Ten Tips on How to Write a Great Book Introduction
I’m writing this post because a lot of my editing clients ask me for advice related to writing introductions, especially book introductions. This is because introductions are hard. They are also important! They are the first text most readers will engage with in your book. This is why former scholarly editor and professor, William Germano, counsels authors to spend a lot of time on their first 50 pages. It is these pages that not only need to hook readers, but that reviewers and acquisitions editors will likely pay the most attention to as they review your manuscript.
So here is some advice about introductions that will hopefully make your experience of writing them easier. I’m primarily addressing book introductions and speaking to scholars in the social sciences and humanities, though many of these tips could apply to other academic areas as well as to introductions to shorter pieces.
1
Good introductions draw readers in. Ideally, your introduction will make readers want to keep reading the rest of your book. So try to craft an introduction that is compelling and makes them want to read more. Maybe you frame the introduction with an interesting finding or story from your research and return to this throughout the chapter. Maybe you start with one of the questions that propelled your research and help your readers understand why this question matters. Maybe you start with a surprising research finding to help pique the reader’s interest. Work on crafting your writing, making it engaging, evocative, and clear.
2
Good introductions introduce the research project. This is the place to give your readers a sense of what the book is about and to introduce your major argument. You want them to leave the introduction having a good sense of where you are going. Introducing the project should typically happen fairly early in this chapter. If you let your reader get to page 15 without giving them a sense of what the book is about, you very well may lose them (or they will wonder if the book is actually about anything!). One nice way to show what the book is about is to introduce the questions that drove your research and give readers a sense of why these questions and your answers matter.
Once you’ve drafted an introduction, have a friend or colleague from another discipline read it and ask them to explain what the project is about. They should be able to do this fairly easily and, if they can’t, you have more work to do.
3
Good introductions make a case for why the research matters. As an academic developmental editor, the most common issue that I see in early drafts of introductions is that scholars avoid pointing out the significance of their projects. I think this may be because doing so opens the writer up for critique. If you don’t say why your research matters, others can’t disagree with it as easily. But if you don’t say why your research matters, others won’t understand its importance nearly as well and the impact of your book will be diminished. So be sure in the introduction that you make a clear case for why this book should exist out there in the world. How is it generative for other scholars? What does it help them to understand that they might not have before? How does it help us to think differently about something (Tips on how to do this here).
4
Good introductions provide readers with tools. Your introduction should equip readers with what they need to dive into the rest of the book. So think about what those things are. Are there theoretical concepts that the book is grounded in? Do you draw on these in multiple chapters? If so, you’ll likely want to introduce readers to these topics in the introduction. Does your reader need to be given some historical background to understand your arguments and claims? If so, you’ll want to put some of this in the introduction. In my book on slave descendants in Mauritania, for example, I needed to give readers a quick sense of the history of slavery in this place. I knew I’d have to go into more depth on this topic later on, but the reader needed to know enough right away to understand my claims.
5
Good introductions help readers understand what your research looked like. Most academic projects in the social sciences and many humanities will have a methodology section in the introduction. This doesn’t have to be extensive (it likely won’t be as extensive as it was in the dissertation), but it does have to help readers understand how you collected the information the book is based on. Think of giving readers what they need to know in order to interpret your data. Knowing that you conducted in-depth interviews in a community over two years suggests a certain kind of project, while one that relied on broad surveys will suggest you garnered different kinds of information.
Although there is some disagreement on this, I also believe that the introduction is a place to let readers know about aspects of your own background that might have impacted how you interpret your data and/or how your research subjects interpreted you. This obviously applies primarily to people working with human beings, but can also matter in archival work. If you are researching mining practices in Appalachia and your grandfather was a coal miner, sharing that fact with readers not only helps them understand how you may interpret your data but perhaps why you care about the project.
6
Good introductions should be intelligible. Think about your book’s intended audience as you write your introduction. If it includes undergraduates, which many publishers want them to these days, be sure that you are writing clearly and explaining the meaning of terms that they may not be familiar with. Even if your book is pitched primarily to scholars, remember that scholars from adjacent disciplines will read it who may not be familiar with discipline-specific jargon. So don’t feel like you have to completely avoid jargon, but do try and make it intelligible for readers.
7
Good introductions shouldn’t give it all away. This can be a little tricky, but you don’t want your introduction to lay out all of your arguments completely. Doing this can be helpful for readers, but it also means that they may not have to read the rest of the book. So provide the contours of your arguments and their significance, but be sure that you expand on, build upon, and enhance these arguments in the following chapters. Ideally, your conclusion will review the arguments that you have developed throughout the book and then take them even further, showing the reader how the different strands of argument come together to suggest insights that weren’t available earlier in the manuscript.
8
Good introductions don’t have to be long. Generally, introductions are one of the shorter chapters of the book. If you find your introduction becoming much longer than your body chapters, it might be that you are including information in it that would work better elsewhere. Perhaps you are going too deeply into historical background that might work better dispersed throughout other chapters? Perhaps your methods section is extensive and summarizing it in a few pages would be sufficient? Pay attention to which sections are very long; those are places where it might be worthwhile to cut.
9
Good introductions don’t have to be written first. Although some writers prefer, or need to, write the introduction first, it is often easier to wait and write this chapter after most (or all) of the manuscript is written. This is because it is difficult to draft an introduction when you aren’t yet sure what the book is about or the directions in which it will develop. So if you’re feeling tense about the introduction, don’t feel like you need to write it right away. Also, don’t expect it to be perfect the first time. Introductions normally go through several drafts before being sent out for peer review.
10
Good introductions can be written over time. If you decide to leave your introduction until last, that doesn’t mean you should avoid thinking about it at all. Start a list where you keep track of what might need to go in the introduction as you write the rest of the book. If you find, for example, that you are using a particular concept throughout the work that readers might not be familiar with (maybe because you’ve developed it yourself!) note that you will need to explain it in the introduction. If you don’t keep track of these things, it’s easy to forget them by the time you finish your manuscript.
Ok, I know this is a long list of suggestions so I’ll leave you with a useful exercise that can help you see more concretely how good introductions work. Pull out two or three books in your field that you really love and whose writing is strong. Then outline their introductions. Outline not based upon the information they contain; instead, take notes on what authors are doing throughout these chapters. For example, you might write “Page 1-3 contains a vivid anecdote about gifts exchanged at a wedding. Page 4 transitions to show how this story illustrates the author’s main research questions . She then states her overarching argument in one paragraph.” Pay attention to what you like about the structure of each introduction and then pick one (or pieces of several) and follow its structure in drafting your own introduction. You may not ultimately stick with this structure, but having one to follow can make the drafting process much easier.
Good luck with your introductions and happy writing!
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