  Varshamov-Tenengolts (VT) codes are a class of codes which can correct a
single deletion or insertion with a linear-time decoder. This paper addresses
the problem of efficient encoding of non-binary VT codes, defined over an
alphabet of size $q >2$. We propose a simple linear-time encoding method to
systematically map binary message sequences onto VT codewords. The method
provides a new lower bound on the size of $q$-ary VT codes of length $n$.
