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Summary: Got a great idea for an ebook but can't get started? You need a structure.

Category: Writing

Words: 650

Structuring Your Ebook

Copyright (c) 2002 by Angela Booth

(Angela Booth has been a professional writer for 25 years, and is published by mainstream publishers.)

Got a great idea for an ebook but don't know how to start writing it? Find book's structure, and it will (almost) write itself.

I've got three partially-completed books on my hard drives that I'll complete one day. Maybe.

All three books are viable, with great information and great ideas. What they lack is a structure. They're books with a body but no bones.

I started each book thinking that structure would come to me as I wrote. Many thousands of words later, I'm still waiting.

With luck, I'll manage to work out a structure for each book, and will turn them to profit. However they taught me importance of working out a book's structure BEFORE I start writing.

Having structure in place makes a book easy to write. Writing a book without a structure is like trying to build a house without a blueprint.

=> The structure starts with your working title

How easy do you think following ebooks would be to write?

* 101 Ways To Secure A Retirement Income

* Ten Secrets Of A Successful Day Trader

* Every Writer's Quick-Action Guide To Writing An Ebook

* Improve Your Golf In Thirty Days

* Seven Days To Your Own Successful Home Business

These titles make excellent working titles for an ebook, because they provide a built-in structure for book.

You may use your working title, or can change it. You can also use your working title as a sub-title.

Tip: when you decide on a title, print it out and stick it on side of your monitor. While you're writing, you can go off on tangents if you don't keep your book's premise in mind at all times.

=> Create an outline

Here is what works much, much better: accept critic but always, always remember you--the adult, is in charge. Accept that critic has gifts to share but he only gets to share them when you say so and even how you say so. Accept that we all contain light and shadow, and our full creative power means we have to listen to all parts of ourselves, icky and angelic.

Fully acknowledging critical parts of yourself is not same as agreeing, entangling with, arguing with, or believing this part of yourself. The best three tools to be in dialogue with critic are:

1) Tell critic, "Thank you for sharing," when you do not currently need his input.

2) Boss critic back during first drafts, getting paint on canvas, or designing sweater, then invite critic to be heard during editing, revising, during times you need discernment.

3) Never let critic have last word. You adult creator is always in charge.

It's very interesting to me that I had to take medication for 6 weeks (yesterday being exactly 6 weeks since my surgery) to keep my body from rejecting "foreign" object in my body...that is, stainless steel knee and ligaments and connective cement. It makes me think of how often we reject our creative impulses...how something that will renew us comes right into our laps and we reject it, consciously or consciously. The medicine that I had to take had to be monitored carefully. I had to have bloodwork every week, and I had to monitor some of my foods because excess Vitamin K threw dosage off. Each week, dosage was tweaked to make sure that this medication, this tonic for bodily acceptance, was working properly. ACCEPTING a gift of renewal, it seems, is tough work...it needs monitoring, upkeep, attention, and willingness to surrender to what pain can teach us. Just as that which our spiritual expansiveness requires from us.