How To Write Your First Non-Fiction Book and Make Money from Your Writings as an Author by Sesan Oguntade - HTML preview

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Chapter 5: Get to the Body of your Book

List Topics

This is just a practice that will help you to start your book from the 'foundation' to the final stage of it. It is like a building project which builders start from the foundation to the final stages of the building. You will be developing the working skeleton of the book with this step. With the main problem in your mind, begin to think of some related sub-problems and write them down. Do this freely and write as many as possible. You will still be able to pick the important or relevant ones later.

Let me show you an example from my book 'You Can Stop Masturbation'

I want you to look at the sub topics I developed which later became the different book chapters:

Introduction

Just What Is Masturbation?

3 Parts Of Man

This Will Help Your % Score

This Is Also Important

Reasons Why People Indulge In It

Why It is Not Right

Read This Story With All Your Heart!

Solution Charts

Your Mind is a Workshop

Start a Relationship with God

Clear Out “Wastes” From Your Mind

Replace With Useful Things

Begin Work Immediately

Package the “Product” and Sell to the Public

The Ultimate Decision

It started with the Introduction (most books start with this) and then build its case up to the last stage in order to solve the problem it promised to solve with the book title.

Your experience will be relevant here.

Apart from the Introduction and probably the next one or two chapters which I will advise must contain carefully selected contents which should encourage your readers to read on (I will show what you write under these chapters later), other chapters should contain descriptions of solutions to identified sub-problems under the main problem your book is solving.

For example, if you want to write, How to Publish a Newspaper, you can have subtopics like: How to Get Trained, How to Register ISSN, How to Source Articles, How to Obtain Cheap Printing Materials, How to Find Good Freelance Writers etc.

Can you get the gist?

Note: You can also further use free internet keyword research tools to carry the step I described immediately above, for example, if you are writing how to publish a newspaper, you can type Publish Newspaper in the search box on these websites. Pick the relevant ones to the goal of your book.

You can also visit google.com and search for "publish newspaper + blogs" to see results of blogs that write on your topic. When you get to the blogs, try to look at the various categories they write on. You don't have to copy anything here, just use these blogs contents to get ideas about the sub topics.

You should now pick the relevant ones from the various options you have written down. You can pick 8 or 10 more depending on how big you want your book to be and ensure you arrange them in a proper way that will show you are building a case for the problem you are trying to solve. You should look again at the example for my book, You Can Stop Masturbation which I shared earlier:

This is how the chapters of your book will be arranged. This step will help your readers to get organized in their learning when they are reading your book.