'I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.' Dorothy L. Sayers
It might not surprise you that I found the quotation above in an online dictionary of quotations. In this case it comes from Sayers’ 1932 detective mystery Have His Carcase – not that the dictionary in question provided this attribution, so I had to track it down for myself.
And there immediately lies a problem with turning to such resources: they often fail to attribute a quote correctly, and indeed they often claim someone said something when they didn’t. There are countless ‘quotable quotes’ attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, for example, smeared all across the internet, and in many cases there’s no evidence whatsoever that the great man ever said it. (These collections seem dominated by men, too – women are greatly disenfranchised in them.) Alongside those online dictionaries, a side industry of sites debunking popular misattributions has sprung up – such as quoteinvestigator.com – revealing just how widespread misinformation is.
As a nonfiction author, you may well find yourself tempted by having a pithy line or two by someone well known at the start of each chapter – epigraphs, as they’re called. They’re often a feature of business and self-development books, of course. But here at The Right Book Company, our advice is that if you find yourself reaching for an online dictionary of quotations: STOP!
Ask yourself these questions every time:
Does this quotation really add value to my book?
How does it demonstrate my own authority, rather than someone else’s?
Is the quote actually a bit of a cliché or a truism, something in fact that might be trite or obvious if considered for a moment?
Is the quote definitely relevant to the points you are making below it?
Does this line appear in lots of other articles, websites or books?
And did the person really say or write it anyway?
We would always advise our authors to resist the temptation of having epigraphs like this. This is your book, not Stephen R. Covey’s or Viktor Frankl’s or Helen Keller’s. A key purpose of your book is to demonstrate your own expertise and experience – and while we all know that everyone is ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ (yes, Isaac Newton did write that, in 1675, although the same idea has been traced back as far as the 12th century), you’re the person the reader has turned up to listen to. Believe in your own voice!
That doesn’t mean you can’t acknowledge your influences or recommend the work of others – far from it. And there might be value in quoting them sometimes, perhaps in the body of your text to illustrate a particular point or discuss a methodology related to your own (but please provide a proper source for the reference – when you publish with us, we’ll give you our straightforward style guide for doing so).
If you’d like to resist the siren song of the epigraph, here are some suggestions you could consider instead:
Don’t have anything! Take the reader straight to the meat of your book in every chapter.
Quote yourself! Highlight a particularly useful or well-expressed point of your own from the text that follows.
Have a short list of key topics or points which the reader can use as a roadmap for what follows.
Summarise the chapter that follows in a paragraph (you might decide to do this at the end of the chapter instead, though).
And remind yourself every time: you’re the expert here. Have the confidence to stand on the shoulders of those giants and speak with your own voice – and don’t bend down and ask for their permission.
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