Michael DeLon
Creating a coherent superstructure is likely the most difficult part of outlining. When you open to the book’s Table of Contents, can you tell what the book is about? Do the parts clearly fit together into a focused whole?
To aid your outlining efforts, here is a collection of outline templates you can use.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath exemplifies this most basic of outlines. In between an introduction and conclusion, six chapters move in a straight line. The introduction asks a question: What makes ideas stick? The chapters describe six characteristics of ideas that stick. And the epilogue summarizes the book’s discoveries. Easy to follow, easy to understand.
Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg also follows this template.
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Obviously related to the Simple List, the Complex List outline is suitable when your material cannot quite be reduced to one level on the outline. Consider Carmine Gallo’s book Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds. He could have listed all nine secrets in a simple list, but instead he categorized them under three headings: Emotional, Novel, Memorable. One of the perks of a Complex List is that makes a greater number of points easier to remember. Can you remember 9 secrets in order? Not likely. But 3 concepts, each with 3 secrets? Probably.
This book’s outline is a Complex List. Organized beneath the 7-Step Publishing Process are the 20 chapters that form the book’s backbone. Listing 20 straight steps would be overwhelming, but 7 is not so bad.
Daniel H. Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us begins (Part One) with a paradigm shift. We tend to think that motivation comes from carrots and sticks. But he argues that the strongest source of motivation is actually ourselves. He explains this source of motivation in Part Two: it consists of our human needs for autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Part Three is a practical toolkit explaining how to apply the message of Parts One and Two.
Deep Work by Cal Newport combines Paradigm and Explanation into what he calls “Part 1: The Idea.” Application follows in “Part 2: The Rules.” Dale Carnegie’s classic How to Win Friends & Influence People also follows this structure.
In chapter 3 on choosing your market, we outlined a 3-step process to narrow your audience. It begins with identifying a problem, then creating a solution, then locating people who need that solution. You can use a similar process to outline your book: explain the problem, present your solution, and outline the benefits to the reader.
A Loose Collection outline includes many chapters organized around a few common themes. While the overall book may have an outline, the order of individual chapters is not as significant. Consider the ever-popular Chicken Soup for the Soul series by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. The 20th anniversary edition of the book that started it all contains stories in seven categories.
Another good example is Roy H. Williams’ book The Wizard of Ads (Ads, not Oz). Its structure consists of three sections: Turing Words into Magic, Turning Strangers into Customers, and Turning Dreams into Realities. Underneath these three sections are 101 collected chapters.
If the story of your life is wound up in your unique offering, you may choose to make it a prominent part of your book. Ryan Levesque took this route in his book Ask, splitting the chapters into the main sections of The Story and The Methodology. Describing his path to discovering the Ask Formula precedes Ryan’s explanation of the formula itself.
To make the outlining process easier, we have a free gift for you. It’s a Book Outline Template—the exact document we use with our own clients.
Access your free download by typing bit.ly/pbetemplate (case-sensitive) into your favorite web browser.
Michael DeLon is the founder of Credible Author. When he's not helping people become authors, he loves reading great books, playing games with his wife and daughters, and meeting up with good friends for early-morning coffee.
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