In their eagerness to share their wisdom, writers of eBooks to help others develop skills commonly find themselves with the urge to jump from topic to topic while they write. Although this random discussion may seem like an orderly way to discuss the basic concepts of your industry, an outsider will see a jumbled mess.
What you must keep in mind about eBook publishing here at Skill Bites is that you are not talking to someone who has had years of experience and training in your industry. No, your reader is an average person with a zero knowledge base of the skill you are imparting.
What this means is that your readers will see your jumbled attempt to explain concept after concept as confusion, rather than the logical discussion that you believe you are writing. In order to keep your train of thought on a single subject at a time, authors should employ the outline in their pre-writing stages.
For the modern professional, working with an outline seems reminiscent of your college English classes, where professors would drill the outline concept into your head and demand to see an outline with the finished product. The concept of the outline is as helpful as your old English teachers said. For both organization and keeping your writing on track, the outline is a priceless tool.
As you work with your eBooks to develop skills, your outline will help to keep you on task and on target. Before you even start writing, take the time to think through the entire eBook. Use a sheet of paper to create an outline that first lists off every major point you need to cover in the eBook itself. To help your readers develop skills, make sure that you put these major topics in a logical order on paper.
Take your time and rearrange these as needed. When you feel you finally have them in the correct order, step away from them. Come back to your outline the following day and ask yourself if it still seems correct. If it does, then you should proceed with filling in each major topic. To help your reader develop skills correctly, you will need to have actual meat on each of these topics.
Take each topic and expand it onto its own area of the page. Take your time, and think only about this major topic. Ask yourself what falls under this category. Don't worry about an order yet. Part of eBook publishing is just getting the pieces that you need written down at all. After you have all of the possible parts written, then you can organize them into a model that makes sense.
Once you have done this for each of the main topics, you have finished your outline. This outline will help you stay on target, and make sure your readers get to develop skills without random ramblings in their way.
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