How Do You Even Write a Book?

5 steps to help you get started

Just like training for a marathon, your first month at a job, or trying to get into a Netflix show that your friend swears “gets better by the third season,” starting something new is hard. And writing a book is no exception to that.

After helping over a hundred authors write and publish their nonfiction books, I would like to offer a few tips that might help you as you start writing your own book. Below, I've mapped out some of the processes I go through with authors to draw out their central message and create the best outlines for their books.

Step 1: Gather your content

Whether it’s late-night musings on your notes app, your journal entries, sermon notes, blog posts, podcast episodes, school papers, a dissertation, or speeches, gather content that you’ve written or recorded that could add value to the book. You can always pare down later, so don’t worry about how well the ideas fit together yet. Add all those entries to a Word doc, and look at that, you’ve got yourself a solid start on your book.

Step 2: Establish your central message

After reading through the content you gathered from step 1, you’ll probably notice some core themes—subjects you’re passionate about that keep coming up. Other questions you can ask yourself to determine your central message:

- What are you known for?

- What have you gained wisdom in over your life?

- What is a theme or thread that keeps coming up in your life?

When I gathered all my content, it centered around writing. So my central message could be that I want other people to experience the benefits of writing and become more confident writers.

Step 3: Determine who your audience is and what they need

When you’re writing a book, you have to always keep your audience in mind. It’s important to have a specific target audience so that you can be more effective and unambiguous in your writing; you want the reader to feel like you are specifically writing to them about their life. And determining your audience’s felt need is basically answering the question, why is your target audience going to pick up your book. You want to answer a question they have or give insight into a topic that they care about.

My audience is 30–50-year-olds who have always wanted to write a book but aren’t confident in their abilities. If I want my audience to experience the benefits of writing, I need to determine what barriers keep people from writing. For many, they don’t know where to start and they don’t feel they have the ability or tools needed to write. My central message that fits my audience’s felt need is: I want to help everyone feel equipped to write a book.

Step 4: Break your central idea into sections

Once you have established your central message, break the idea down into three to five parts to help you communicate the idea with clarity and cohesion. It’s not always necessary to have sections, but this helps, in the beginning, to make sure that you are taking the reader from point A to point B instead of just taking them in circles. Something that helps with this is looking at the table of contents for some of your favorite nonfiction books.

If my central message is helping everyone feel equipped to write a book, my three sections might be:

1) the writing process,

2) how editing is essential, and

3) information about the publishing industry

Step 5: Brainstorm ideas for chapters

Once you’ve outlined the different sections, start adding bullet points under each one with stories and insights that would fit in said section. Look at the content you gathered in step one to help you figure out what content to put in each section. Then start grouping bullet points into topics. Now you have your chapters! Each section should have two to five chapters, but not all sections need to have the same number of chapters.

Part 1 The Writing Process (Brainstorming topics)

• Landing the right title and subtitle

• Outline your book, so the task of writing a book becomes less intimidating

• Examples of different authors’ writing processes: Leslie Jamison, Stephen King, Rachel Held Evans, Erik Larson

• Determining your central message, main theme, and the felt need

• Finding your audience

Part 1: The Writing Process (Chapter Outline)

Chapter 1 What’s in a Title?

Chapter 2 Know Who You’re Writing to

Chapter 3 Structuring Your Book Like a Pro

Chapter 4 Examples of Different Writing Processes

***

After completing these steps, you should have a full and fairly detailed book outline. Then from there, you’ll have more than a blank page to go off of when you’re writing each chapter.

If you’d like more information or guidance, send me a message. I’d love to talk through your book idea with you and help you with your publishing goals.