely tied to like the meat of the book. So it talks about the book overall, and it helps people understand what comes next. So this is the spot where you want to talk about major themes in the book. You would explain any kind of key terms that you have for the book, if you’ve got specific methodology with how you put things together, or you did research, or like how how the book came into existence, so that you can understand the content and any terms that you’re using. All of that goes in the intro. Some people also skip the intro, so you want to keep that in mind too, where again, when you’re so when you’re done with the intro, and then you have chapter one, you kind of want to like make it so that if people skip the intro, they’re not completely lost. So there’s where the tricky part comes in, but the intro is a good spot for getting a lot of that stuff out of the way, like key themes, definitions, that kind of thing. You also want to get readers excited about the book. So you want to drive home why the book is so important, how it’s going to help people and make them want to keep reading. So as you can see, it’s a little bit different from the preface, but not so different that every author sees the need to have both the preface in the intro and again, like the beginning is hard. So if you’re struggling with this, I encourage you to finish writing the book, even write the last chapter. Come back to the beginning, and I think you’ll have a lot more clarity on how to write a good introduction and have a good preface for your book. Again. This is Amelia Forczak from Pithy Wordsmithery.