Is this the first great information product?

Will it be the last?

Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash

In 2015 or thereabouts I was on a cross-campus bus at Johns Hopkins, riding from the medical institutes to the university’s Homewood campus. Sitting in the row ahead of me were two medical students, talking about one of their tough classes. My ears perked up when I heard one of them ask the other if she’d bought the textbook. 

She had! And she elaborated. She wanted not only good information, but a roadmap. Even though all of the information was available online, having a vetted source as a guide was reassuring.

In a world overflowing with information the humble Table of Contents might be one of our most valuable tools. When you can find anything and everything on the internet, how do you know where to start? And how do you know where to end? 

A beginner will be lost in all that. To organize information into a functional and understandable progression you need a higher level of mastery. If one day all knowledge is available for free online, will textbooks be obsolete? Maybe. But if you want to learn anything, you’ll still look for an expert to give you their Table of Contents. 

Here’s a useful thought—one that is hard to internalize for a lot of authors until they’ve really gotten comfortable with the pen. If you need to learn something, would you rather learn it from a shorter book, or a longer book? When you can impart well-tailored information, or even set the bells ringing in someone’s mind over a paradigm-shifting idea, all with fewer pages, you’ve found your power as an author. A Table of Contents is not only a valuable information product—it’s also an efficient way for you as a writer to distill your ideas until they can give that value to your reader.

How to build a great Table of Contents that works for you and your reader:

• To start, you have to know who your reader is, and where you want to get them by the end. Create “point A” and “point B” bullets accordingly.

• Fill in the space between points A and B with whatever stepping stones are necessary for your particular reader to get from here to there. Those are your chapters and this will be your rough Table of Contents. It will look wildly different depending on who you’ve identified as your reader. (If I were writing about how to make an eclair, I could write “make the choux, make the custard, make frosting, assemble the eclairs” and you’d only be able to do it if you knew what each of the components was and how to make them. If I were writing for first-time bakers, they would need more stepping stones.)

• Next, write a couple of sentences under each describing why it’s important to the overall book (to the reader, to the topic, how it relates to the other chapters. Add a very brief sketch of what will be covered in each chapter—use it as a chance to brainstorm, then cut back to only what’s necessary as a stepping stone for your actual reader. Don’t put stuff in just because you know it; put it in only if your reader needs it to get to the destination.

• Finally, clean up. Give chapters snappy titles so that your reader, upon opening the book, will not only see what the chapter topics are, but also see the promise they hold and be enticed to read the first chapter.

If you’re at any stage of a book project, taking a look at your Table of Contents with these steps in mind can pay off. And next time you’re thinking about starting a new book, this is a great place to begin. Many (most?) acquisitions editors would be really happy to see a query accompanied by a strong, clear, and focused Table of Contents. If nothing else, it makes it look like you know what you’re doing.