Book outline: [Working title]

The book in brief

  • Title and subtitle:

  • Big idea:

  • Promise:

  • Length:

See an example

Title and subtitle: The Decision Habit: How Teams Stop Arguing and Start Choosing
Big idea: Most teams fail from unclear decisions, not from bad people or bad plans.
Promise: By the last page, a team lead can take any decision from open question to written answer in a week, with one owner and a deadline.
Length: about 60,000 words, in 10 chapters of roughly 6,000 words each

Reader: a team lead two years into the job, whose meetings end with “let's take this offline”.

Chapter: 3. Name the owner
Key point: a decision with two owners has none.
Stories and evidence: the launch that slipped six months while two directors waited for each other, told by its project manager.
Takeaway: put one name beside every open decision today.

The big idea is a claim someone could disagree with. “Teamwork” is only a subject.

The reader

Who

Their problem

What they've tried

Why now

Comp titles

What yours adds

Structure · tick one

  • Step by step: chapters follow the order the reader does things

  • Problem to solution: the problem, why it happens, then the fix

  • Argument: the claim, the evidence, the objections, what follows

  • Chronological: events in the order they happened

  • Modular: self-contained chapters the reader can take in any order

Why this shape:

Parts, if any:

Introduction

  • Opening story:

  • The problem and its cost:

  • The promise:

  • Why me:

  • Map of the book:

Chapters · one claim each

Chapter

Key point

Stories and evidence

Takeaway

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Order check · before you start drafting

  • Read top to bottom, the Takeaway column sounds like a short version of the book

  • No chapter relies on an idea or term that a later chapter introduces

  • No two chapters make the same key point

  • The reader gets something they can use early, not after chapters of background

  • Every chapter has at least one story and one piece of evidence

Conclusion

  • Callback to the opening story:

  • The big idea, restated:

  • First step for the reader:

  • Further reading:

Front and back matter · tick what the book needs

Front

Back

  • Dedication

  • Epigraph

  • Contents

  • Foreword

  • Preface

  • Acknowledgments

  • Appendix

  • Notes

  • Bibliography

  • Index

  • About the author

Research to do

What I need

Chapter

Source or person

Status

Not in this book

Idea, story or topic

Why it's out