Jennie Nash - Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book

Praise for Jennie Nashs Blueprint for a Book: Build Your Novel from the Inside Out

This process makes me want to write, and it makes what Im writing better. I read it before every draft. Its that good.

KJ DellAntonia, New York Times bestselling author of The Chicken Sisters

Before anyone is allowed to ask a writer-friend out for coffee just to pick your brain about a book idea, they should be required to read this. It answers SO MANY QUESTIONS. Im going to keep a stash of copies to hand out.

Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

I will sing the praises of the Inside Outline forever. Its f*ing genius.

Carla Naumburg, author of How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t With Your Kids

Jennie Nash turned me into a plotter and changed the way I think about approaching any new project. Im an Inside Outside outline fan for life!

Alison Hammer, author of You and Me and Us and Little Pieces of Me

If you are about to start writing or revising your novel hold up! You need this book before putting fingers to keyboard. Its a step-by-step design-your-novel manual that encapsulates the most important aspect of great story-telling: how to reach deep into your writerly heart and into the heart of the story you want to bring to life.

Janet Fox, author of The Artifact Hunters

The Inside Outline is making writing easier. I can focus more on the writing rather than discovering what the scene is about when Im creating it. Why isnt every writer using it? Instead, people are plonking down good money to be told ten key steps in writing dialogue or setting a scene. Im so grateful Im no longer one of them.

Kate Kimball, first time novelist

Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book:
Plan and Pitch Your Big Idea

Copyright 2022 by Jennie Nash

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Tree Farm Books
Santa Barbara, CA
www.jennienash.com

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022906907

Permission to use material from other works:

Permission to use the table of contents from The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to your Mate (Northfield Publishing, January 1, 1992) by Dr. Gary Chapman granted by Moody Publishers, Moodypublishers.com.

Permission to use the table of contents from The Artists Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julie Cameron (Tarcher, January 1, 1992) granted by Penguin Random House LLC.

Author photo by Ashleigh Taylor
Cover design by Stuart Bache
Page layout by Clarity Designworks

ISBN paperback 978-1-7332511-4-3
ISBN ebook 978-1-7332511-5-0

Visit www.jennienash.com/blueprint

A t the start of the pandemic, professional speaker and leadership researcher Sara Ross had more than 20 keynote speeches cancelled, and she decided to use the forced downtime to do the thing she had always longed to do: write a book. She hired me as her book coach and during our first meeting said, I know just what will be in it. Ive given this speech a hundred times.

She described to me a poem she loved about falling into holes and finding your way around them the next time you walked down that same road. She often referenced this poem in her talks, which were about the traps high achieving businesspeople tend to fall into over and over again. Her audience connected with the poem as much as she did. She thought she would title her book Falling in Holes and structure it according to the six most common traps.

This concept meant a lot to Ross, but it struck me as a bit negative and simplistic. I sensed that Ross had an optimistic outlook about high achieving businesspeople and that she had more to say to them about their relationship to work, beyond avoiding traps.

We worked through the Blueprint processand it turned out that Rosss keynote contained only a tiny fraction of her big idea. Once she realized that a book could contain so much morethat there was room for it, and she didnt have the constraint of 90 minutes on a stage in front of a restless audienceshe let herself soar.

By the time she finished crafting her book proposal, her idea was a deep and compelling argument for how people who are passionate about their work can maintain their vitality over the course of their careers. It was a much bigger idea than the one about falling into the same trapsalthough that idea is certainly part of it. The book she will be publishing has the clever and resonant title, Dear Work: I Love You, But Something Has to Change.

In your career, you have no doubt developed a keynote speech or a conference presentation or a podcast interview or a workshop curriculum or a pitch deck that showcases your ideasbut those things are very different from a book. A book is a uniquely powerful way to deliver your big idea to the world. When readers pick a book to read, they are making a commitment to sink into the authors way of thinking. They are prepared to go deep in a way that just doesnt happen in a public or group presentation. We all know the experience of feeling like an author is speaking directly to us, peering into our soul, and articulating something that changes the way we see the world. Its almost akin to falling in love: we feel seen, we feel whole, we feel inspired.

Books that have the power to move us like that are not easy to write. We can be lulled into thinking they are because skilled writers make it look easy, but there is no shortcut, no fast and easy success formula, and no way to reverse engineer it. Writing a book is a complex intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial undertaking and to write a good one, you have to put in the workand I dont just mean cranking out words. The work that is going to have the most impact is the work you do before you write a single word of the book itself.

You will hear all kinds of advice about the physical act of writingwrite every morning, write 1000 words a daybut those habits dont matter if you dont know what youre writing, or why, or for whom.

You will also hear advice about crafthow to make sure youre not using passive phrasing, how to make sure each chapter has narrative drivebut craft is the frosting on the cake. You first need to bake the cake.

I developed the Blueprint method because the experts, executives, educators, and entrepreneurs who were coming to me for help with their books couldnt answer the most fundamental questions about their projects. People who would never start a business without understanding their customer had not thought about their ideal reader in a strategic way. People who would never launch a product without market testing it had not bothered to look at what other books were on the shelf.

I needed a way to help these writers answer the fundamental questions about their book, their ideal reader, and their content before they started to try to write. I wanted a tool that would lead directly to the book proposal so that they could focus on the task of selling their project. I hoped that it would all lead to a more seamless development process and a more powerful pitch.

The Blueprint for a Book System

The Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book system walks you through 14 foundational questions. It is divided into three parts Part 1: Understand Your Book Fundamentals; Part 2: Get to Know Your Ideal Reader; Part 3: Design a Structure.