My New Alice Attitude
We’ve gone through the process to see WHO would read our book and WHY they’d buy it. Now we’re sitting in front of our computers, feeling like this scene in Alice in Wonderland as we try to figure out what to do next:
“Alice came to a fork in the road. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked.
‘Where do you want to go?’ responded the Cheshire Cat.
‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered.
‘Then,’ said the Cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
How do we decide which road to take?
The way to get out of the rabbit hole is to map out our book. We sat at the table and pulled together all of our research notes, our marketing information and our overview ideas. Seeing all the pieces together like that helped give us a directional map of where to go next.
Our next step was to create the Table of Contents. We have a lot of chapters for our book so we used a 2 – 3 word prompt for each chapter title. The time to be clever and creative will come when we do the actual writing. At this point, we just needed to get our ideas down on paper.
Seeing the table of contents laid out in one place finally gave us a glimpse into the full picture of our book. After the first review, we asked ourselves, “Does our table of contents answer the question of why someone would want to buy our book?”
We tweaked it and made a few more changes. Our chapters need to show our readers the specific social media information they’ll find in the book and how it will help them grow their business.
Think about how many times you pick up a book at a bookstore or read the table of contents in the Amazon preview area. You check that section first before you make the decision to buy it.
And that’s why this is such an important part of the book writing process. If you don’t know where you need to go, how will you know when you get there? I knew my partner was eager to start the writing process but I asked her to do one more thing before we both started pounding away on the keyboard.
One more chapter thing
With our framework in place, we’re now going to write a 3 – 4 sentence synopsis of each chapter. It’s time to flush out the details of what each chapter will teach our readers. We’ve added a unique twist to our chapters (Sorry, I can’t share this part with you just yet!) so we’ve got quite a bit of work ahead of us before we actually sit down and do the actual writing of the book.
And just like in Alice in Wonderland, now that we have a map of where we’re going, our chapter overviews will take us all the way to end:
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Photo credit: Genetics Exhibit
