How to Outline a Self-Help Book
Have you wanted to write a book forever but thinking about staring at a blank page is paralyzing? Where do you even start?
Imagine if you could sit down every day (or however often) to write, and you knew exactly what to write about. What if you always knew exactly what came next and could pick up right where you left off each time?
Dream come true, right?
Even if you aren’t worried about writer’s block and you think you can write a ton of words with ease, think about what you’re going to end up with. It’s going to be a mess because it was a stream of consciousness.
No. Save yourself the time in editing and make a plan now.
This is where an outline comes in. I know, it might feel like a school assignment and you just want to write, but trust me, you want one.
I can’t stress enough how important an outline is. You must have one for a self-help book. Must!
First off, make sure you already answered the three big questions of a nonfiction book before starting an outline. Find those three questions here.
If you’re writing a book based on a course or coaching program
You might already have a loose outline. Do this exercise anyway because things might change a little for this book. Look at the modules and lessons and see if you need to make any adjustments based on a slightly different target audience. A different audience (even if it’s a tiny difference) has different needs. Learn more about narrowing your audience here.
If you’ve noticed any FAQs from people who’ve taken your course, see if you can add those answers into the book. Or maybe those questions would be answered if you swapped modules 4 and 5.
This is your chance to redo your course, so optimize it.
Okay, let’s get into it.
Open a document or journal or whatever and list out the biggest, most surface-level ideas you want to cover. Just bullet points (or do a web if you want). For example, pretend I’m writing a book teaching beginners how to garden. The biggest topics I want to cover are preparing the garden bed, planting the seeds, tending the garden, and harvesting the fruits and veggies. Those are four steps to how to have a successful garden. Think about what the reader needs and wants to know about this topic.
Then dive one level deeper. Start listing some bullet points within each of those big topics. Within the topic of preparing the garden bed, I want to talk about how/where to set up a bed, types of soil, and maybe some other basic-level things that anyone who knows anything about gardening (clearly not me) would add to this list. Anyway, don’t go too in depth yet.
Once you go through all your main topics, dive deeper into a third level. These are the details. When I talk about where/how to set up a bed, I might talk about how big it needs to be and how high off the ground, how deep it should be, if we need to surround it with a fence or something so animals don’t get your veggies, what to line the bottom with, how much sun the area should get, etc. I’m still not explaining my thoughts on each of these topics (that doesn’t come until you actually write the book), but I am listing all the detailed topics I want to discuss. Go through all your main topics.
You have an outline! Now edit it.
Audience
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Does it make sense? Does it start where the audience expects it to start? Does it answer all their questions? If I was writing an advanced guide to gardening, my outline would look a lot different because I would skip a lot of the basic topics for beginners, so always keep your reader in mind.
No One Right Way
Know that there is never a single way to organize a book. My big topics could instead be the four seasons, and the focus is optimizing my garden during all four seasons: preparing in the winter, planting in the spring, tending in the summer, and harvesting in the fall. (I don’t garden, so this could be wrong, but just go with it.) Or maybe I break up the book into how to grow veggies, how to grow fruits, how to grow herbs, and how to grow flowers (if that makes sense for your audience).
I’m only giving examples with four big topics, but you can have as few as two and as many as six. More than that, and it’s getting a little too big. That might be a sign those topics are level-two topics rather than level one—or maybe that you need to write more than one book so it isn’t 800 pages.
Repetition
As you’re reviewing your outline, see if any topics repeat throughout the sections. If I’m talking about how much to water/feed the plants in each section, maybe I need to have an entire section about water and fertilizer. I didn’t think it was that important before, but as I can see from my outline, it is!
Same-Length Sections
If one section is way longer or way shorter in bullet points than the others, consider if it should be split up or joined with another section. Maybe it’s a bigger or smaller topic than you originally thought. We want all the topics to be about the same length, so if you’re looking at the outline and see that won’t be happening, resolve that issue now.
Now What Do I Do?
Done? Here’s what you’re looking at now. Level 1 could be the parts of the book (Part 1, 2, 3, 4), level 2 is the chapters, and level 3 is the subheadings within those chapters. Or you could instead make level 1 the chapters, then levels 2 and 3 nesting subheadings within those chapters. It’s up to you; do what’s best for you book and your audience. Either way, you have your chapters figured out now plus a rough guide of what goes in each chapter! Nice!
Keep editing the outline for as long as you want until you’re comfortable with the organization of the book. Or if you’re ready to dive in now, go for it!
Make sure you stick to your outline as you write. Don’t go off on tangents, and don’t forget topics.
Why Outlines Are Amazing
The best thing about having an outline is you can start writing whatever chapter you want. If you feel like writing Chapter 5 first, do it. You know what’s going to be in Chapters 1 through 4, so there’s no reason to write those first if you don’t want.
Every day when you sit down to write, you can consult your outline, choose a chapter or section to write that day, and start typing. You already have all the ideas written down, so there’s no Hmm, what do I write about now? dawdling. No writer’s block either! And self-editing will be so much easier for you at the end because you know it was at least cohesive and clear in theory. If you just opened a document and started writing stream of consciousness, you’d have a whole lot more work to do.
Once you’re done with your first draft, you can self-edit! And when you’re comfortable with your book and have done all you can, it’s time to hire editors. Not sure if you’re ready for editors? Check out this blog post.
