4 Ways to Optimize Your Table of Contents & Sell More Nonfiction Books
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Imagine walking down the main street of a tourist town. It’s dinner time and a tantalizing mixture of inviting aromas wafts from the open doors of the many diners, chophouses, pubs, and pizza parlors nearby. In front of each establishment, there’s an open menu with a few tourists huddling around as they debate whether or not this particular eatery can satisfy their appetite.
Through a combination of thoughtfulness, strategy, and an understanding of their customers, a great menu gives a restaurant an edge over the competition and turns interest into action.
Your nonfiction book’s table of contents (TOC) functions exactly the same way and plays an essential role in helping your prospective reader become an actual buyer. In tandem with your front cover, back cover content, and reader reviews, your TOC will be one of the first things customers look at when they browse your book in stores and online (via retailers’ “Look Inside” preview feature). Your goal with the TOC is to stop the reader in their tracks and end their search right there.
As a professional book coach and bestselling author, I see most nonfiction authors ignore the incredible sales potential of their TOC — treating it more like a rote recitation of the book’s structure instead of a branding opportunity.
To improve your presentation, here are 4 ways you can turn your nonfiction book’s table of contents into a reliable book-selling machine.
1. Focus on freshness
Thousands of memoirs have a first chapter called something like The Early Years. Innumerable self-help books on success begin with chapters on The Importance of Setting Goals. Sure, those kinds of chapter titles make sense, but they’re nothing new.
You can still write about those early years or the importance of setting goals but give your chapters more fresh and appetizing titles. What kind of craving does your intended reader have? Make your book cater to their unique type of hunger with titles that use specific words or phrasing that will capture your message in an equally unique way.
If you’re writing about achieving a lifelong dream of climbing Mount Everest, that story’s been told before. Hundreds (if not thousands) of people now achieve this (still quite amazing) feat every year. You need a new angle — a fresh way to describe the importance of having a goal to achieve, or how to work better as a team. For example, one of the biggest dangers for mountaineers today is waiting in line for your selfie on the summit in deadly cold conditions. Try turning that modern irony into a fresh-feeling chapter title, like This Queue Is Literally Killing Me. Okay, a bit macabre, but you get the point. Restaurant owners go to great lengths to avoid menus that present their offerings as stale or packaged. Your table of contents needs the same focus on freshness.
2. Stick to your style
You wouldn’t find osso bucco buried in a long list of sushi choices at a Japanese restaurant. Even if you absolutely adore that classic Italian dish, the incongruity of its appearance would feel unprofessional and just plain weird. Unfortunately, many nonfiction authors treat their table of contents with that same lack of focus.
Your TOC shows your potential reader you know what you’re doing, that your content is well organized and cohesive. Style consistency signals a clear sense of your book’s “personality.” If you like short, punchy (even single word) chapter titles: stick to it. If you’re aiming to shock your reader with outrageous titles: be consistent. If you want your titles to be questions (generally not my recommendation), at the very least keep at it — don’t mix declarative titles with interrogative ones.
Together, the chapter titles should work together to communicate something important about the book, your message, and/or your writing style. Maybe you want the reader to immediately sense your deep experience with the subject matter as someone with the authority to write this book. Serious, informative chapter titles can communicate that kind of gravitas. But is gravitas important to sell your book? Maybe humour is your ticket. If not, find another style or theme to highlight, one that will help the reader to click “buy” (or at the very least dig deeper into the preview).
3. Keep title structures consistent
Another inconsistency I see is when chapter titles start off as action steps then switch to ideas or principles. A book about managing anxiety might start with action steps like Focus on Just One Thing and Limit Your Time on Social Media, but then flip to The Pros and Cons of Meditation. Here, the author has jumped from action steps in the first two chapters to a critical analysis of an antidote to anxiety. Potential readers need consistency of structure from the author to prove you can deliver the goods.
If you’re writing a book about saving democracy and the chapter titles touch on principles like Responsibility, Advocacy, Commonality, you can’t switch to an action step title like “Combating Voter Apathy.” Instead, this chapter might be renamed Apathy.
Memoir chapters are often organized around captivating stories in a person’s life. Catchy or intriguing story titles can draw the reader into the narrative arc of your life simply from reading the table of contents. But you can’t jump from storytelling titles to moral statements or self-help action steps in your book’s menu of chapter titles. This will confuse the reader about the book’s purpose, allowing them to just move along to the next option to see if it better meets their needs.
4. Sell the mood
Any good restaurant is selling a mood, not just food. A potential customer can read a chapter online, or while standing in the aisle of a bookstore. But, to get a vibe for the whole book, it’s the menu — the table of contents — that will often close the deal. This is because people make buying decisions emotionally — including book purchases.
Nonfiction authors need to ask themselves how they want the reader to feel while consuming their work. Rather than just aiming to “increase awareness” of a certain problem, or causing the reader to “take action” to achieve an end result, you should focus on a mood you’re creating that will shift reading to absorbing the benefits of your book.
Take climate change as an example. It seems pretty obvious that most authors who write on this subject are trying to get readers to reduce their carbon footprint or advocate for government policies to encourage sustainable energy options. So, that’s the end goal for the author. But a good writer should focus on generating a feeling like hopeful or empowered — even shamed or angry — as the emotional foundation the reader needs to develop to become motivated into taking action.
If your TOC sells the mood — not just the “food” — you have a better chance at closing the deal. How do you cultivate mood?
The secret is found in the oft-quoted writing maxim show don’t tell. A humorous book should have funny or quirky chapter titles. Don’t tell the reader the book is funny, show them the mood they can anticipate. If your book is about a heroic journey battling addiction or recovering from trauma, show the reader the mood that represents different stages of the adventure. You can set the mood right from the table of contents.
So, instead of treating your table of contents as an afterthought, consider its importance in the hierarchy of book marketing. You will spend months (or more) to produce your manuscript. It’s a true labour of love, something you’ve dreamed of — just like curating a restaurant’s menu. Simply offering it doesn’t mean the customers will come. The final step in writing a book is selling the book’s value, style, and mood through a well-crafted table of contents. While the TOC may not be as impactful as reader reviews or ratings to attract new readers, you can craft yours to whet the reader’s appetite so that they order your book without hesitation.
Steve Donahue is a bestselling author, book coach, ghostwriter and speaker. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into multiple foreign editions. Steve is the founder of Storyglu.com, a book coaching and ghostwriting firm that helps nonfiction authors write books readers can’t put down.
