In this week’s episode, we take a look at five tips for outlining your novel. I also take a look at audiobook sales for 2024.
This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book #2 in the Half-Elven Thief series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store:
WIZARD50
The coupon code is valid through February 21, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook for spring, we’ve got you covered!
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 237 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is January 31st, 2025, and today we’re discussing five tips for outlining your novel. Before we get to that, we will have Coupon of the Week, an update on my current writing projects, Question of the Week, and then a look at how my audiobooks performed in 2024.
First up, Coupon of the Week. This week’s coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard Thief, Book Number Two in the Half-Eleven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That coupon code is WIZARD50. Both the coupon code and the link to the store will be in the show notes for this episode. This coupon code will be valid through February the 21st, 2025. So if you need a new audiobook to get you through the February doldrums, we have got you covered.
And now an update on my current writing and audiobook projects. I am very, very, very pleased to report that Shield of Deception, the fourth book in The Shield War series, is done. As soon as I am finished recording this episode, I’m going to start publishing it at all the stores. So by the time this episode goes live, you should be able to get it at your favorite ebook store. I’m very pleased this is done because I think this is the longest book I have written in the last four years, which of course I picked to do over the Christmas holiday and was in the process of switching over to a new desktop computer. Great planning on my part, but the book is done and hopefully you should be able to enjoy it soon at your favorite ebook store.
Now that Shield of Deception is done, my next project will be Ghost in the Assembly and I’m pleased to report I’m 20,000 words into that. So I’m hopefully on track to have that come out sometime in March. My secondary project is also going to be Shield of Battle, the fifth book in the Shield War series, and hopefully that will be in April, if all goes well.
In audiobook news, Cloak of Masks is now finally available at all audiobook stores: Audible, Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Chirp, and all the others. A reminder that you can also get Ghost Armor Omnibus One, the combination of the first three Ghost Armor books (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy), at Audible, Apple, and Amazon.
00:02:15 Question of the Week
Now it’s time for Question of the Week, which is intended to inspire enjoyable discussions of interesting topics. This week’s topic: do you watch the special features on the DVD when you watch a movie? I’m talking about the making of and the director and cast and crew interviews and so forth. Not all DVDs have them of course, but some do. We have a few responses to this question.
Justin says: It depends on the movie. The special features in Monty Python and the Holy Grail Special Edition are a must-see in my opinion.
John says: I watched all the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition extras. Really great material. I know I’ve watched others, but I can’t recall offhand. Definitely the gold standard.
Tom says: My general pattern is to watch the trailer, then the movie, then the deleted scenes. Sometimes I’ll watch parts of the special features if their name caches my eye, not often though.
James says: With On-Demand through my cable provider, I just watch the movies. Being part of the PC Master Race, I’ve never had a gaming console to play DVDs on. I haven’t bought a DVD in ages. I used to belong to Redbox, but they’re not even in business anymore.
- Elizabeth says: Sometimes, or play in another language with English subtitles.
Brandy says: Sometimes. I watched The Lord of the Rings special features and enjoyed it. I also watch historical extras or look them up.
Bonnie says: I think I may have once? I usually just watch the movie, haven’t watched anything in ages, though.
Juana says: Yes. After the feature things are interesting!
Tracy says: I do.
For myself, the inspiration for this question was that I couldn’t think of anything to watch, so I was watching the special features on The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions box set, which a few people have already mentioned. I really think those are the gold standard for DVD special features. Not too many special features have middle aged literature professors discussing the origins of the book that inspired the movie. There’s like six discs worth of special features in the Extended Edition Lord of the Rings DVDs, and if you watch all of them, it’s really a very interesting and comprehensive documentary on how those three movies were made. If you get the Oppenheimer Blu-ray, the special features that come with that are also quite interesting and worth watching in my opinion.
00:04:18 Audiobook Sales in 2024
Now let’s talk a little bit about how my audiobooks did in 2024. Ebook sales were down a bit from 2023 to 2024, but my audiobook sales were up from 2023 to 2024. So here are my Top 10 bestselling audiobooks of 2024. It’s nice to note that audio (at least for me) was up, in 2024 in a time of general economic contraction. So that’s nice. Now my Top 10 audiobooks:
- The Ghosts: Omnibus One
2. Frostborn: The Gorgon Spirit
3. Frostborn: The Dark Warden
4. Frostborn: The Broken Mage
5. Frostborn: The World Gate
6. Frostborn: The False King
7. Frostborn: Excalibur
8. Frostborn: The Dwarven Prince
9. Dragonskull: Omnibus One
10. Frostborn: The High Lords
So I have to admit, it’s nice to see the Frostborn books still in the Top 10 there because they’ve long ago made back their production costs. So now it’s just a pure profit at this point, which is nice. And it’s also amusing that The Ghosts Omnibus One remains my bestselling audiobook of all time just because it’s so long. Now let’s see how those sales broke down by vendor because as you know, I sell my audiobooks through several different platforms. And so let’s see how they did:
- ACX (Audible, Amazon, Apple): 76.54%
2. Google Play: 9.84%
3. Storytel: 5.08%
4. Hoopla: 2.73%
5. Spotify: 2.27%
6. Chirp: 1.05%
7. Under 1%: Kobo, Scribd, Audiobooks.com, Overdrive, TuneIn, Bibliotheca, Nook, and Anyplay
So as we can see, Audible in the form of ACX is still pretty dominant, but there is growth on the other platforms, especially Google Play. I was not expecting Google Play to come in second. I would’ve thought it would’ve been Chirp or Spotify, but it seems Google Play did very well for me for audiobooks for 2024. So thanks for listening everyone, or at least listening to the audiobooks. We’re not done with the podcast yet, so let’s now move on to our main topic.
00:06:34 Main Topic: 5 Tips for Creating an Outline for Your Novel
Now let’s move on to our main topic, five tips for creating an outline for your novel. In the fiction writing community, there’s generally two schools of thoughts, outliners (of which I am definitely one), and discovery writers, who feel that starting with outlines sort of drains the process of its fun and magic.
Though I heard an interesting point from one of Brandon Sanderson’s videos recently where he said that all outliners do have a little bit of discovery writer in them because if you look at your outline, it’ll say something like “there is a chase scene.” Then when you get to that part of the book, you write out eight to ten pages of the chase scene or whatever that you come up with on the spot and then later refine and improve through editing. So that’s a good point, but I do think outlining is more useful in general for writing than not outlining is.
So why outline? As I mentioned, many writers do not outline, but I do think outlining does help, especially with beginning writers. For one, it saves time because if you follow the outline, you’re less likely to go down a blind alley and realize you have to drop the last 10 or 20,000 words you wrote.
It helps prevent getting stuck and not knowing what to write next. And it also really helps because it’ll save you time in editing because you’re less likely to have to rewrite large portions of the book. And it’s also helpful for maintaining continuity as well.
I found also that outlining in advance is good because it forces you to think about things before you start because we all know writers who get really excited about writing, get a third of the way through, and then don’t know where to go next. It’s because they haven’t thought it through. Outlining forces you to really think through the middle, which is where a lot of writers get stuck, and it also forces you to think through the ending and make sure it properly resolves the conflicts and stakes raised in the story.
As an example, I know a beginning writer who did not create an outline when setting out to write for the first time, although she had a strong setting and liked her characters, she realized about halfway through that the conflict wasn’t enough to carry her whole story and that changing the conflict or raising the stakes would change the tone of the story too much. And unfortunately, she decided to abandon the draft. You could look at that one way, that it was months of wasted effort for her that could have been prevented with a couple hours of outlining, though I think it’s better to look at it as a valuable learning experience where she learned that yes, outlining really will help me with my writing and just sort of had to learn that the hard way through attempting to write without an outline first.
#1: So our first tip for outlining novels is to learn story structure. It’s hard to write an outline without understanding good story structure, but the flip side is if you do understand story structure and put good story structure into your outline, it will be all the easier to write your novel. The basic story structure that everyone learns in English class when they’re talking about short stories (or should learn an English class when they’re talking about short stories), is introduction, conflict, rising action, climax, and resolution. That is essentially basic short story structure that’s in short stories and in novels, however long. A longer novel of course we’ll have subplots and sort of sub conflicts and maybe false ends and red herrings, but that basic story structure is there throughout.
So our first tip for good outlining is to understand story structure. And if you try to hold to that basic five step story structure when you’re first starting out, especially when you’re first starting out, you’ll probably find it a lot easier to go.
#2: Start with the problem. What do we mean by that? First, think of the main conflicts and then start outlining to move the characters/locations around them accordingly. Work the hardest on understanding your central conflict. Your protagonist must have a problem that results in a serious conflict. Now, serious conflict doesn’t necessarily imply violence, though in genres such as a thriller and mystery, it can. The conflict must be emotionally significant and serious for the protagonist where there are real stakes involved.
The example I usually go to for this is the movie The King Speech, which is a highly fictionalized version of Britain’s King George VI learning to overcome his stutter to speak in public. At no point in the movie is George VI in any physical danger. His wife and children love and respect him, and he’s generally well regarded by everyone who knows him. However, the problem is he can’t speak in public effectively, and this is a huge emotional problem for him. And frankly, one with serious stakes after his brother abdicates and he becomes king. He needs to be able to speak effectively in public or he won’t be able to carry out his duties well. So this conflict of dealing with his stutter and his speech impediment is central to the movie. And even though he’s not in any physical danger, it nonetheless has very high stakes for him, which is why I say that the problem has to be emotionally significant and have high stakes for the protagonist.
And there are ways to do that without violence, though of course, if you’re writing fantasy or a thriller, you can use all the violence you want. You can help create a significant conflict and problem for your character by asking yourself a few questions. What conflicts and actions lead up to it? What is causing this conflict to happen? What are the stakes? What will happen if it doesn’t resolve favorably? And why is the character involved? What must they do to resolve the conflict?
For an example from my own books, I’m going to talk about Half-Elven Thief, which is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited if you want to go read that. In Half-Elven Thief, the main character is Rivah, who is a member of a fantasy Thieves Guild in her city. She’s massively in debt to her immediate superior in the Thieves Guild who hates her and has been using that debt to exploit work from her and considering selling her into slavery to recover the debt. However, a massive and very dangerous job comes to the Thieves Guild, and Rivah is the one assigned to take the job, and if she pulls off the job, her debt will be repaid and she doesn’t have this debt hanging over her head anymore.
But the job is to steal a spell book from a very dangerous and powerful wizard, so there’s every chance she’ll be killed in the process. So the central conflict of Half-Elven Thief, that Rivah needs to steal this spell book from this very dangerous wizard, and the stakes for that is so she can get out from under this debt her superior has been holding over her head for the last three years. So hopefully that is a helpful example of a conflict with serious stakes for the protagonist.
#3: Our third tip is to start with simple. What is the book’s blurb or elevator pitch for this story? Write that first. There’s a couple different ways you can do that. I’ve sometimes described my Cloak Games/Cloak Mage series as Shadow Run meets The Dresden Files, which can be a starting point. I’ve heard people describe the Caina series as Black Widow meets Conan the Barbarian, which is another way to do it.
To return to our previous two examples, in The King’s Speech, the precise pitch is “faced with becoming King George VI must overcome his speech/stutter and face his emotional problems in order to effectively exercise his office.” And with my book Half-Elven Thief, the elevator pitch was, “in order to escape a dangerous debt, a thief is forced to steal a spell book from a dangerous wizard.” So that is the one sentence starting point, and you can use that to build the conflict.
Another potential way to do this is to write the blurb for your book and then build the conflict off that. For example, here is the blurb for another one of my books, Ghost in the Serpent, which is available at all ebook stores.
Anyway, the blurb: “A deadly poison. A hidden cult of sorcerers. Only Caina can find the truth. Caina is a countess of the Empire, an advisor and friend of three powerful monarchs, but she was once a nightfighter with the Ghosts, the spies and assassins of the Emperor and faced lethal sorcerers and corrupt lords. And when a hidden cult of malevolent sorcerers emerges from the shadows, Caina will show them that she has forgotten none of her old skills.”
So what is this blurb doing? It is introducing the setting and the characters, Caina and the Empire, focusing on the conflict and stakes and focusing on how they relate to Caina. And that allows us to sort of expand out into the conflict. If you read the book, you know that the plot is someone tries to poison Caina and fails. As she investigates what happened, she discovers that her husband had two children that he didn’t know about, and for some reason this mysterious cult is trying to kill both Caina and these children, which pulls her deeper into the mystery. So that is the stakes and the conflict, and that is how I was able to build the book around them.
#4: Our fourth tip is to just start. Just pick a time, grab your laptop or your notebook or whatever, and just start writing down an outline for your short story or a synopsis. Don’t research things about your story while you’re outlining. You can just write “TO BE RESEARCHED LATER” in capital letters, which is what I do sometimes. Don’t research the perfect way to make an outline, just sit down and make an outline.
How I outline personally is what I usually do is I have the central conflict in mind, like the example with Rivah, and then I sit down and write a synopsis of what I want to happen and then I chop up the synopsis into chapters and I go from there. My outlines tend to be about 1,000 to 2,000 words long, depending on the length of the book.
For example, Shield of Deception, which I just published, was on the longer side. It came to about 120,000 words and the outline was about 2,000 words. And it basically started out as a long synopsis I wrote, and then I chopped up the synopsis into chapters and went from there. I included major story beats, where the characters were going to go, and what they did. It doesn’t get too detailed. Each chapter…the book had 30 chapters. So each chapter generally was described with about 80 words in the outline, maybe a hundred words, depending on what goes on. The detail varies. Basically, like in a chapter outline, I’ll say “Character X comes and confronts Character Y and then they fight.” Then I will extemporize and make up the conversation when I actually get to the writing.
What I try to include in all the outlines is story beats that have to be in the story. The character has to be here or the plot doesn’t make sense, or they have to go this location or it’s a massive plot hole, or they have to think of this or it causes a plot hole, that kind of thing, which is part of the value of the outlining process is that it forces you to think of these things in advance. What I don’t include is that I don’t get too super detailed because to return to the Brandon Sanderson example from earlier in the show, when you get to the actual scene, there is a bit of discovery writing, like where I’ll write where Character X confronts Character Y about whatever they’re arguing about. Then the actual conversation I will just write when I arrive there.
#5: And our fifth and final tip, try a different style of outlining if you’re struggling. There are different outlining techniques and styles out there. Here are two examples.
There’s the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson, which is where you start with a one sentence summary, build up to a paragraph, and continue to add detail in depth. There’s also Dean Koontz’s story structure from his book, How to Write Bestselling Fiction. His story structure is:
- Get your character into trouble as quickly as possible
- Their plans backfire
- Things escalate until defeat seems inevitable
- Victory against all odds
If you’re having trouble starting an outline, that might be a good way to do it. That said, there is no magic bullet. There is not a magic outlining style or perfect outlining style that will guarantee success. So don’t get lost in endless reading or studying different kinds of outlines. A finished outline is better than waiting for a perfect one. And in that vein, a book that you have actually written, even if it’s not as cool as you want it to be, is still infinitely better than a book that exists only in your head.
And all that said, those five tips for outlining, I’m about to do all that myself. There is in the tech industry a phrase called “eating the dog food” or “eating your own dog food,” which means if you make a product and sell a product, you should probably be using the product a great deal. And Microsoft in particular was known for leaning on this. And for myself, I’m going to be doing everything I just talked about here because over the next few days, I’ll be writing the outline for Shield of Battle, which at the moment consists of only four sentences I jotted down when I had ideas. I’ll be applying all those techniques myself to write the outline for Shield of Battle, and hopefully it will work well for me. I think it will. I think these tips, if you want to start outlining your novels before you write them, would hopefully be helpful for you as well.
So that is it for this week. Thank you for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. A reminder that you can listen to all the back episodes at https://thepulpwritershow.com. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
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