Outlining progress

I am not sure this counts a break through, but last week I took up the offer of a free ebook on how to create an ebook. This was given away by an American who makes money selling information products ........ like ebooks. It reminds me of the joke that the best of building a small business was to set up a business selling products aimed at people seeking to build a small business.

Anyway this ebook offered to show how to outline a book over the weekend and showed how it thought it could be done. I decided to give it a go.

The suggestion was to use post cards and sticky notes. I decided to use mind mapping software on my iPad, but the process was the same. In working my way through I realised why I had been struggling previously. The advocated approach is largely  one of "top down and eliminate". With an amount of material already written I had been attempting to see how I could assemble that material, sort of more "bottom up and enhance".

Now I have a good outline. I suspect I will review and refine it over the next week or so, but this is a real step forward.

One of the tips was to phrase your chapter headings as questions. This remind me of an old boss' advice to always ask "so what?" This made me think about titles for the book. There is no pressure to finalise this but I am keeping ideas.

I have three so far.

• The "ronseal" option ie The (Change) Sponsors' Handboo
• My earlier thought of "To Delivery And Beyond" 
• New idea of "So What?" or something using this.

All in all I do feel I am making progress and writing this blog is a good support to that effort.