Effective Organization for Nonfiction Book
When organizing your book, you want to think about chapter order, whether you want to use sections or not, where and when to use headings, and how to connect paragraphs and ideas together.
Chapter Order
Organize your chapters by theme or by progression, depending on your topic. If concepts build on each other and need to be done in a certain order, then go with progression. Otherwise, focus on grouping like-themes together.
When you group by theme, you may consider grouping the chapters in sections, though you do not have to.
You can also group do both: progressive and themes. So have thematic sections, and then the chapters within each section are in progressive order.
Example
Compare the original chapter and subheading order to the revised order in a how-to book:
Explanation of changes
Starting with the creation phases
The original “Phases” content was buried in Chapter 5, even though it’s the natural starting point for a Kickstarter journey.
Since this content represents the foundational steps of creating the product, I pulled it out and made it the new Chapter 1 under a section titled Where Are You At?
This also helped break up the overly long and disjointed original Chapter 5.
The edited order took both a thematic and progressive approach.
Keeping the original progressive order with a few tweaks
Chapters 1 through 3 in the original manuscript followed a logical, progressive order, so I kept their sequence intact.
However, I grouped them under a new section called Marketing and Promoting the Kickstarter Campaign to give thematic clarity.
I also pulled out the material about public Facebook pages into its own chapter, since it didn’t fit with the launch team content it was originally grouped with.
Creating thematic cohesion
Originally, Chapters 4 through 6 were seemingly randomly placed. By introducing the Putting Your Campaign Together section, I was able to keep Chapter 4 (Reward Levels) and Chapter 6 (Campaign Descriptions) together.
Only one part of Chapter 5 belonged here (the section about creating the campaign video), so I left that here but moved the rest of chapter 5 in various spots where it fit.
The final chapter in the original manuscript (Stretch Goals) also fit better here and was moved accordingly.
Breaking up and redistributing chapter 5
The original Chapter 5—Running the Numbers—was overloaded and thematically inconsistent.
I split it into three parts:
- The Phases section became Chapter 1.
- The Video content became its own chapter in the campaign creation section.
- The remaining content (about vendors and costs) became a new section titled Calculating Costs and Working with Vendors.
To improve flow, I reversed the order of the vendor and budgeting content—readers need to know their vendor costs before they can accurately calculate their campaign budget.
Final tweaks
The original Chapters 7 through 9 were already in a logical, progressive order, so I kept them as is.
However, I split Chapter 8 into two separate chapters since it covered two distinct topics:
- What to do if you didn’t reach your goal, and
- What to do if you did.
Each had multiple subtopics, so splitting them helped with clarity and focus.
Various Leveled Headings
Not all nonfiction books will need headings and subheadings, but most could benefit from them.
Headings are a quick way to transition between significant ideas. Sure, you could write a transition, but then that requires a lot more words, and this could bog down the reading experience.
No one wants to continuously read sentences showing the connection between the ideas before getting to the new idea.
So headings help!
Consistency
Consistency with headings isn’t as rigid as to say every chapter has to have headings or headings shouldn’t be used in any chapter. Consistency means that it is mostly the same.
If only one chapter doesn’t need headings, see if you can make it a subsection in another chapter because it is awkward to not have headings in only one chapter. You want your readers to get used to the book’s format.
It’s fine to have a few chapters without any headings in a book where many chapters do have headings. So don’t put in headings in a chapter that doesn’t need it just because other chapters have it.
Essentially, the majority of the chapters should follow the same format, but it is okay to have a few outliers.
This applies to the levels as well. If only one chapter goes four levels deep with subheadings, see if you really need that fourth-level heading.
But it’s fine to have some chapters go three levels deep and some only go two levels and/or one level deep.
Right amount of headings
You do not need to use a heading, no matter how clever and cute it is, to separate paragraphs discussing the same idea.
Yes, typically, every paragraph contains a new idea, but you only put in subheadings when you have a significant new idea.
In the example book above, the chapter on putting together a launch team had the heading “Make the Ask.” Several tips were given on how to ask people, but it was unnecessary to have a heading for each tip. They all had to do with the “making the ask.”
But it was necessary to create a new heading called “Choosing a Platform” because the original was a bit misleading.
With the original, it suggested the author wanted you to use both email and private Facebook page when putting together your launch team, but in this case, the author gave pros and cons for each method and tips on using them, so I created the subhead Choose a Platform to nest them under.
(I also moved Make the Ask and renamed that heading to before for logical flow, but we’re focusing on amount of headings here, not order.)
Let’s look at another example from that book.
The publicity chapter began with information about the importance of publicity, then it started discussing finding and building a relationship with influencers without any sort of transition or heading. All of this came before the “local publicity” heading.
Since the author had a heading for two types of publicity (local publicity and Kickstarter promotions), it made sense to also have a heading for influencers.
He did have a heading for pitching to influencers, but it came after the local publicity portion. So his publicity chapter discussed influencers, then local publicity, then back to influencers, then Kickstarter promotions.
I grouped all the influencer content together and added the appropriate headings to help the reader navigate it.
Heading levels
You want to nest headings appropriately. If content underneath a given heading strongly relates to content under the previous heading, you may consider nesting it.
In our example publicity chapter, the author had these two headings assigned the same level:
- Local Publicity
- Local Radio/TV Shows
Since local radio/TV shows are a type of local publicity, it makes more sense to nest the second one.
As mentioned earlier, if you find yourself nesting deeper than you have in previous chapters, question whether you need the heading at all.
This is where transitions can come into play. Earlier I mentioned how no one wants to continuously read transitional statements/sentences, but that doesn’t mean never use them.
Use transitions between sub-topics under a given heading rather than continuously nesting if all the headings are unnecessary and over the top.
Transitions
Transitions help readers follow your train of thought and flow into a new idea or subtopic without getting whiplash.
In our how-to book, the author has the following subtopics under the “email” heading: why you would want to choose email as your platform, how to make the email entertaining, what length it should be, and adding a link.
It was not necessary to have headings for those, as each topic was only a paragraph or two. Plus, that email heading was already quite nested (the structure below shows it was a fourth level heading after I finished editing).
So instead of using headings to transition between the subtopics in “email,” I helped the author craft effective transitions.
You can use single-one transitions like “first,” “next,” “also,” “therefore,” etc. But those type of transitions are usually connecting sentences, not paragraphs or topics.
When you are switching to a new subtopic, it is better to use effective transitions. I wrote an entire blog on effective transitions, so learn about that here.
Conclusion
A well-organized book helps your reader follow your ideas. It also makes the reading experience seamless.
Just like how plot holes can take a reader out of a novel, lack of headings, transitions, and/or random chapter order, can pull a reader out of your book.
You want to clearly organize your book to avoid reader whiplash and temporary confusion.
[…] others organized theirs. Read blogs on the art of organization. I have one blog that might help: Effective Organization for Nonfiction Books.But do not just wing it. That doesn’t work with […]