After you find a niche to write a book about, the next step is to create a story outline and figure out how to make money from your book.
Outlines are important. When you have a good one, you can ensure your book will have quality content.
That will help you get better reviews, more sales, more of a list to build, and ultimately… more money.
And if you create a story outline MY way, you can be 100% sure that your book is structured better than anyone else’s out there.
Not only that, but your outline will be done within 20 minutes – tops.
Here’s the “Rachel Rofé Outline” in 7 steps ;):
1. Go onto Amazon.com and do a search for whatever your niche is.
2. Open the first 10 books, then sort them out by their bestseller ranking.
The bestseller ranking is on every single book page. #1 = the bestselling book on Amazon, and then it goes all the way down into the millions.
It looks like this:
3. Next, click on the “Look Inside” on each book:
4. Write out the Table Of Contents for the book that’s selling the best. You’re not going to copy this verbatim. It’s just a starting point outline which we’ll modify.
5. Go through the other books Table Of Contents, and then mark a star next to everything you see coming up over and over again.
If you see anything else that looks good in other peoples’ outlines, add that to your running outline.
(This isn’t going to look pretty or even make sense… you’re still in research mode.)
6. Go through the reviews for each of those 10 books. Click on the 1 star reviews, and the 5 star reviews that were rated as the most helpful.
Write down anything that people either really liked, really didn’t, or wanted to see more of onto your running outline.
7. Now you should have a huge list of the best pieces of peoples’ outlines, plus what reviewers are eager to see.
At this point, you’re ready to make an outline.
Take all of the things that you put a star next to, plus the reviewers’ comments, plus any ideas YOU have, and create a cohesive outline that makes sense to the reader.
That’s how easy it is.
You leveraged the other authors’ research, plus what actual book buyers WANT, and made one EPIC outline. :)
Hopefully you found this useful – and if you’d like more tips on how to create a story outline and publish a book the easy way, please feel free to check out my bestselling (but new to Udemy) Ultimate Kindle course.
8 thoughts on “How to create a story outline for a great book in 20 minutes”
Thanks for sharing this post. it’s really useful.
This is an amazing website and this post is really interesting.
That’s a great article about books. Thanks for sharing.
Great idea! will definately try out this way and I am sure i will get the result. I am excited about this new way of finding ideas for novels. Thanks. on that note i would also like to read more articles about wriuting from you.
Thanks for your comment. What kinds of articles about writing would you like to see?
How would going through the table of contents work when its a fiction novel?
Please check out this post: https://rachelrofe.com//how-to-publish-a-book – it should help! <3
Nice idea and a good way to give readers exactly what they want in a book. I’ll definitely follow up on this advice. Thanks.