How to Outline a Nonfiction Book in 5 Simple Steps

Learning how to create a book outline properly is the secret weapon that you need to write an entire manuscript when you have a lot of demands on your time.

You’re an entrepreneurial author. You may have a business that requires your constant attention, or you may be a professional with a busy practice, or you may run a busy consultancy.

You’ve come to the realization that what you need right now to take your business, practice or consultancy to the next level is a book. A book that can open big doors and new markets. A book that can be used as a way to convert new prospects, a book that will help you achieve the status of industry expert.

But there’s one key roadblock on the way to your desired goal: a lack of time.

In a sense, you fear it’ll take a lot of time to write a book and you simply don’t have much of it available at this point. You certainly don’t want to take time out of your family life or your sleep – you’ve already made enough sacrifices along the way for the sake of your business.

You’re at a crossroads and unsure how to proceed.

But what if I told you that there’s a secret weapon at your disposal?

A weapon that:

• Will help you finish your book in record time
• Will make it possible for your book to literally “write itself”
• Will create the structure of your book with minimal effort on your part
• Will ensure that you never get writer’s block

This is a secret weapon used by the most successful nonfiction writers to write book after book after book, without seemingly ever running out of ideas.

Let’s get started!

How Do You Start Writing a Book?

There’s a key difference between an entrepreneurial author and a fiction author.

The fiction author is said to “have a book in them.” The entrepreneurial author “is the book itself.”

That’s right, technically speaking you’re a walking book. All those years learning, training and refining your skills, all those years serving clients and all those years teaching your skills to others mean that when you sit down to write your book you’re not going to have to think hard to come up with new ideas, new scenarios or new story lines.

The ideas will be drawn from your knowledge, the scenarios will be drawn from your client interactions and your story lines will be drawn from your life experience.

All you have to do now is to find the perfect “secret recipe” to download all that information point by point out of your head and onto the printed page.

That’s what I’ll help you achieve in this article.

How Do You Gather Your Thoughts?

The secret weapon you’re going to learn to use next has two steps: the “Mind Mapping” phase and the “Outlining” step.

• Mind Mapping is the technique that you’re going to use to do a brain dump of your thoughts and ideas into a format that you can easily structure and manipulate.
• Outlining is the technique that will allow you to turn that Mind Map into the point form that will become the table of contents of your book.

And I’m not talking about a straw man here. I’m talking about a fully fleshed out table of contents with everything that you’ll cover in your book, with the right flow and with such level of detail that your book will simply write itself.

All you’ll have to do now is to expand each topic with concepts, ideas and thoughts that will come second nature to you, flowing directly from your professional experience and in a much faster way than you think is possible.

Here’s the thing: not only will you not be “stuck” for ideas and content, but you’ll be overflowing with such a torrent of thoughts you won’t be able to write fast enough to capture it all in one sitting!

These are the same kind of techniques that successful nonfiction authors in business, psychology, finance, health, law, coaching and many other genres use in order to keep coming up with new books in such a high frequency.

How Do You Organize Your Thoughts For Writing?

The starting point to organizing your thoughts in preparation for your book is to create a Mind Map. This is something you can learn in detail in my article: How to Use a Mind Map to Create a Great Book for Your Business.

In other words, you’ll be creating a “map of your mind” as it pertains to the main idea or topic that you’ve chosen for your book. You’ll achieve this by drawing a mind map on a whiteboard, on a wall with post-it-notes or on a piece of paper, mimicking the same way your brain is wired to store information.

Your mind map will include the main idea of your book at the center (typically conveyed in your book’s title and sub-title) and radiating out of it will list everything that needs to be explored further in order to support of your main idea.

These “branches,” or the key topics derived from them, will eventually be turned into book chapters.

Each branch then spawns a number of sub-branches as you expand the depth or complexity of each key topic into smaller building blocks. When you’re using this technique, you’ll be surprised how intuitive it feels. This is because the way you recall information onto the whiteboard, post-it notes or paper diagram maps very closely to the way it’s stored in your head.

At this point you’ll notice time beginning to speed up. Before you know it, you’ll have mapped out all your thoughts and ideas as they pertain to your book’s main idea. In the future, you’ll be using the same mind mapping technique with different main ideas at the center to create new books with ease.

Over time you’ll find that your brain is actually storing every book that you’ll ever write in a filing cabinet called “Main Idea 1,” “Main Idea 2,” and so on. But such a cabinet isn’t arranged linearly in rows and columns like a physical filing cabinet, but instead it’s arranged in a radial way, just like your mind map!

How About Writing Your Thoughts Down?

If you attempt to document your thoughts down one by one in a  “linear” fashion, sitting down with a laptop and just typing away, you may do well for a while (if you happen to feel inspired at that moment.) But when that river runs dry — and soon enough it will! — you may find yourself stuck trying to “force” your thoughts onto a piece of paper.

With the use of a mind map, you’ll never be out of ideas.

How Do You Organize Your Book?

Your mind map will be complete when you’ve exhausted every possible topic, subtopic and sub-subtopic associated with the main idea of your book.

Your next action is to take this “radial” information and structure it into a “linear format” point by point.

• First, you’ll group the main branches thematically. These super chapters will become the main parts or sections of your book structure. For example, the first section of your book may be composed of chapters 1-4, the second section will contain chapters 5-8, and so on.
• Next, you’ll focus on the key topics of each main branch. They’ll connect to a number of subtopics which will expand on the content related to that key topic. The key topics will become your chapters.
• Finally, you’ll group the chapters’ subtopics. Sometimes a subtopic connects to enough sub-subtopics that it might warrant its own sub-chapter. Other times, you’ll combine two or more subtopics into one.

Depending on the depth of your mind map, you may need to go one level deeper. But don’t keep diving ever-deeper: beyond three levels, you may be adding too much complexity to your book.

Now you’re armed with all the information you need to create your book outline.

How Do You Create a Book Outline?

In their simplest form, book outlines are numbered lists of the same kind you can find in any word processor.

To create a detailed outline of your book at the very beginning, you just entering the “super chapters” into your document and label them “Section 1, Section 2, etc. (you don’t need to name each sections yet).

Next, you begin placing the main branches or key topics into the numbered list. Hit the tab key before you go down to the next level of the list so the word processor can begin numbering them again from the top of the count.

At this book-outlining stage, you don’t need to worry about formal chapter names; that will come later on. For now, just list your topics.

Next, for every key topic you’ll tab once to get to a level deeper and begin populating the subtopics that you grouped earlier. Again, don’t worry about creating formal names for the subtopics yet. Just write down enough information to identify them clearly – you can do this in many ways: for example, using just one word, using a short phrase or even a long phrase to jog your memory.

Finally, tab one more time to the next level (3^rd) and repeat the above outlining process for your sub-subtopics.

How Do You Write a Book Outline?

Now that you’ve finished populating your draft book outline, you can begin to give it the shape required to turn it into a proper book.

The first thing you want to do is to read your draft book outline and think about what the best roadmap would be for a reader to step through (e.g. Section 1 followed by Section 2 followed by Section 3? or perhaps Section 1 then Section 3 then Section 2?).

The next thing is to find what the best chapter flow is within each section, and rearrange them by highlighting and dragging around chapters (along with all their contents). The book outline numbering will be automatically re-sequenced.

Once you’ve created the right chapter sequence for each section of the book, repeat this process inside each chapter by rearranging the subtopics in the same fashion using the highlighting and dragging technique.

How to Structure a Nonfiction Book

Now it’s time to clean up your detailed outline. To do that, go back and start tightening (rewriting) all entries to make them less verbose if necessary.

Next, to achieve a balanced visual weight make sure that most chapters have approximately the same number of sub-chapters and that most sub-chapters have an equivalent number of sub-sub-chapters. In order to achieve this you may need to combine some entries along the way.

Finally, it’s time to structure everything in your book outline into a proper table of contents.

You need to begin substituting your book outline entries for actual chapter, sub-chapter and sub-sub-chapter headings. For this task, try your best to use language that will resonate with your target audience.

To create proper headings, aim to be:

Concise

Try to use as few words as possible to convey the main message of the chapter, sub-chapter or sub-sub-chapter. The best table of contents always looks clean and balanced – headings that are too short may skip key information and become confusing for readers, too verbose and your sentences will wrap around making your table of contents look like one big plate of spaghetti.

Clear

Your table of contents is part roadmap and part sales tool. As such, you have to have chapter and sub-chapters headings that are enticing to your readers, that speak directly to them and that address their problems or challenges.

Relatable

Use language your readers can relate to and always try to make them the subject of your headings, when applicable (e.g. use “How Your Mind Works” instead of “How Our Mind Works”).

Congratulations!

You’ve now created the first draft of the table of contents of your book. Why do I say first? For a number of reasons:

To begin with, expect your table of contents to be a living document as you go through the process of writing your book.

As you create actual content for your book, you’ll discover many ways to re-structure your chapters and sub-chapters that make more sense to you.

This is something that’s not only normal but also desired. Why? Because your original table of contents is the starting point of your book-writing journey, not the end. You want your writing to inform your final roadmap. Your initial roadmap is there as just an idea to kick-start your journey and get you going on the right direction.

Secondly, when you pass your manuscript over to your editor, it may come back with suggestions to further refine the table of contents and that may result in new rearranging.

Thirdly, before you start writing your book, it’s a very good idea to get outside feedback about the structure of your table of contents – you’re just too close to the action. Enlist a small group of advance readers to help you run a reality check on your table of contents before you begin to turn it into a book.

Always Try to Get Feedback From Members of Your Target Audience

To get the best feedback, enlist the help of a small group of members of your target audience. They’re the people that you’re trying to help the most, so their feedback will be invaluable to you. You’ll find out first-hand whether the different steps in your roadmap resonate with them, or fall on deaf ears.

Although it’s perfectly okay to run your table of contents by peers and colleagues, since they’re not part of your target audience their feedback will tend to be more academic in nature. This can be valuable, but not as much as feedback from your actual target audience.

Finally, when it comes to family and friends, you can of course ask them for their opinion, but do take their feedback with a grain of salt, because it’s quite rare that they’ll provide you with critical comments. In most cases, family and friends will tend to give you “benign” feedback because they want to be supportive.

Next Steps

Now it’s time to turn your table of contents into a proper book!

I highly recommend that you read my post: How to Write a Compelling Book in 12 Steps: A Must-Read Guide for Nonfiction Authors. It’ll provide you with all you need to know to turn your table of contents into a great book.

All the best on your book outline process!

If you enjoyed this post and you want to learn the steps to write, publish and market a nonfiction book, be sure to check out my free nonfiction success guide, drawn from years of experience editing books for bestselling authors (including a New York Times bestseller) and ghostwriting for CEOs and politicians. Simply click here to get instant access.

Ben

Leave me a comment below if you have any questions or a specific need that I can help you address – I operate an author services firm that specializes in helping entrepreneurs, professionals and business owners who want to publish books as a calling card for prospects, to establish their status as an expert or to generate additional leads for their businesses.

Here are some related articles I highly recommend:

How to Grow Your Business Writing a Nonfiction Book

How to Use a Mind Map to Create a Great Book for Your Business

How to Come Up With Killer Book Titles for Your Nonfiction Book

10 Nonfiction Book Layout Tips that Will Glue Your Audience to the Page

How to Write a Compelling Introduction that Will Move the Needle

Bennett R. Coles is an award-winning author of six books published through Harper Collins (New York) and Titan Publishing Group (London). He is also the publisher at Promontory Press, editor for multiple bestselling authors (including a NY Times bestseller), ghostwriter for CEOs and politicians and the founder of Cascadia Author Services, a boutique full-service firm that specializes in premium author services specifically designed for busy professionals. Our end-to-end services include writers coaching, ghostwriting, editing, proofing, cover design, book layout, eBook production, marketing, printing and distribution.