Planning Before Writing Your Book Is a Major Key to Success
Earlier this year, I released my first book. It was not self-published; rather, it was handled by a trade publisher that is small but has been around for many years. This company has a well-established process for all its books, which includes sending each manuscript through at least two editors, a separate proofreader, and finally an indexer. But its strategy for success starts long before any manuscript is ever submitted. This publisher demands a good deal of planning up front to ensure that any manuscripts it accepts will become worthwhile, successful books. These steps will work just as well for authors who plan to self-publish as they will for those who go the more traditional route.
One of the main steps that this niche publisher makes each potential author do is to write a detailed proposal about their book, before they ever write a word of the book itself. One reason this was a great exercise is that it made me envision the entire book ahead of time, so I could see "the big picture" before I got mired down writing the individual paragraphs and sentences.
The best part of this exercise, to me, was the requirement to write the entire Table of Contents (TOC) as part of the proposal. When I first read that the publisher needed that up front, I was not pleased, because I knew it would take a lot of thought, work, and planning-a lot more than I wanted to put into an initial proposal. And I did struggle with it for hours, over the course of a week, first writing the basic list of chapters that I had in mind, then changing the order of the chapters as I thought more deeply about it all. Yet, that was the easy part.
Since this was going to be a nonfiction book (a lengthy guide about the marketing process), every chapter would have subheadings for each individual topic it would cover (as is the norm for most how-to guides). So I ended up having to plan out all 14 chapters in detail: What would each include, and in what order? Thinking of this as a how-to guide that would start with the most basic information on the topic and work its way through to intermediate tenets and finally to high-level strategies, I had to reorganize my thoughts several times as I worked toward a TOC that would carry the readers on a journey that made sense.
So I would list all the major sections (topics) in each chapter, then let the list sit overnight and look at the next day with fresh eyes. I needed to see it from the readers' point of view: If I knew nothing about the field of marketing, did the order of topics make sense? Would I learn what I needed to learn before moving on to another chapter where I'd be reading more-advanced information? I also took into account my own expertise on the subject to decide what should come first and what mattered most. Combining these two points of view guided me through the process of planning a solid Table of Contents. Studying the TOCs from similar books also helped.
When that task was finally done, and the whole proposal was finished, I was very relieved. Soon after, when the publisher accepted the proposal with barely any changes or suggestions, a note came back to me saying that it was one of the most well-thought-out proposals they had ever seen. Time to celebrate!
But if I thought I was happy about it then, I ended up appreciating that TOC exercise much more later on. When I was in the throes of writing and rewriting sentences, staying up late at night checking sources and wracking my brain for the perfect verbs, it was a blessing to have that TOC to guide me. I got to a point where I couldn't see the forest for the trees. In other words, once I was worrying about every sentence (tree), I didn't have the mindset to see the big picture (forest) anymore. If, in the middle of writing chapter 5 of 14, I had had to stop and ask myself what topic to cover next, I don't think I could have done it. My book would've ended up as a mish-mash of topics and chapters that were not in a sensible, readable order. But because I had written my guide ahead of time, when I was thinking about the project as a whole, knowing what to do next was never a problem.
More than once, when my eyes were bleary and my fingers tired of typing, I was relieved to refer to my TOC and thankful that the publisher had forced me to complete it before I started writing. I would recommend this course of action to anyone who wants to write a coherent book, be it fiction or nonfiction, company-published or self-published. Because, as in other areas of life, good planning paves the path to success.
About the Author:
Kathy Dempsey is a professional editor, writer, and speaker who published her first book, which teaches librarians how to market their value, in 2009.
|
