Monday’s planning tip for authors

Authors looking for help writing a book can learn a lot from using MindManager to create mind maps of books by successful authors, such as Guy Kawasaki, whom I will be interviewing Wednesday evening, October 15. By analyzing a mind map of Guy Kawasaki’s 462-page Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition, you can “reverse engineer” the book using a mind mapping software program like Mindjet’s MindManager.

A collapsed view of a MindManager map of the contents of Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check shows that the book is organized into 12 major parts, or sections, corresponding to the book’s major topics. Organizing a book and fine-tuning its contents are far easier when you concentrate on just one part, or section, at a time, than viewing all of the chapters of the book, as you can see, below. NOTE: click the map image to download a PDF of the collapsed map.

Each section, or topic, contains several chapters, as a partially-opened mind map of Reality Check reveals in the next map, below. NOTE: click image to download a PDF of the partially-opened map.

However, an opened–or expanded–mind map, allows you to view your entire project as a whole. The expanded view, below, makes it easy to see each chapter in the context of the others, permitting you to fine-tune your book’s topic sequence. Again, click the map image to download a PDF of the opened map.

Hints for working with MindManager maps

• Open, or expand, a section by clicking the plus sign, (+). This reveals the titles of the chapters it contains.
• Collapse a section by clicking the minus sign, (-) to show just the section title.
• Quickly toggle between expanded and collapsed views of the book by, first, clicking the book title, in the center of the map, then pressing the CTRL+D keyboard shortcut.

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To attend this Wednesday’s interview with Guy Kawasaki
My interview with Guy Kawasaki for Jay Conrad levinson’s Guerrilla Marketing Association takes place Wednesday evening, October 15th, between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM EST. To attend, visit the Guerrilla Marketing Association website, or e-mail me at roger@publishedandprofitable.com.

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