This is where your blurb comes into its own. You can develop a basic outline from your blurb as a mind map, or cluster diagram. For each book I've written, I've used mind maps. Because a book is long, it's hard to keep the whole thing straight in your mind --- mind maps help you to do this.

Here's a sample mind map for Making The Internet Work For Your Business:

Diagramming your initial ideas of what you'd like the book to contain gives you an overview, from which you can develop a more detailed outline. Go through all the material you've gathered so far, and insert headings into your mind map.

Remember that at this stage, nothing is set in stone. Just work as quickly as you can, don't think too much about it. You just want to get an idea of how much material you have.

Create your outline

Working from your mind map, create a chapter outline of your book. The easiest way to do this is just to write numbers from one to ten or one to 15 down the page, and type in chapter headings. Most books have around ten to 15 chapters. If yours has more than 15, that's fine.

Only got three or four headings? No matter how little material you have, or how much, don't worry. This is the initial stages, remember. Just work quickly so that you get something down on paper. Tomorrow we'll be researching your book, and as you research, you're sure to find many more headings for your outline.

In these very early stages of working on your book proposal, your subconscious mind is your greatest resource. Therefore, if you get an impulse to write down something, write it down, even if it doesn't make much sense to you. The reason you got this idea will come to you.