From Your Head to Their Hands: How to write, publish, and market training manuals for historical martial arts

By Guy Windsor

"Our favourite writer of instructional manuals"- Neal Stephenson, from his foreword to Swordfighting, for writers, game designers, and martial artists.

 

Guy Windsor's historical martial arts training manuals are legendary. His first was published in 2004, and he's been producing them ever since. They generate about half his income. So he is expert in writing, publishing, and marketing books for historical martial artists, and in this book he'll teach you how to do it.

 

The goal of training manuals is to teach skills. This one will teach you:

• How to write well
• How to plan your book, or write without a plan
• How to get reader feedback as you go
• How to avoid procrastination and imposter syndrome
• What tools to use
• How to write without destroying your body
• How to incorporate photos and videos
• How to edit your work
• What should be outsourced
• How to publish: commercial, indy, or something else?
• What metadata you need, and how to create it
• How to choose your publishing platform
• How to market your book
• How to find your readers
• How to launch
• Everything you need to know about copyright and piracy
• The best book marketing strategy of all time.

Also included: Guy's article Show Your Work: how to communicate your historical martial arts research with the historical martial arts community.

If you've ever wanted to write a training manual for historical martial arts (or anything else), this book will show you how to do it. Buy it, read it, and get writing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spada Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9789527157176

Guy Windsor

Dr. Guy Windsor is a world-renowned instructor and a pioneering researcher of medieval and renaissance martial arts. He has been teaching the Art of Arms full-time since founding The School of European Swordsmanship in Helsinki, Finland, in 2001. His day job is finding and analysing historical swordsmanship treatises, figuring out the systems they represent, creating a syllabus from the treatises for his students to train with, and teaching the system to his students all over the world. Guy is the author of numerous classic books about the art of swordsmanship and has consulted on swordfighting game design and stage combat. He developed the card game, Audatia, based on Fiore dei Liberi's Art of Arms, his primary field of study. In 2018 Edinburgh University awarded him a PhD by Research Publications for his work recreating historical combat systems. When not studying medieval and renaissance swordsmanship or writing books Guy can be found in his shed woodworking or spending time with his family.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A TRAINING MANUAL?

So you want to write a training manual? There are three parts to getting your book from the inside of your head into readers’ hands:

writing

publishing

marketing.

These three activities overlap considerably; writing your book can involve making chunks of it public as you go, for marketing purposes. But it is useful to separate them, as the skills required are different.

Writing is about thinking clearly, arranging your thoughts in order, and putting them into a format that others can experience.

Publishing is making those thoughts generally available.

Marketing is letting the people who can benefit from your work know about it.

It will take a lot of work to get your book written, published, and marketed. My first book took me four years to write, but it changed my life. These days I’m a lot faster. But expect this process to take months, maybe a few years, depending on how much of your time you can give it. This book isn’t about me, but you may want to know who I am before you trust me with more of your time. If that’s the case, read About the Author on page 129.

There are basically three kinds of instructional non-fiction book. There is some overlap between the types, but their goals and therefore their structures are quite different.

An overview provides a picture of the topic. A training manual provides organised instruction and a reference resource. A workbook provides a course of instruction for the student to follow.

In this book I will keep my promise and teach you how to write training manuals, and add some extra content about creating workbooks. We are not going to look at writing overviews (though feel free to apply the general principles you’ll find in this book, if that’s what you want to write).

I have also included an extensive chapter on presenting more academic work (the ‘what’ and ‘why’ rather than the ‘how’), in Show Your Work, towards the back of this book.

I assume you already know your subject reasonably well. This book may help you organise your thoughts and present your approach more clearly.

So what exactly is a training manual? It’s a book or other medium that enables the user to develop practical skill.

You must clearly understand the difference between skill and knowledge before we proceed. Knowing how something is done is not the same as being able to do it. How many times have you watched someone get hit in fencing and thought I know exactly what they should have done? And how many times have you actually got hit, despite knowing exactly what you should have done?

Books are optimised to store knowledge, not to convey skill. This makes writing good training manuals harder than writing good general non-fiction. We are working in a less than ideal medium. The secret to writing good training manuals is to tell the reader what to do to get to the next level of skill.

The first thing to understand about training manuals is that they must be very precisely targeted.

The Principles of Navigation may be an awesome book, but it can’t be a training manual. Navigation on foot is totally different from navigating at sea or in an aircraft. Navigating using a map and compass is totally different from navigating by the stars.

‘How to navigate across country on foot with map and compass’

‘How to find your way around New York using public transport’

‘How to navigate under visual flight rules’

These could all be training manuals.

What clear and well-defined set of skills is your training manual going to enable your readers to attain?

Before we jump in, a word of advice about taking advice. Nothing I say is gospel. You can probably do very well by just doing what I say, but if a piece of advice goes against your sense of what you want your book to be, ignore me. It’s your book; it will be your name on the cover.

When I teach a student their first basic strikes, I don’t load them down with all the things they eventually need to get right: foot position; hip alignment; grounding; shoulder relaxation; grip on the weapon; edge alignment; etc. etc. Instead, I get them moving with a simple action they can already do and modify that action bit by bit towards perfection, making only one small correction at a time. This book works the same way. It is not a comprehensive list of all the possible options, but a sensible starting point from which you can develop your writing, publishing, and marketing skills.

And as you gain experience, you may find yourself disagreeing with my approach, and finding other ways of getting the book you want out into the world. That’s as it should be: but you won’t get there by doing a thousand hours of research into all the options. You’ll get there by trying things out, and finding your own best path. This book is deliberately short: it will get you started, and get you moving in the right direction.

Learn by doing!

PART I

WRITING

LEARNING TO WRITE

Writing is just putting one word after another. The right words, in the right order. It’s simple, but simple is not the same as easy. Most good writers had some serious training at some point. This may have been provided by an editor, by college professors, or by a readership that told them when their work sucked.

Writing is a skill like any other. To learn to write well, you need three things:

to write a lot

critical feedback on what you have written

to apply that feedback to what you have written and what you write next.

That’s it. If you’re not a trained writer, expect your early efforts to be crap. You wouldn’t expect a beginner to show up to your martial arts class and wow everyone with their amazing skill, would you?

When a clumsy beginner comes to your sword class, works hard, and blossoms over time into a graceful fencer, that’s how things are supposed to work. Writing is no different. The best thing you can do for your writing skill is to listen to your readers, editors, and critics.

It really, really sucks goats.

When somebody points out an error or an unclear phrase in my work, it feels like they are saying they hate me, despise my work, and hold me in utter contempt.

That’s what it feels like. But it’s not what it is. What they are actually saying is I like you and your work enough to engage with it at the level at which I notice these things you could do better, and I believe in you enough to bother to let you know.

To which the only appropriate response is thank you.

The best thing you can do for your writing is to find people who will tell you what’s wrong with it, and actually listen to them.

ANSWER THE QUESTION

It’s a massive challenge to write a whole book. It’s much easier to write a sentence, a paragraph, maybe even a chapter. A book is too big, too complicated, to start with, especially if it’s your first. The overall project might be book shaped, but what you do on any given day is a lot smaller. As we’ll see shortly, there are writers who plan the whole book, and others who just start writing and see where it goes. But in both cases, or anywhere in between, your book will answer a simple question, and the answer will be an ordered sequence of answers to smaller questions.

So frame your overall book as the answer to the implied large question How do I learn X?, and frame each chapter as the answer to an implied smaller question.

Such as:

Book question: How do I get good at fencing with a longsword?

Chapter