Dear People Who Write Books,

With your mighty pen or clackety-clack keyboard at hand, you have the power to decide on how great the experience of reading a book can be. Should you choose to take on the difficult challenge of writing your own set of words on a bound of blank sheets, you will find yourself with the great responsibility in deciding on how much enjoyment one can attain from your creative talents.

As a keen reader, I want to wish you well on your venture by pointing out some ideas of what readers want (or more accurately — what I want as a reader) in order to help you with your conquest:

Here are some suggestions:

• Have an appealing title and book cover:

First impressions count. If you want me to pick up your book, you should try to make it as attractive as it can be. Have a clever title and an appealing front cover. Design is important — don’t neglect it. Generally, the pleasant-looking books get the best seats on my bookshelf (including my virtual bookshelf) and unpleasant ones are hidden away at the back or the very bottom. Think about where you might want your books to be placed on your reader’s shelves. From my experience, the only books that are exempt from this judgement are ones that have been highly recommended or been classified as a classic.

Here are a few examples of books that sound and look appealing: David Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared and Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations.

• Break content down into small chapters or sub-chapters.

With the ability to carry books on our smartphones and tablets these days, reading in short sessions is now more practicable. Readers are 25% more likely to finish a book with shorter chapters.

Alternatively, you may prefer to divide content into smaller chunks by using mini breaks.

One good example that comes to mind is a book that I am reading currently: Onwards: How Starbucks Fought For Its Life Without Losing Its Soul.

• Less waffle, please.

Just because you have set out to write a book as opposed to an article or a short-read, it does not give you the license to gab on and on. No one likes a chatterbox. The greatest writers are often the ones that can express their ideas best in the fewest of words. Craft your sentences carefully. Adopt the ‘less is more’ approach - even if it requires greater effort than the ‘more is better’ style of writing, because that extra effort will make it all the more worth it.

I would say authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Khalid Hosseini do this well.

• Summarise at the end of each chapter.

Bring some closure to each chapter by summarising or concluding on the contents of the last few pages. This particularly applies to non-fiction books, with the loose exception of biographies. Not only will this give you, the writer, the opportunity to reflect upon what you have written, it will also encourage readers to ponder upon your words and make their own interpretations and speculations. This sort of active thinking in readers will make your book and ideas more memorable.

Maria Konnikova does this well in her book — Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes.

• Suggest further reading and resources to your readers.

If you have managed to keep me engaged and interested right up to the very end of the book, congratulations! However, don’t let that reading experience end at the final word of your story. Make suggestions to your readers on where they could go next in order to further develop what they have gained from reading your book — be it other related books or essays or perhaps even discussion forums. I would particularly stress this for authors writing non-fiction books.

In Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, the writer has a chapter named ‘Next Steps’ in which he suggests other books to read. In addition to this, he provides information about ways you can directly contact him, such as on Twitter and his website. He has also set up a forum where users can discuss the topic of the book.