Embracing the flexibility of an under-utilized resource
Your table of contents is not just an outline–it is an overlooked, underappreciated marketing and sales tool. An editor will use your table of contents to evaluate your book proposal. They will share it with marketing colleagues and their Editorial Board, to rally support. Your publisher’s sales team will share it with retailers. Marketers will post it to Amazon and online stores around the world. Foreign language rights managers will use it to persuade publishers in China, Germany, or Brazil to translate your book into their language.
But you also want a captivating table of contents for your most important audience–your reader. Readers deciding whether or not to buy your book will look at the cover and the marketing copy, and perhaps skim chapter 1, but they will also browse your table of contents. Will it grab their interest or not? I’m a business book editor, and when I’m working with an author, I ask them to picture a browsing reader scanning the table of contents online or in a bookstore, deciding whether or not the book is worth their valuable time. A book I published called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy received a rave review in the New York Times, including praise for the author’s “beguilingly titled subchapters.” That’s the response we want from a reader browsing the table of contents!
Creating a polished, marketing-oriented, reader-friendly table of contents, is a way of getting to know your audience better.
So I encourage you to put on your marketing/copywriter hat for an hour and finesse your chapter titles. This requires a mental shift, since you have been thinking about the internal coherence and narrative flow of your argument. You don’t want frothy chapter titles that undercut the scholarly rigor of your work. But you strongly believe in your book and you care about connecting deeply with your reader and their concerns. Think about which of your book’s topics, ideas, claims, and themes your readers care about most. Whatever those are…they should show up, stated clearly, in your chapter titles.
Authors sometimes want to wait until a first manuscript draft is written, and only then start polishing the table of contents. They don’t know how the manuscript is going to evolve and they don’t want to straitjacket their creative process. I understand the concern, but I still recommend polishing and revising your table of contents early, ideally as part of writing your proposal. You are not locking yourself in. Creating a polished, marketing-oriented, reader-friendly table of contents, is a way of getting to know your audience better. Take that step first, and you will be writing the rest of your manuscript with a stronger sense of how to connect with your readers, and how to foreground the topics they care about most.
Some preliminary questions before you revise your table of contents with your marketing hat on:
- What false beliefs or mistaken assumptions do your readers have about your book’s topic?
- What are the most controversial, surprising, or significant takeaways in your book for your readers?
- When you’ve presented this material publicly, what topics, arguments, or claims have received the most attention?
The answers to these questions should show up in your table of contents.
Now it’s time to start editing! Below are some tips and tricks for creating a table of contents your readers that will make a browsing reader want to buy and read your book.
- Avoid opaque chapter titles. Your chapter titles should clearly reveal what the chapter is about. Instead of calling Chapter 7 of your book on management, “Long-Term Philosophy,” call it, “Base Your Management Decisions on a Long-Term Philosophy, Even at the Expense of Short-Term Goals.” (That’s the title of Chapter 7 of The Toyota Way, a book which sold about 500,000 copies). It’s ok to have long chapter titles if they state a central idea from the chapter—and that idea is thought-provoking or surprising to most readers.
- Don’t “bury the lede.” Journalists are taught to put the most important idea in a story in the first paragraph. In your table of contents, the most salient, fascinating, or contrarian theme of a chapter should be right there in the chapter title. Look at article headlines and taglines for the New York Times Magazine for inspiration. Then for each chapter, write down your most compelling ideas or theses, and work these into your chapter titles. You are writing “clickbait” chapter titles--but this is legitimate, as long as your chapters actually deliver on the promise in the chapter titles. Chapter 2 of the 10-million-copy bestseller Atomic Habits summarizes the theme of the chapter with a gripping title (and a premise borrowed from Aristotle): “How Your Habits Shape Your Identity (and Vice Versa).”
- Think of your table of contents as an executive summary. Prospective readers aren’t sure they have time to read your book. They want a summary. Look again at your key themes from Step 2, and see if your book’s most important ideas can be summarized in your chapter titles. You want a browsing reader to get some real value, perhaps even the narrative arc of your argument, just from spending 30 seconds reading your table of contents.
- Add subtitles or a reading line to your chapter titles. Consider making the chapter title short, topical, and prosaic--then say something punchy in the chapter subtitle. Or vice versa: make the chapter title punchy, with an explanatory chapter subtitle, as in Chapter 8 of Why Nations Fail, “Not On Our Turf: Barriers to Development”.
- And/or add a reading line in italics under the chapter title. A reading line gives you even more room to say something interesting or contrarian, e.g.
“Chapter 8: Not On Our Turf: Barriers to Development
Why the politically powerful in many nations opposed the Industrial Revolution”
- Organize your material into short chapters. Make it easy for readers to find and read about what they are most interested in by breaking up long chapters. The unfortunate reality is that readers’ attention spans are shorter than they used to be. Many will not read your book cover-to-cover. Instead of organizing your book into six or seven excruciatingly long chapters, consider twelve or fifteen shorter chapters. This doesn’t mean dumbing down your argument. The Nobel Prize-winning book Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, has 38 chapters.
- Organize your chapters into “Parts.” If your chapters fall into clear categories, consider grouping them into Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, etc. One useful formula for a non-fiction book is to explain the problem or foundations in Part 1, the solution or critical analysis in Part 2, and cover advanced applications or special topics in Part 3.
- Finally, consider adding new chapters on topics of special concern to your readers. What are their most salient questions, frustrations, opportunities, or blind spots concerning the topic of your book? What is your breakthrough idea? Too often, authors bury this important material deep in a long chapter. Don’t make it hard for a reader to find. Fixing this might mean writing a short new chapter on a crucial topic you had previously overlooked. Or maybe you covered the topic, but it’s currently invisible in the table of contents. Consider moving this material to its own chapter, so it can be prominently featured in your table of contents.
Treating your table of contents as a key marketing document for your book, will help you sell your book proposal to a publisher, energize the marketers who work on your book, and captivate prospective readers. An hour of editing with your marketing hat on, and your reader in mind, is a great investment in your book.
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