Hey there!

The instant I saw the shape on the page, I knew it wasn't going to work out.

My client had brought me with her initial book outline. She'd been working on it hard for ages, coached by a well-meaning friend who wrote fiction.

I could tell she was discouraged. She'd been trying to write this book for years, and she thought an outline would help. Instead, it had just made the book feel more out of reach.

"Maybe I'm just not supposed to write this book," she said.

I shook my head. "You just have the wrong outline," I told her. "We'll get you sorted out."

Her well-meaning friend had encouraged her to follow a standard fiction plot. Inciting incident, rising action, midpoint, climax, denouement—the whole works.

This would have been fantastic advice if she was writing a mystery novel, or even a memoir.

But my client was writing a how-to book.

I asked her what journey she was taking her readers on.

In other words, where were they starting out, and where did she hope they'd be at the end of the book?

The journey she described was simple and straightforward:

Uncertain newbie —> Confident amateur

She was teaching them how to learn a super specific skill, yet because her outline was so story-focused, she was setting herself up to write a very thin memoir with some lessons woven in. And she was bouncing off the idea, hard.

"I don't want to tell them my whole story," she told me. "I just want to teach them what I know."

But teaching what she knew also wasn't as simple as dumping out a bunch of facts and organizing them into topics. Her story was important—and, in order to get her readers across the finish line to "Confident amateur," we had to give them a transformative experience.

We had to figure out how to take the reader on that journey.

As a nonfiction author, you might think that your job is to provide your reader with information. But you’re actually in the business of taking your reader on a journey of transformation and discovery.

I inadvertently discovered that when I published my first nonfiction book, From Chaos to Creativity.

My publisher liked the title structure, and so we stuck with it for the next three books.

• From Big Idea to Book
• From Dream to Reality
• From Solo to Supported

As you can see, the title of each book explicitly describes the journey that the reader goes through.

• Do you have a big idea? I'll teach you to turn it into a book.
• Do you dream of the freedom of freelancing? I'll help you make that a reality.
• Are you lonely in your writing career? I'll help you find community.

But defining your reader's journey is more than just coming up with two words that describe the start and finish point.

It’s about shape and structure.

The structure is your outline. It is the nitty-gritty details, the architectural blueprint.

The shape is more like the overall vibe and genre and reader journey of your book. The experience your reader is going to have.

Shape is the journey you're taking your reader on. Structure is how you arrange the chapters to deliver that journey. You cannot pick the second one until you've decided the first.

Going back to my client, once we decided that the shape of her book was about upleveling skills, we knew we were leading the reader through a transformation, and the focus needed to be on the knowledge she was teaching and helping people internalize it.

Her story was a great tool for encapsulating that learning and helping drive home the points she was trying to make, but her story wasn't the point of the book. The knowledge was.

We just needed to decide the right order of operations, and figure out how to weave her story in to have the most impact.

Once we nailed the outline, she went to work.

She'd struggled for years, trying to fit her story into the wrong shape—but with the new outline in hand, she banged it out in four months.

Four months!

While running a full time brick-and-mortar business.

Every book has its own unique shape and structure.

Finding your own can be a challenge, but sometimes all it takes is an outside perspective to help you bang it out.

I'm teaching a class tomorrow morning about the different nonfiction shapes and structures that go into leading your readers on an effective journey.

If you're writing nonfiction, I’d love to see you there!

We’ll be live at 9am Pacific, or you can watch the replay for free through Indie Author Training.

​Register here to join us.

Talk soon,

Jessie

P.S.: Once you understand how you are taking your reader on a journey, everything else becomes so much easier.

So if you've been struggling with your manuscript for a while, hit reply and let's set up a time to meet.

The only thing I love more than talking about books is getting authors unstuck!