Creating Your Ideal Book Outline

Write, Edit, & Publish Podcast

Episode 08

Delve with me into the art of crafting the perfect book outline to bring your writing dreams to life in just 90 days. Whether you're a meticulous plotter or a spontaneous pantser, I've got you covered with strategies that cater to your unique writing style and help you align your book's voice with your target audience.

Let’s explore various outlining methods, from traditional outlines to mind maps, and discuss how to choose the one that suits your writing approach. I’ll also tackle common pitfalls like perfectionism and analysis paralysis, ensuring you stay on track and avoid getting bogged down by endless revisions.

Discover how to transform your book ideas into a clear and compelling structure, and hear real-life insights from discovery calls that can guide you in aligning your voice with your ideal readers. Flexibility is key, and I encourage you to remain open to new ideas and feedback to enhance your manuscript's value.

As your ghostwriting unicorn, I'm here to support you on this exciting journey from concept to publication. Don't let fear hold you back—take the leap and book a discovery call to fast-track your path to becoming a published author. With my personalized guidance, your manuscript can evolve from a mere idea to a polished product ready for the world in just 90 days.

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Disclaimer: The information in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The content shared by the host, guests, and any affiliates is not intended to substitute for professional legal or financial advice or any professional advice specific to your situation. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional with any questions you may have.

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00:17 - Lynn (Host)

Hey, future authors, it's Lynn Aliquity-Smargis again for another episode of the Write, edit and Publish your Podcast. I am so thrilled to bring you another episode so you can learn more about writing, editing and publishing for your new or your first self-published book. So before we jump into today's podcast, I just wanted to let you know that Unicorn Publishing Company is what I call an a la carte publishing company. So my publishing company is very different from your other traditional or hybrid publishing companies as, where I walk you through the entire self-publishing process, I don't have any contracts. That takes away your rights and I don't handle your money. So I am the publishing company for creatives that creatives retain and hold all of their rights and their creative like what they want to do with their book, and I simply help you, walk you through that, hold your hand through that whole process so you get it done as quickly, as efficiently as possible, while saving you time and money. All right, so let's jump into.

01:15

Today's topic is how to. No, today's topic is implementing your book outline. So this is part of our continuing outlining series on how to outline your book outline. So this is part of our continuing outlining series on how to outline your book, and today we're going to dive into how to choose your outline method, how to avoid common pitfalls and implement strategies for success. So first you want to choose your outline method. So we talked about some different types of ways. You can outline your book on the last episode, whether that's a traditional outline, whether that is the epic method, or you're doing a mind map, or you're outlining it in any different way. There's many, many different types of outlines you can do. So, no matter what outline you're doing, you want to choose the correct outline method that works for you. Ok, so a mind map works right for me, but that might not be your style. So you want to choose one that works for you. So you want to first assess your writing style. Are you a plotter or a pantser, in other words, like you fly by to see your pants with ideas? Do you think linearly or in clusters, right? So if you think linearly, a traditional outline or an epic outline might be a better way for you to outline your thing. If you think in clusters, a mind map might be better. If you think linearly, the snowball method or snowflake method might work better for you.

02:32

Are you a visual or a verbal processor? Are you detail-oriented or big picture? Okay. So ask yourself these questions and write down the answers and then find out which type of outlining is best for you and you'll work best with right. Are you going to work best with on the computer, online, or are you going to work best doing pencil and paper? And if you're doing your outline on paper, definitely use pencil and have a big one of those big click erasers. I love those.

02:59

Okay, consider your book type. Is it fiction or non-fiction? Do you have a technical complexity to your book? So, in other words, is it very technical oriented? Okay.

03:09

Do you need to have research requirements for your book? Do you have a timeline structure? Like we said before, epic outlining is great if you have a timeline structure. Do you have character involvement? Is this a fiction book with characters? Then that's going to decide. You know what type of outline you're going to use. If you have a character book with outlines or a fiction book with character outlines and things like that, you definitely probably don't want to use a traditional method because that's going to be way too clunky for that specific type of book.

03:36

All right, evaluate your schedule. What is your available writing time? Like we said before in a couple episodes ago. Right, you want to take the amount of amount. Say we say you have a 40 000 word book and each chapter you have 10 chapters at 4 000 words a chapter. Then how much time do you have available to write those chapters? Okay, and which one of these outlines are going to be best for outlining those chapters? All right. What are your project deadlines and your research needs? Okay. Do you have any collaboration requirements that are going to maybe extend your process a little bit more? Okay, or maybe shorten it, depending on the type of collaboration that you have. And what are your publishing goals? All right. So all of these things you can take into consider when you're making your book outline.

04:21

Again, if you want to publish a book faster, you'll want to consider a book series. Now, a book series. You might ask what that is. You might have the same topic but break it up into smaller books, right? So instead of writing one 40,000 word book, you might have three books that are 10,000 words a piece, or three books that are 15,000 words a piece. Okay, so you have this pretty much the same amount of content, right? Give or take, but you're coming out with a series of small books instead of writing one one large book, and that's actually a really popular way to publish right now is publishing in series.

04:57

Okay, so let's take a look at common outlining mistakes. All right, so this is going to be a shorter episode today, so we're gonna take a break and when we come back we're gonna talk about some common outlining mistakes. Hey, future authors, it's Linda Liquidy-Smargis, back with the second half of Implementing your Book Outlines, and this is a little bit of a shorter episode. So we're just talking about, in this episode, choosing your outline method and common outlining mistakes. So first, okay, the perfectionism trap. Let's talk about this because this happens a lot with my clients and that's why I do a lot of ghostwriting. Coaching, right, I do writing, but I do a lot of coaching because a lot of people, a lot of clients I don't want to say a lot, but there are several clients I have that are looking to make things perfect.

06:02

Right, you don't want things to be perfect. They're never going to be perfect it has to be good enough, and good enough doesn't mean it's bad, or good enough doesn't mean it's low quality. Good enough means that you have valuable content that looks professional, that you're proud to show off. Okay, that doesn't mean it has to be perfect, it's okay. No book is perfect, right? You can take literary works that win awards, and they're not perfect. Everybody can always get more feedback. You can put out a second edition if you feel like doing that, or a different type of book that has the same thing, but just get feedback on your book. Okay, you can use a beta group, too, before you publish it, to get some feedback and maybe change some stuff up if you want to. But you don't have to.

06:40

But you want to know that you don't want to get stuck in this perfectionism trap of, like over-planning, right, revision, revision, revision because you think it's never good enough. So you're going to get, you know, another revision, or you're going to do another revision because you don't like it, or you have someone else revise it, right. So I've had I'm helping a client right now that she's had three people revise her book after I wrote it, which is perfectly fine, right. But she also didn't get to publish it and it's been several years. So you want to make sure that you don't get caught in that endless revision cycle. Okay, and it's okay to have two book editors work on your book. Maybe one does the main bulk of your editing and then you have a separate person do your grammar editing, whatever that is. But just, I definitely wouldn't get more than two editors.

07:22

All right, analysis, paralysis, right. You start looking at it and be like, oh, how can this be better? How can this be better? Oh, I don't know if I like this. Like, is this really good? Does this explain the details enough? Okay, you get into that cycle and you go down that rabbit hole of, oh my gosh, I can't, you can't move on to the next step in publishing your book because you're so looped into, like, hyper-analyzing everything. Right, it might be hyper-analyzing a paragraph, it might be hyper-analyzing a chapter, it might be hyper-analyzing the way you've made your outline, whatever it is. Don't get into that trap of hyper-analyzing. If you need help with that kind of stuff, I can definitely help you with my ghostwriting and book coaching program on that. All right.

08:03

Fear of starting right, this is another thing.

08:05

I also have.

08:05

Fear of publishing, okay, so some people are just afraid to start their book. Or they start their book and they are afraid to publish it. Because I've had clients literally say to me what if no one reads my book. Okay, that's never been the case. I have never seen that happen. The only time I've ever seen actually okay, let me back up, the only time I've ever seen that happen is an author in my writer's group said he's published four books and he hasn't sold any of them, but he doesn't care about selling them and he doesn't do any marketing or advertising at all. So if you don't do any marketing or advertising at all, you don't tell anybody about your book you're never going to sell it. Okay. But if you do any type of marketing or advertising, chances are you're going to sell a few copies. Okay.

08:42

Or if you're not selling your book, you're not me building your book and creating it and publishing it to sell it. Um, you know, for your main thing of selling it. Right, like you can say, okay, you're selling your book, but you're really using it as a calling card for your business, which I've done before, which is a great calling card. People get so excited when they meet a business person who is also an author like people love meeting authors. It's like you can see their face light up and everything. So it definitely puts you in a higher category and a higher level of respect with people when you hand them a professionally published book. It's very exciting and, by the way, I've never handed anybody my self-published book and people look at it and say who's your publisher? Literally never Say people don't care about who your publisher is. People care that you've written a book, that it looks professional, it's professionally edited, it looks great and it's easily readable and it delivers value. That's what people care about about the book, not who's published it. All right.

09:34

So if you're starting and or if you're publishing, okay, so people get oh my gosh, what if no one's ever going to like this book or no one's going to read this? No one's going to like this book. What if I get a lot of bad reviews? Okay, you can't go in with that mindset. I mean, it's just going to like, stress you out, you're never going to get your book published and you're never going to reach your goal of being an author. So you need to change up your mindset. If that's where you are and that's where part of my coaching comes in, all right.

09:59

The rigidity problem Okay, so you make your outline and you're never changing it. You're inflexible for your structure and that's not good either. Right, like you don't want to change all your chapters around, clearly, right. But when you're writing your book I always find every book I've ever written, whether it's my own or it's for someone else and one of my clients there's always going to be two or three chapters. We at least change the order of, because as you're writing, you're like oh wait, this makes much more sense. It's chapter three, right? So you want to make sure that you don't have the rigidity problem and that you're not inflexible, that you are flexible, okay, that you like someone suggests a new idea.

10:35

I was just talking to someone on a discovery call and they said, well, this is what I want my book to sound like, but this is what's happening. And I said, okay, well then you need to change your voice and style to this so that you attract this type of avatar. And they're like but I don't want to change my voice and style. And then I'm like okay, well then you're not going to attract the avatar that you want, right? So they're telling me they want to attract a certain avatar, but they want to speak in a voice that doesn't attract that avatar. Now, those two things clearly don't align.

11:00

So you need to be if you're talking to a professional and you say, well, I want to do this and that's clearly not going to work, okay, then don't do that idea, okay, so you can't be resistant to new ideas, right? So? Or inspiration, right, finding things that give you inspiration. If you were like, no, this is what I'm going to do, no matter what, I'm not going to do anything outside this. I'm just going to do X, y, z when I plot this and that's going to be it and it's never going to change because this is how I want it. Okay, so you don't want to be that rigid.

11:31

So you want to be open to new ideas to make sure that you, you know, if there's something valuable in that, that's that you can add in there. That's going to bring even more value to your book. Right, it doesn't have to be a huge change to your book, it can be something small. Like I said a couple episodes ago of my clients, I suggested a new chapter for her and she's like, oh yeah, I think that's great, let's throw that in there, because it brought more value to her book and also gave a little more information about a certain section of her book. That would clearly bring value to her readers.

12:00

All right, so the detail overload, okay, so people are like, oh, and they throw in 500 details, right, you don't need 500 details to make your book more valuable. As far as information, okay, it needs to be clear and concise and you don't want to have run on things. So I see that a lot. I see people that publish books that are self-published and you can tell they clearly haven't gotten an editor because they literally will repeat the same phrase 25 times in their book. Like literally, no joke, 25 times. Like I just read a book last week that this author repeated the same phrase probably 30 to 40 times and it was really getting annoying by chapter two. So, yeah, so you want to make sure you're not doing things like that, like repeating it too much information that you're babbling on and so people lose the point. Like they don't understand the point of the chapter or the book, uh, if they're overwhelmed by a lot of, like little detailed notes, uh, or if your execution is really confusing like you're not they're like people like how you executed your book. People aren't sure, like what it is about or like what to take the next step, right, so they're not clear on your instructions or your education that you're giving them in your book, all right.

13:11

So my pro tips are start simple when implementing your book outline. Stay flexible. Be open to people's opinions not that you don't have to take them, all right, but be open to other ideas and opinions and advice. Trust the process right. It's like a work of art. You might paint it, come back, paint it, come back. That's okay if you leave it for a week, but have a deadline where you're going to come back to your outline. Adapt your outline as needed and keep moving forward. So, no matter what right, just keep moving forward with the process.

13:41

And if you're stuck in your book outline, I always that's like one of my key things that I do for people is help them write a fabulous outline, because I always have ideas. I never run out of ideas. So if you're stuck and you can't come up with any ideas, definitely book a discovery call with me. I can definitely help you with some ideas for that.

13:58

All right, my friends and future authors, thank you for joining our another outlining episode of Write, edit and Publish. Remember to hit that follow and subscribe button, whether you're on YouTube or you're on an audio player for our podcast, because next week we're going to explore actionable strategies for implementing your book outline and remember future authors. If you want to see your book dreams sparkle into reality, make sure you jump into. Make sure, excuse me you hit the discovery call button so we can weave your story into gold. As your ghostwriting unicorn, I'll fast track your journey from idea to published author in as little as 90 days. Your magical transformation can begin with one click, so make sure to book your discovery call below All right future authors. I'll see you next week for another Write, edit and Publish podcast.