Elements of Narrative Nonfiction: How to Write and Sell the Novel of True Events »

Name some of the huge bestselling books over the years—In Cold Blood; All the President’s Men; The Perfect Storm; Black Hawk Down; Longitude; Jarhead—and they all have one thing in common; they all read like novels. Author and agent Peter Rubie shows the reader how to join journalistic research with riveting, character-driven prose to create narrative nonfiction. This is the only book to focus on writing and marketing the narrative nonfiction “novel.” (An earlier version of this book was published under the title Telling the Story: How to Write and Sell Narrative Nonfiction. This version has been extensively reworked.)

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Peter has extensively revised and expanded the book to include case histories . . . as well as plenty of hands-on advice. Worth checking out!

Introduction vii

1 Narrative Nonfiction: The New Genre 1

2 Dramatic License? 23

3 Searching, Searching: Discovering a Subject 50

4 Researching Your Subject 76

5 Order Out of Chaos: Building the Skeleton of the Book 99

6 Writing the Book: Flesh and Blood on the Bones 125

7 Find an Agent or Submit Directly? 159

8 Who Do You Know? What Can You Do? Marketing and Promotion 180

9 Writing a Book Proposal 202

Sample Book Proposals 215

A Highly Opinionated and Totally Subjective Reading List 269

Notes 273

Index 280

About the Author 288