Have you struggled to get your book started?

There’s many people who don’t write their book, simply because they don’t know where to start. Many people have an idea for a book, but they don’t know how to get it going.

That’s how it was for me when I started to write my first non-fiction book Write and Publish Your First Book. The whole process of seemed a little overwhelming to me. I’d never written a non-fiction book before, and didn’t really know where to start.

However when I read, James Roper and Chandler Bolt’s book Book Launch: How to Write, Market & Publish Your First Bestseller in Three Months or Less AND Use it to Start and Grow a Six Figure Business it really helped me see how mind mapping could help simplify how I wrote my next book.

I began writing down ideas in outline form, but discovered I was missing ideas until I finally did a brain dump using mind mapping.

*The photo above is a mind map of the first half of my book Write and Publish Your First Book.

What is a Mind Map?

A mind map is a simply a writing down all the information you know around a subject. The difference is, you start with the central topic in the middle of the page and then the spokes become the key points on that topic and growing out of those spokes, more detail pops up as you keep writing.

The wonderful thing about mind maps, is that they can be words, pictures or phrases. You can add colour too. There’s software you can use or you can draw your mind map by hand. It can be done in a short time(it took me 30 minutes to do mine) or you can work on it over a few weeks or months.

Mind Maps are an amazing tool for you to use to organize your thoughts and get your book ideas started. If you did a bunch of brain dumping as you mind mapped, then it will be simple to organize detailed chapter outlines. More than likely, you’ll even know what subjects to cover in each chapter.

3 Simple Steps to go from Mind Map to Outline

The drawing above is where I dumped my ideas for my upcoming non-fiction book Write and Publish Your First Book. It’s not something I did when I wrote my first fiction book, and I really found mind mapping for this new book,  really made the process much simpler so that I could get all my ideas down quickly.

For some writers, going from mind map to outline might be confusing. It can feel like all your thoughts are jumbled around as you put them into a mind map. Then to transfer those cluttered ideas into a clear outline, can seem overwhelming.

The biggest thing to remember, is it’s okay to make it a rough outline. Don’t try to make it perfect. It might seem a little tough to start, but as you work at it, it will become easier and more natural.

So, here’s the steps to mind map your book & transition to your outline.

1. Organize your mind map into sections or branches. First, write your main topic in the middle. Then write out everything you can think of on that topic onto little branches that reach out from the main topic. After you finish one section or branch, you repeat this process until your entire mind map is in the form of an outline. When I did the above mind map, this one had six branches. However this was only the first half of the mind map, the second mind map also had 6 branches.
2. After you organize the mind map into sections, create the order for your book. Once you get your thoughts organized into groups, you’ll be able to see with more clarity how it all flows together. There might be seven, or ten groups. Once that’s done, you can begin to order the groups in the sequence of how you want to bring it all together in the book.
3. Next, divide the sections into individualized chapters. This is really the end goal. You are taking the mess you created in your mind map and organizing it in a way that will make it simple for you to write your book.

This whole process might seem a little tough to navigate at first, but as you keep going, you’ll get a feel for where you’re headed with your book and organizing all your ideas into chapter will become more natural.

By the time you are finished with these steps you’ll have a solid outline. This is a great place to start when you begin setting your goals and writing your book.

Have you tried creating a mind map for your book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.