Writing a book on autism

Hello Matt, welcome to the site.

I would start by getting a big board to put on the wall (or against it or even on the floor - you get the idea) and create a list of the main age groups in your life that you want to cover in the book.

Something line the year before school. the first half of primary school, then the second half, the same two halves of secondary school and finally post school if you plan to go that far.

Now get a few packs of biggish post-it type notes and write the kernels of the story for the situations you are thinking of writing about and stick them on the relevant age section.

Soon you will have lots of ideas at a rudimentary stage in an easy to see way to help you identify where there are gaps and you can then go research (eg speak to parents, school friends etc) and find ideas for here.

Take a handful of these ideas and sketch out what a page would look like and write up the list of ideas you previously had on the board - this should give an outline of the plan and a handful of illustrations what they would look like when fleshed out.

Now you can speak to some backers or publishers - maybe speak to NAS to see if they would sponsor you, speak to publishers who deal with this sort of material to see if they would be interested in paying for it (you typically get an advance payment for the finished work and the balance on delivery) and the publisher will assign someone to review it and tweak it before its final version.

The latter stages of actually wrapping up the idea can be slow and frustrating as can be the review process, but you will have done all the hard work by then.

Well, you asked for ideas - I hope something here is of interest.

Hello Matt, welcome to the site.

I would start by getting a big board to put on the wall (or against it or even on the floor - you get the idea) and create a list of the main age groups in your life that you want to cover in the book.

Something line the year before school. the first half of primary school, then the second half, the same two halves of secondary school and finally post school if you plan to go that far.

Now get a few packs of biggish post-it type notes and write the kernels of the story for the situations you are thinking of writing about and stick them on the relevant age section.

Soon you will have lots of ideas at a rudimentary stage in an easy to see way to help you identify where there are gaps and you can then go research (eg speak to parents, school friends etc) and find ideas for here.

Take a handful of these ideas and sketch out what a page would look like and write up the list of ideas you previously had on the board - this should give an outline of the plan and a handful of illustrations what they would look like when fleshed out.

Now you can speak to some backers or publishers - maybe speak to NAS to see if they would sponsor you, speak to publishers who deal with this sort of material to see if they would be interested in paying for it (you typically get an advance payment for the finished work and the balance on delivery) and the publisher will assign someone to review it and tweak it before its final version.

The latter stages of actually wrapping up the idea can be slow and frustrating as can be the review process, but you will have done all the hard work by then.

Well, you asked for ideas - I hope something here is of interest.

Thank you for your response Iain. It's really helpful and I appreciate it. You've provided me a lot of useful ideas there.