Behind the Book: My Research Process

I get asked about my writing process fairly often. People expect the answer to be about outlining or drafting or editing. But for nonfiction, the process that matters most happens before a single word of the manuscript exists. The research phase determines whether the book will be worth reading. Everything after that is execution.

Here is how that phase works for a typical BellerBooks title, from the initial spark to the point where I am confident enough in the material to start writing.

Phase 1: The Question

Every project starts with a question that genuinely interests me. Not a topic — a question. There is a difference. "Volcanoes" is a topic. "Why do some volcanoes explode violently while others erupt gently?" is a question. The question forces specificity. It tells me what I need to find out and, just as importantly, what I can ignore.

I spend a few days with the question before committing to a book. I read broadly — review articles, textbook chapters, popular science coverage — to understand the landscape. If the question has already been answered definitively in an accessible way, there may not be a book worth writing. If the existing answers are scattered across technical literature with nothing tying them together for a general audience, that is where the opportunity lives.

Phase 2: Deep Research

Once I commit to a project, the research becomes systematic. I build a source library using Zotero, starting with the foundational papers and expanding outward through citation networks. For a typical science book, I will read 40 to 80 papers, plus several textbook chapters and any relevant books already published on the topic.

I take notes in plain text, organized by subtopic. Each note includes the key finding, the source, and my assessment of how reliable the finding is. A single study with a small sample size gets flagged differently than a meta-analysis covering dozens of studies. This reliability assessment becomes important later when deciding how confidently to present a claim in the manuscript.

Phase 3: Structure

With the research assembled, I build the book's structure. This is not an outline in the traditional sense — it is a map of how the pieces of evidence connect to answer the central question. Each chapter addresses one part of the answer, and the chapters are ordered so that each one builds on what the reader learned in the previous one.

For children's books, the structure also accounts for attention span and cognitive load. Chapters are shorter, concepts are introduced one at a time, and each chapter ends with something memorable — a surprising fact, a vivid example, or a question that sets up the next chapter.

Phase 4: Fact-Checking

Before I start writing, I do a final verification pass on every factual claim that will appear in the book. Statistics get checked against the original datasets. Dates get verified against primary sources. Scientific claims get cross-referenced with at least two independent sources. Any claim I cannot verify gets cut, no matter how interesting it is.

This step catches more errors than you would expect. Numbers get misquoted as they pass from study to review article to popular press. Historical dates shift. Scientific consensus evolves. A fact that was accurate when I first encountered it months earlier may have been updated or corrected since then.

Phase 5: Writing

Only after all of this do I start the manuscript. By this point, I know the material well enough that writing feels more like translating than creating. The research has answered the question. The structure has organized the answer. The fact-checking has verified it. My job now is to present it in language that is clear, engaging, and appropriate for the target audience.

The research process takes longer than the writing. That is by design. A well-researched book writes itself. A poorly researched book fights you at every paragraph.