Doing research for your book can make you feel like you’re on a roller coaster. You’re on a high making new discoveries and generating ideas one minute. And then the next, you’re feeling overwhelmed by how many books you haven’t read yet and all the research you have left to do.

The Germans (of course) have a word for this feeling: bücherfrust, or the overwhelming frustration you might feel when looking at a pile of books you have yet to read.

Meanwhile, the Japanese term tsundoku refers to the bad habit of acquiring books without reading them, letting them pile up around you. Think of all those tabs you have open on your phone or your laptop for months that you absolutely can’t close because they’re important research for your book (if you ever got around to reading them).

I have my doctorate and no one at any point in undergrad or grad school sat me down and taught me how to do research effectively. I had to learn it for myself.

And I spent many, many years going through the trail and error of figuring out how to research a book while writing said book (which, in my case, was my dissertation).

I just published my first book — a history of comics and cartoon art in America — and I’ve almost reached the finish line for a draft of my second book, which is also very heavy on the research side of things.

We live in a time where all information seems to be at our finger tips, in our purses, or in our back pockets thanks to smartphones and the Internet. But we often do a really bad job of organizing and making sense of all that information without being completely overwhelmed by it. And this is especially true for writers, who seem to take any opportunity to distract themselves that they’re given 😌

Having gone through the process of researching a book no less than three times in my writing life, I do wish someone had been there to just show me how to do it.

So, let me be that person for you. Here’s how to research your book like you have a Ph.D.

Embrace Your Lack of Expertise

Often, when we start doing research, we get hung up on the idea that we don’t know enough yet to start writing. This is the fun little lie we tell ourselves to keep ourselves stuck for days and weeks, spinning our wheels when we could just be writing.

I’ve worked with clients who run the gamut from entrepreneurs to 9 to 5-ers who moonlight as writers. Without exception, regardless of education level or the time they have to spend on their writing, every single one of them has told me at some point that they just can’t start writing because they’re not an “expert” in their chosen topic yet.

Ok. Here’s the part that’s going to change your life: Your readers are not going to read your book because you are an expert.

They’re going to read your book because of the unique perspective and ideas you bring to your chosen topic.

Get Organized

Over on Instagram, I shared a bunch of hacks for organizing research quickly and effectively. As a Type B writer and researchers, I’ve never stuck to one single organization method, but there are some tools — like citation managers and moodboards — that I find essential for staying organized no matter how much chaos I create with all my open tabs.

One thing that does help keep my tendency to magpie my way through the research process, is to keep a table that tracks one important quotation or idea from each piece of research that really stands out to me.

The key to doing this is to pick the sentence or idea that you can’t stop thinking about. The idea that pops into your head well after you’ve read that article or interview, while you’re doing some mundane task.

That’s the thing to keep, the part of the research that wants to make its way into your book. Not the millions of annotations you made trying to keep every last little detail in your head (never done this myself, nope).

Go Behind the Paywall

Imagine you’re on Google Scholar and you just found the perfect article. You click on the article, excited to add it to your cache of PDFs, but then you’re hit with a paywall. And not just any paywall, but a paywall that says you have to pay $150 in order to download this specific PDF of this specific article.

I know I’m not alone in this experience.

The thing about accessing academic research is that academic institutions like to give the illusion that the research their scholars produce is locked away in a database that you can only access by enrolling at their venerated school.

All of this is a lie.

As someone who has a few academic articles published under her name, all of which currently exist behind paywalls that are way to pricey for my taste, I can tell you for a fact that I — the actual researcher and writer of those articles — have never seen a cent come through my bank account thanks to my academic research.

I’m not even sure who sees this money at all. And I spent ten years in academia.

All this is to say, you can typically reach out to the researcher/scholar/author whose work you’re trying to gain access to and just request a copy of their article. I for one would be happy to share any of the PDFs of my articles currently sitting on my hard drive for free to anyone who asked.