How To Write An eBook, Part 3: Brainstorming The Details

This is part three in a series on How To Write An eBook: From Idea to Launch. You can read part one here and part two here.

So step three in the eight-step eBook creation process involves really digging into your idea. Before you can do this process, you’ll need to have decided on a topic for your eBook. If you haven’t done that yet, you should do so before continuing on.

Once you’ve got your perfect eBook idea, the next thing you’ll want to do is some brainstorming.

The brainstorming process will allow you to really focus into the nitty-gritty details of what needs to be included in your eBook. You want to make sure you cover all your bases and include everything a reader needs to know.

The Brainstorm Process

There are a million ways to brainstorm. Some of the most popular ways include:

• Mind-mapping
• Making lists
• Clustering

Here’s an awesome article that offers 25 useful brainstorming techniques.

It’s up to you to decide which method you want to use. Once you find the brainstorm method that works for you, here’s what to do.

Brainstorming The Details

For illustrative purposes, let’s say you’re going to mind-map an eBook about “gluten allergies.”

Here’s what that would look like, process-wise:

1. In the middle of the page, write “gluten allergies.” 

2. From the center point, come up with all the subtopics relating to the main topic. These will be the chapters in your eBook.

So you’d probably want to write about:

• Symptoms of gluten allergies
• How to eat at restaurants
• Gluten-free recipes
• How to cook gluten-free food
• Transitioning from eating gluten to not eating gluten

3. Go back through the subtopics and come up with subtopics for each of them.

For example, for the chapter on how to eat at restaurants, you’d probably want to write about:

• Questions to ask
• How to read the menu for hidden gluten
• Dealing with waitstaff who don’t understand

These will become the subsections of your chapter.

4.Go back through the subsections and come up with things to talk about related to each one.

This will help you put together what information goes in each subsection. For example, in the “Questions to Ask” subsection, you’d want to include:

• Does this have any wheat in it?
• Does this have any soy sauce in it?
• Does this have any flour in it?

Once you have your outline completed and exactly how you want it, you can move on to step number four, which is building the actual outline. That’s coming next week in Part four of this series.

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What’s your brainstorming process like? What method do you prefer?

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