How to Write a Book Outline with AI: Rapid Book Outline Method

Full video transcript

Hey, what’s going on everyone, Darby here. Zachariah here. All right, we are coming at you guys live today with a quick and sweet video breaking down a rapid book outline method.

One of the most common things that I do here, and I know Zachariah does as well, in running workshops to help people write books using artificial intelligence or not, is that people ask: where do I start from here? How do I organize the content? How do I get past this curse of the blinking cursor, the blank screen, the blank page syndrome that most all of us have felt at some time. So we’re going to walk you through a really simple, quick, sweet process to help get that book out of your head so you can start writing it. The main thing here, guys, is we’re just trying to take what’s in our head, the book that we’ve been thinking about for years or months, and just get it onto paper. It’s more of a brain dump than actually an outline, but it’s an easy way just to get from what’s in your head onto paper, and we love it, we use it all the time, and this is outside of using artificial intelligence.

Obviously, we talk a lot about how to use AI, Jasper specifically, for writing, and so we’re going to show you and demonstrate how you can use the AI for this, but we want to walk you through this first and foremost. This is a new article we just posted on LinkedIn that breaks down this entire process. If you follow me on LinkedIn or Zachariah, you should see this on both of our feeds. But in a nutshell, this is a brain dump; it’s helping you get that rough outline out of your head, and you can do it in around 15 or 20 minutes if you’re on the ball with what you need to talk about.

So I think we just want to give you the high-level overview of what each section of this is. But ultimately, again guys, this is the challenge: give yourself some constraint with a time factor to just get the stuff out, and then edit it later as you continue to build and expand your book. So how we start this off is the only thing you’ll need is an egg timer, or now everyone has a timer on their phone, so that’s it. What you’re doing when you set that timer for yourself, when you set that constraint, is it actually forces your brain to act and move quickly. You do well under pressure. Well, all my procrastinators here, like myself, will know this: we crunch right at the last minute, and that’s what this forces you to do, is trick your brain into actually giving you the goods quickly versus staring at a blank page.

Absolutely. So like we said, all you need is a timer and a blank piece of paper, so you can use a classic egg timer, you can use your phone, you can go to the Google Chrome store, the extension store, and add this onto your browser if you’re using Chrome, and get started. So we’re talking about step one here: just breaking down the title and getting a paragraph about what the book is. When we’re using this main paragraph, this is going to be like the high-level, almost think book blurb, but doesn’t need to be super salesy here. It’s just like, what are you talking about in this book? Who is this book for? Why should someone read this book? Just what is the general synopsis of what we’re going to be talking about in this book. So, first step here, you set your two-minute timer and you hit the ground running: two minutes brainstorming what are some title ideas and what is kind of the overall paragraph, and I really want to hit on not getting stuck on the title too much, because you can always come back and change that. And you can write this with pen and paper, guys, you can do it in Google Docs, the whole point is literally just to write as fast as you can, don’t worry about if it doesn’t sound good, don’t spend a ton of time thinking about the title, just literally, you know, you want your hand to be an extension of your brain right now. Yeah, exactly.

And then the thing is, once you get done with that first two minutes, now this is going to be guiding: okay, now that I’ve talked about what this book is going to be about, all right, let’s go ahead and write out what are the topics that you’re going to be inside of that book. And the key here is really aiming for about 12 to 16 chapters. That’s pretty common practice for business books across the board. Obviously you can go more, obviously you can go less, but this is kind of the sweet spot. Nonfiction is eight to twelve chapters generally, you don’t go above that, but you want to get obviously more if you can, because you may not use all of those topics. So shoot for 16, not the end of the world if you don’t get it.

Yeah, absolutely, and in thinking about what you’re writing this book about, if you’re writing about your personal experience overcoming an addiction or an obstacle, think about the different steps that you took to overcome that problem. If you’re an expert in the topic in your field, what is your process for helping people get results, going step by step through that? These could all be talking points, it’s going to be chapters inside of your book. So once you’ve brain-dumped those chapter topic ideas, now we want to organize them. They might not have come out of your head in the perfect order, and so take these next two minutes to rearrange and really organize and filter that so that you’ve got a clear “this happens, then this happens, and this happens” all the way from the beginning to the conclusion. So you want to be thinking about what’s the end result in this two-minute organization, what’s the end result you want your reader to have, and organize your topics as start to finish of what they’ll need to do to get that end result.

Absolutely, and that’s really again what we’re trying to do here is solve a problem with this book. The book should center around a specific pain point, problem, and person that I am serving here, and so just keep that in mind as you’re building out your topics and your outlines.

The next step, we’re going to go ahead and bump the timer up. We’re not doing two minutes now, we’re going to do seven minutes, in order to understand what is the chapter content that we’re going to be talking about. This is kind of, okay, now you’ve talked about the high level, this is the idea I’m going to talk about, what are maybe the three to five talking points or sub-points that go under that, that would be the rest of your content inside the chapter. I know Zachariah, you’ve got some interesting perspective on this. Yeah, so inside of each chapter there’s three points: the first part is the intro, how you earned or learned the information, the introduction, kind of the high-level overview of that chapter. The second piece is actually the meat of the chapter, what they need to learn; sometimes this can be broken up into three pieces, but I would just stick to the meat. And the third is your call to action, the next steps that they’re going to take inside the chapter. So you want to wrap up what they learned, and if you have a worksheet, a course, or something to give them where you’re going to get them off of your book and into your world, right, so you want to send them to your website, that’s the last piece. Basically you’re saying, hey, if you like this chapter or you want the worksheet to go along with it, go here, and that’s the main point of nonfiction books, guys: it’s to gain interest from your ideal customer avatar, someone you want to work with, and get them from your book to your world, to your courses, your website, book consulting with you. So that’s the last part of each and every chapter you do, the call to action.

And so whenever it goes into actually writing out the entire book, that’s where you’re going to fill in all these stories from your experience and all the nuance and details, but for right now we’ve got seven minutes, all we need to do is have the general ideas or maybe the questions that are commonly asked, that people will run into when it comes to that topic of your chapter. So brainstorm, get those out; you know, if you’re doing that for anywhere from eight to twelve, really 16 is a lot if we’re talking about all the chapter titles, you can trim stuff out here, you can cut it out. This book isn’t generally going to be like a 50,000-70,000-word magnum opus. What we’re really looking to capture here is that brain dump, so that when it’s time to start expanding and modifying the content, you’ve already done what honestly holds most people back from writing in the first place, which is getting an outline on paper.

For example, inside of each chapter, maybe chapter one, if you’re doing like a diet or cookbook, maybe chapter one is your meal prepping, and then inside of that chapter you would say tell a story about how you first learned to meal prep, or how you worked with two of your clients and the only thing you switched was their meal prep and they immediately lost 15 or 20 pounds. That’s your “how you learned to earn the information,” the second part is the structure of what that meal prep is, and the third part would be, hey, if you want my Excel sheet meal prep plan guide, whatever ebook, whatever it is, the digital version, go here. Yeah, that’s how we structure each chapter, that’s pretty much it, and again this article can be found on my LinkedIn page, we’ll also share it to theaiauthor.com. This is really the process that we’ve seen people have a lot of success with, even not using AI, just to help brainstorm and get that process out.

So this is how it looks in just a simple Google Doc, you can take this Google Doc and do it yourself. What’s a title, what did you just say, Zachariah, if we’re going to go through the first section, cookbook, how do we start brainstorming those sort of titles again? What’s the end result, right? 15 pounds in 10 days, what is the end result that you want for your ideal customer avatar? 10,000 dollars in two weeks, literally what is their biggest pain point, that’s what you’re going to target. And then next is, let’s say it’s 10,000 dollars in new customers in one month, then the next step, the 12 to 16 topics, are the exact steps they’re going to take to get there, whatever that strategy is, maybe it’s a TikTok strategy. Then you go over each topic of that strategy: diet, cookbooks, meal prep, diet, exercise, what holds them back, things to avoid; all of those things are the topics. So that second half, once you’ve got your title and general idea, get those topics out, you’re then going to organize those topics so that they make sense in the most sequential order, and then you just get the rest of it out with the four things you’ll talk about inside of each chapter: your story, answering some of the questions or addressing some problems head-on, action steps, and call-to-actions or follow-ups for people so they can actually implement what they just learned inside of it, and polish and go. Now we can move on to the next step of starting to really write this content out.

But let’s say you’re still struggling with where to even start here and you’re still running into that blank page. Let’s go ahead, I think now it makes sense to transition to how we would actually use Jasper, the AI writing assistant, to take a topic and help formulate this first rapid book outline. Always easier with Jasper. So what I’ve done here, guys, is I’ve opened up a new project inside of my Jasper account; we’re not going to get into the details in this video of that, but what we’re looking at here is a recipe that’s designed to help us take action on accomplishing a certain goal. And how I always teach people, when they’re using this AI tool Jasper, to start using recipes, is to always, always, always start with the content brief, because this content brief is going to fill out this area right here. Let me go ahead so you can see it. That’s weird, I can’t see it anymore, oh no, it’s destroyed everything.

Content brief, right over here, this is going to be the context for the AI to understand what it needs to be saying and outputting. So first and foremost, when we’re talking about this rapid outline recipe, we want to cover the what, where, why, who, when, and how about the book. This is the really high-level overview, and this is what we’re going to tackle first, with the title and the paragraph. So I would actually want this, we’re going to pick a topic at random here, and we’re going to start with just kind of filling it out and then coming up with a title inside of a two-minute time frame. So before we do this, Zachariah, give me an idea. Let’s do: how to lose 20 pounds in 30 days. Okay, so why I’m doing this, this is a specific goal that you have for a reader, 20 pounds in 30 days, that’s the end result of what they want, so that’s what I want to be focused on, that one pain point that they need, or maybe how to lose the last 10 pounds of belly fat or something. If we have any viewers, if you guys have suggestions, I love to use crowd suggestions too. And if nothing, we’ll just roll with this.

We just want to start out with, again, taking a step back and coming into this context: we’re going to talk about losing 10 pounds in 30 days, or whatever the topic’s going to be, we need to answer these questions now, and this is what the first two minutes is for. So what I’m going to do is put you under the gun, Zachariah, and I’m going to turn on my dictation over here. All right, so let’s go ahead and hit the title, we’ve got 600 characters, so keep an eye on where we’re at there. And first I’m going to click the timer, so we’ve got the first two minutes, and we’re going to come up with this content brief title and general paragraph. Ready? All right.

This is a book about how to lose the last 10 stubborn pounds of belly fat in 30 days. Most people struggle with their fitness goals, they can lose a ton of weight in the beginning but they tend to peter off and plateau in their weight loss goals. This is a 30-day guide on how to lose the last 10 pounds. Let’s just pause it right there, because that’s a pretty solid start. So we’ve got “tend to plateau,” now we’ve got one minute, we just filled out the general idea for it, I need some title ideas, so I’m going to say, a title at the top left of Jasper, write a list of titles for this book, short book titles. So let’s go ahead and hear a list of short book titles, I’m giving on a PC a Ctrl+Shift+Enter, a command in Boss Mode, which is commanding on the AI, and so what it’s doing right now is picking up on patterns of what it thinks I’m trying to tell it to do.

And so, “get trim and firm in one month,” it’s giving me a little bit of options right there, we’ve got 18 seconds left, let’s see if we can get something there. “10 simple steps to a beach body,” okay, so we’re working a little bit now, we’ve got some options: “burn fat fast,” “weight loss made easy,” “the ultimate guide to losing belly fat in 30 days.” And so there’s our first two-minute sprint, and all we wanted to do is get the idea out there, the big high-level idea, and brainstorm some title ideas so that we can continue on to the next step. So anything out of here that catches your eye specifically, Zachariah? “Lose the last 10 pounds in 30 days,” okay, again very specific on what their pain point is. Maybe like “weight loss made easy,” I like “burn fat fast,” “lose the last 10 pounds in 30 days,” so there you go, there’s a title and a subtitle.

So now we’ve got that locked and loaded. I’m going to come on down; I know we’ve got some hacks for your diet plan, things you need to be doing first half of the day, it’s more of an outline of a book. So what I’m doing with these three asterisks is just telling the AI not to look above, to not distract it, it’s still going to reference the content brief and above. Now let’s go on to the next topic. Two minutes, 12 to 16 topics we’re going to cover. All right, let me see here, timer two minutes, Ctrl+J, that was so easy. So what I just did is it wrote me a really short, pretty much like ebook outline right here: introduction, importance of fat, how to burn fat, dieting tips, working out, conclusion. Let’s see if we can get some more, let’s see if we can build those topics out. So I’m going to just keep giving it this command, and so it wrote me a little bit of an intro paragraph there, and so now I’m going to say, let’s mix it up a little bit, write a book outline for this book about how to burn fat fast, Ctrl+Shift+Enter, and so now it’s just going to start giving me these outlines.

Notice how it’s kind of like one to six right now, we’re not necessarily always going to get a fully fledged perfect outline right out the gate. Obviously there’s a lot of research that can go into understanding how other books on the market are building the outlines too, but again we’re trying to not be perfect here, we’re trying to get the rapid idea for the outline now and what step makes sense for. This one I like where this is at, right, we’ve got the weight loss plateau card right here, what’s the problem, they’ve stopped losing weight, they want to lose more weight, the weight loss plateau immediately goes into that pain point, it’s perfect. And so check this out, so now what we’ve done, we’ve just built out our entire topic bit with this, the weight loss plateau. Check out what Jasper’s doing now, it’s now referencing back to this, “a lot of people who lose weight at the beginning, yada yada,” now it’s starting to expand on this a little bit, maybe we don’t want to go into this much detail yet, but it’s something, so a little bit of a trick with AI here, looks like it caught itself on a loop, and bad outputs, nothing to worry about, we just got our time hit and we’ve got exactly what we wanted, a list of resources, we’ve got 16 sections of our book right now that we can then use to organize and make sure that it makes sense.

So just moving right along, I’m going to go ahead and delete these because not needed right here, “introduction fat loss,” so now we go to the second two minutes, and the next two minutes is organizing these topics. So what I really want to do here, I’m just going to spend some time and go back through the 16 that it came out with, and make sure that they’re actually in the right order that I want them to be in, so kind of a little bit of a QA, making sure everything makes sense, let’s go ahead and jump into that. Again, if you guys are experts on the topic, you should know what the correct order is, that your reader needs to go through. So in terms of like a book, the weight loss plateau, this is the history of a problem, I think that makes sense for starting off, obviously you could put an intro before this. But the weight loss plateau, chapter two, why is it hard, why is it hard to lose this 10 pounds, it’s not your fault, the last 10 pounds are the most stubborn part of the belly, it’s the last thing you lose in any diet. And then here, “after Zachariah’s appearance on my 600 Pound Life”… damn it, you’re not supposed to tell people. And so I mean, this is like, it seems like this is in pretty logical order: four tips for burning more calories, how to do it, here’s some more tips, ways to increase your metabolism, so now you could have some hacks for increasing metabolism, the benefits of high intensity workout routines, you know, maybe there’s things that you do specifically if this is your field of expertise, dial something back. But overall, everything doesn’t seem to need to be changed too much from this output specifically, I think this is great, “a 30-day meal plan,” so that’s a lot of helpful resource right there, “how to stay motivated through your journey,” “the importance of maintaining a healthy weight,” “FAQs,” now this is really great, the more questions you can answer, the more assistance you’re going to be providing through your book, but it’s also going to increase your credibility on being a thought leader on a specific topic. “A guide to finding gym owners,” “inspiring before and after photo gallery,” see that’s not a bad chapter to have there, if you’re providing these results as a fitness trainer this could make a lot of sense. Yeah, I would do those more actually at the beginning, the photo gallery, show the results, people are going to want to see those, what normal people like them can do. Yeah, maybe this is something for the intro that we mix in and organize up there. So we’ve got four seconds left, and so I think in general we’re pretty good to start building these out and then we might need to shift some things around and maybe even trim some of the fat, no pun intended.

So now what we’re doing here, we just organized the topics, and now we’re going on to the last seven-minute thing of four things we’re going to talk about in each chapter. So what I want to do is come back up here, let’s start our timer for the seven minutes, and now we’re started, let’s go ahead and click the seven minutes, rock and roll. So I’m going to delete this command and not confuse what we’re talking about here, actually, I’m not going to delete that one, I’m going to just put blinders on, “Jasper, what, the weight loss plateau,” and so this is kind of where you’d want to plug in those stories, have a story where you can talk about or brainstorm with Jasper here, and again a lot of this is going to be, it could be a story about, hey, you’re working with a client, they lost 60 pounds really quickly, but those last stubborn pounds they couldn’t lose until we started with this method, and here, this is the method here. So what I just asked it was, what are four things we can talk about in this chapter, right, I’m assuming I’m hitting a wall here because my head’s being stubborn: one, understanding it, how to overcome it, create a calorie deficit, stick to it, burn more calories than you consume, drink plenty of water, and this can be like the high-level overview of this, these are some tips, and each, and then maybe specific chapters are going to go into these in a lot more detail.

So now let’s just start at chapter two now. Yeah, and so you can take that same command, and wait, let’s, how to break it, what about, wonders on above, chapter two, Darby. Yeah, let’s go ahead and do that just to keep Jasper focused. After two, that’s what I said, where would I be without you. All right, so what are some more things I can talk about, first, and so now we’re going, “it’s usually harder to lose weight,” second, “been struggling for a while, our bodies have adapted,” Ctrl+J, keep talking to me Jasper, third, “finally dealing with emotional issues that lead to overeating,” and so there’s some of your content you can talk about here in this chapter. All right, go ahead and rinse and repeat, again this is rapid, we don’t want to stop and be perfect here, we want to be able to come back and trim the fat, and if we don’t like an output, erase it, run a new one: “how to burn fat, the difference in how our body stores and burns calories,” “how to burn fat faster,” “how to break through the weight loss plateau,” and this might not all be perfect, and so the same thing we did with generating an outline, we want to generate topics: genetics, activity, diet, metabolism, that’s awesome, perfect, and so we can take that and run with it, let’s move on to the next one, four, let’s keep those there for now, I don’t want to get into the form of editing, that’s more for the polish stage, if we want to come back and really trim some stuff up. “A few small drinks water, avoid sugary,” “get enough protein,” so we’re running down like about four minutes now, so I don’t want to get into all of the details of all of this right now, we just want to get the high-level overview and maybe a sentence or so about it. But let me see here, and all I’m doing is pasting the same command that I wrote out right here, “ways to increase through diet, exercise, sleep, supplements,” perfect, wow, right, give me those ideas, and you can always come back here afterwards and spend some more time rerunning these same exact commands. “The benefits of this routine, why is it important,” “the benefits of fitness tracking,” right, wow, I want some more, Jasper, hit me with some more ideas, and so we just kind of keep the ball rolling right here, and I mean obviously you could do this without the help of AI, but it sure does take some of the heavy lifting and the thinking off your plate, so you can come in and really more from a position of editing, you need that editor-in-chief, and you’re directing the narrative versus trying to do all of the lifting, not even the heavy lifting.

So now it’s just, we’re basically just keeping it going on this little roll, there’s four things right here that we’re running, but we’re on a time crunch, we’ve got four minutes left, let’s go ahead and really break this thing down, now this is where Boss Mode really comes into play: “creating a calorie deficit,” “stick to it,” “small changes,” “stay active,” and avoid, let’s go, Ctrl+J, keep it going too long, great, dots for the blinders, Ctrl+V for pasting, Ctrl+Shift+Enter, the command to start generating this content right here, and we can always come back and regenerate those, so we’re not trying to have polished paragraphs right here, we just want to get the ball rolling so that we can come back and make that second round of edits, I guess the term might be “vomit copy,” is what a lot of people use for just getting the first thing out.

All right, one, two, three, four, “how to create a meal plan,” that repeated itself right here, now we’ve got a minute left, see if we can finish all of these: “positive, realistic goals when it comes to the same motive,” “tracking your progress,” it gives us all the realistic stuff right here, and so we can come back and just modify those when it’s ready to polish and start expanding even more, so close, “benefits,” I’m sweating over here, I feel like come on, trials, what are some benefits, all right, we’re close, we’re close, “how to find a gym,” super helpful, see, four things you can talk about in this chapter, so we’re talking about before and after photos, motivation, how to stay motivated, listing the resources, help you achieve your goals, and what are we talking about, a list of helpful ways to use, with 45 seconds to spare, so I mean the resource section is generally pretty obvious what should go in there, conclusion, wrap it up, invite people, where to go next.

We’ve got about 1,700 words right now generated in the span of less than 20 minutes, 15-20 minutes, we’re wrapping up, the last 10 minutes is when we did all that, yeah exactly, so I mean we got book titles that we can go back and brainstorm, we’ve got the topics outlined, and then we’ve got the things we’re going to talk about inside of each chapter: weight loss plateau, calorie deficit, burn calories, drink water, why is it hard, here’s what we’re going to talk about inside of the thing, how do we burn fat, and now you’ve got 16 chapter ideas that you can trim up, you can break down, you can start expanding on them, and you can really take the next step, publishing this material, because you’ve got the first step out of the way, which is often the hardest, which is getting past that blank screen.

So, you know, that’s kind of in a nutshell how we’re using AI to approach this rapid outlining method that we’ve got here on LinkedIn, and that’s also the topic, I’m big in fitness just personally, but that’s also a topic we really don’t know a ton about too, so just think of what you can do as an expert in your industry to get people the exact result that they want, that’s what we’re trying to show you guys here. Yep, exactly, and so if you guys like this type of content, if you dig what we’re putting down and you want to get access to this recipe and other recipes like that, make sure to just subscribe to our newsletter at theaiauthor.com, theaiauthor.com, on our YouTube channel, which is where we’re going to be posting videos like this, other informational, instructional trainings around using Jasper and AI to smash through writer’s block, and what we’re also going to be doing is more of the lives, these lives weekly now, so yeah, we’re going to start scheduling more weekly lives, likely around this time, thinking Thursdays are going to be our days, so stay tuned for that, and until next time, y’all, cheers.