How to Write Your Own How-to Spanish book

Today’s guest post is of Scott Thomas. Scott and his wife are the authors of the great book ‘Hollywood Favorites – The Movie Lover’s Guide to Becoming Fluent in Spanish’  and the website ‘Language Safari‘, the perfect book and website for every Spanish-Only.com-lover.

I’m not a native Spanish speaker and I don’t have a degree in Spanish, but as I write this in mid-December, my wife Gaby and I have just put the finishing touches on our second book Learn Spanish from Your Hollywood Favorites – The Movie Lover’s Guide to Becoming Fluent in Spanish, to be published by McGraw-Hill next fall.

How did I wind up being a writer of Spanish how-to books and more importantly how can you write books in your area of interest?

The old adage about how to earn money – find a need and fill it or find a problem and solve it – holds true in publishing and is how we got started. I’ve studied several languages, including Russian, and while I was studying Russian two of my favorite books were the Russian Learner’s Dictionary: 10,000 Russian Words in Order of Frequency by Nicholas Brown and Roots of the Russian Language: An Elementary Guide to Wordbuilding by George Z. Patrick. These were great helps in building a Russian vocabulary.

When I returned to studying Spanish, I looked for Spanish books similar to these Russian helps, but there weren’t any. Even though here in the United States Spanish is the most popular foreign language, my favorite tools for learning a language didn’t exist.

Long story short, I wrote the Dictionary of Spanish Roots and submitted it to two publishers. One editor rejected it and the other, Christopher Brown, a foreign language editor at NTC (later part of McGraw-Hill), liked the idea, helped improve it, and eventually published it as part of The Big Red Book of Spanish Vocabulary.

Here are our 7 steps to writing a foreign language book.

1. Find a need or solve a problem. Complete a phrase like one of these: “I wish there was a Spanish book about _________,” or “I wish these Spanish phrase books would include _________,” or “I wish they made ______ so I could learn Spanish faster.”
2. Involve a native Spanish speaker in the project. I’m not a native Spanish speaker, but my wife is. Her native knowledge is essential to making the end product valuable to language students.
3. Write the book. For a first project write the manuscript and submit it to a publisher, rather than querying first. You’ll have a lot more confidence when you finally do submit a query. This gives publishers confidence as well because the book is done. They don’t have to be concerned about whether you’ll meet the deadline and whether or not you’ll submit quality work.
4. Submit a hard copy with query. Limit your query to one page, telling them how you came up with the idea, who is publishing similar books and what the benefits of your book will be for the reader. It’s important that your editor know these things because if he likes your idea and decides to move forward he has to sell the idea to an editorial board.
5. Be flexible. If the editor makes suggestions for how to improve your work, follow them as often as you can. However, if you find that the editorial board wants your book to be something you don’t want it to be, stand your ground and be willing to walk away.
6. Golden Rule. When you are writing the book, do everything you can to make your editor’s job, the catalog writer’s job, and the book salesman’s job easier. They are all busy people, so if you can think of ways to make their jobs easier, everyone benefits.
7. Find a way. You have many options for publishing these days, so if you don’t find a print publisher, don’t despair because publishing on the web may be better than print in many instances. In fact, most of the publishing we do to help people learn Spanish is done at our Language Safari website. That may be your best option as well.