I found myself needing to write some white papers to describe and explain some things for prospective customers of OnTime. Coming from a technical background hardly qualifies me as a writer, but I have written papers, documentation, and manuals in the past, so how hard can a white paper be?
I've found a pretty good site (in my opinion) that describes how to write a good white paper: http://www.stelzner.com/copy-HowTo-whitepapers.php It's actually a white paper on writing white papers, the website of a consulting firm whose business is to write white papers. They give you a sampling of their white paper, but you can request the whole document and they'll send it to you for free. And they have a link to some nice samples that they have done. Now, if you read the whole thing, they describe how to write a white paper, but according to them, only a 'white paper specialist' can write good white papers. May be true.
Anyways, what I found is that at its core, a white paper is fairly simple conceptually. A simple white paper is made up of three sections:
- Describe the problem you want to address
- Describe the solution to the problem
- Describe how your product is (or helps with) that solution
Simple enough. From here just start writing out the details of each section. That's the hard part, and there's no formula for that. Once you've done the writing, just format it and lay it out nicely, add some nice diagrams or pictures and you're done.