Guide

How to write a course companion book

Video teaches; the book is what students have afterwards. A good companion is not a transcript — it is the reference, the exercises and the summary the video cannot be.

Neubook Write · 11 September 2026 · 8 min read

Decide what the book is for

Before writing, pick which of these your companion is. They produce different books, and trying to be all three produces a bad one.

The third is the most commercially interesting and the most work: it must stand alone while making the course the obvious next step.

What belongs in the book and what belongs in the video

Each medium has things it does badly. Divide deliberately rather than duplicating.

The rule that follows: never transcribe a demonstration; instead write the steps and the failure modes, which is what the student needs when they are doing it alone at 11pm.

One module, one chapter

Mirror the course exactly — same order, same names, same numbering. Students will use both at once, and any mismatch creates friction every single session. Inside each chapter:

1. What this module is for, in two sentences, plus what they should already be able to do.
2. The teaching, rewritten for reading. Shorter sentences than speech, headings every few hundred words.
3. A worked example with real numbers or real text, start to finish.
4. The exercise, with space if it is a print book.
5. Self-check — three questions with answers at the back, or a rubric: "you have done this correctly if…".
6. Common mistakes — the three you see every cohort make.

The "common mistakes" section is where your teaching experience shows. It cannot be invented, and it is the reason a companion by the actual instructor beats a summary anyone could write.

Self-checks that do something

Most course books put a quiz at the end of a chapter and nobody does it. Two changes fix that:

• Make the answer produce the next thing. Instead of "which of these is true?", ask them to produce the artefact they will use in the next module. The check and the progress are the same action.
• Give a rubric, not a mark. "Your positioning statement is finished when a stranger can repeat it back to you" is more useful than a score.

There is good evidence that being tested on material improves retention more than re-reading it — the testing effect is among the more robust findings in learning research, and spacing the checks out over time compounds it. Practical application: put one question from module three inside module six.

Accessibility and formats

• Ship EPUB and PDF. EPUB reflows for phones and screen readers; PDF preserves your exercise layout for printing. Students want different ones and it costs nothing to provide both.
• Describe every diagram in text. Useful for screen readers, essential for the student on a phone, and it forces you to check the diagram was necessary.
• Number everything — modules, exercises, figures — so a student can ask about "exercise 4.2" in your community and everyone knows what they mean.

Using it to sell the course

If you sell the book standalone, three things make it convert:

• Do not cripple it. A deliberately incomplete book annoys the exact person you want as a student. The course sells on demonstration, feedback and community, none of which a book can offer.
• Put the offer where the reader feels the gap — after the hardest exercise, not in the front matter.
• Make the book's buyers a segment. A discount code printed in the last chapter tells you how many course sales the book generated.

Rights, reuse and platform terms

If your course lives on a marketplace platform, check what rights you granted before you publish overlapping material commercially; most teaching platforms are permissive about you owning your content, but exclusivity clauses exist and are worth reading once. If the course includes third-party material — images, datasets, extracts — you may have a licence for the course that does not extend to a book you sell.

Publishing and disclosure

Title it for the search your students use before they find you: the skill plus "course" or "workbook". Use keyword phrases that name the tool or the certification. Disclose AI assistance at upload under Amazon's content guidelines. And if you have taught this material for years, say so in the author bio — in education, the fact that the book comes from a real cohort of students is the differentiator.

A one-week build from an existing course

Turning a recorded course into chapters

The temptation is to transcribe. Resist it: spoken teaching has false starts, repetition and structure carried by tone, and none of that survives on a page. A method that works:

1. Watch each module at speed with a notepad. Write only: the point, the example, the moment students look confused.
2. Write the chapter from the notes, not from the transcript. You will produce 1,500 clean words instead of 4,000 rambling ones.
3. Pull the worked example verbatim if it is numerical or textual — that part deserves transcription.
4. Add what you always say live but never recorded: the aside, the warning, the "most people get this wrong" that you improvise in cohort after cohort.

The book should contain the things you say when a student asks a question, not the things you say to camera. That is where its value over the video lies.

Designing for two reading paths

Students use a companion in two ways, and both need supporting:

The appendix is underrated. Every checklist, template and table gathered in one place at the back converts the book from something read once into something kept on a desk.

Exercises that survive without you

In a live cohort you can correct a misunderstanding in thirty seconds. The book has to anticipate it. For every exercise, write:

• A completed example before the blank one. Students imitate before they generate.
• The two wrong answers you see most, named, with why they are wrong.
• A "you are ready to move on when…" line. Self-assessment needs a criterion, not encouragement.
• An escape hatch. "If you are stuck for more than fifteen minutes, use this starting point and come back later." Stuck students quit; unstuck ones finish.

Pricing and packaging around a course

The pattern that compounds: give the digital version to every student, sell the print edition at retail, and let the retail buyers discover the course through it.

Using the book to improve the course

Writing the companion is the most thorough review of your teaching you will ever do. Expect to find:

• Modules that are two modules. If a chapter needs three separate exercises, the lesson is overloaded.
• A missing prerequisite. The thing you assume and never teach becomes obvious when you must write it down.
• Ordering problems. Written sequence is less forgiving than video; if the chapter order feels wrong, the module order probably is too.
• Examples that only work live. Anything requiring your presence to make sense needs a written substitute.

Fix the course with what you learn. The book pays for itself twice.

Sources

• The testing effect in learning
• Spaced repetition
• KDP: Keywords
• KDP: Content guidelines, including AI-generated content

Common questions