Ryan Holiday structures outlines of all his books before writing them.

RYAN HOLIDAY IS the author of multiple successful books, including titles such as Trust Me I'm Lying, The Obstacle Is the Way and Perennial Seller. He learned his trade apprenticing for Robert Greene, author of The 48 Law of Power. He also does media strategy work for his clients through his creative agency, drawing from his vast marketing experience, having spent time as the director of marketing for American Apparel.

Through a blog post, Holiday shares a couple of pointers on how he's managed to write three books in the same number of years — something which anyone who has attempted writing one before will agree is no mean feat.

Using the strategies he's mentioned, Holiday managed to produce Trust Me I'm Lying, Growth Hacker Marketing, and The Obstacle is the Way, all of which have gone on to become bestsellers since they've been published.

The Main Takeaway

In this sharing of advice, he provides not only encouragement for current and aspiring authors who are trying to complete that mission, but also actionable strategies which can be effectively employed to make the authoring process easier, quicker and much less painful.

Obstacles and Difficulties

Writing a book is an arduous, tremendously difficult task, and Holiday knows it all too well. Putting 60,000 words to paper and managing to not only sound coherent, but also have something worthwhile to say at the end of it is no mean feat.

Besides from the task itself, authors may also face additional pressures from facing deadlines in having to turn in their manuscripts, or a lack of motivation to produce material should they find themselves somehow not coming to resonate with the content they're producing.

Using an Outline

Holiday offers the solutions to these obstacles — and in them, he stresses that key to the process is having an outline of your book before you begin to even write the paragraphs for each chapter.

The difficult part of writing a book, he says, isn't the writing itself, but being able to formulate, capture and define the main idea of what the book is going to be about. Structuring an outline of the book prior to writing it is essential to being able to do this well.

It's much easier to achieve your desired result when you know what's the path to follow to get there. Holiday's advice on structuring your books before writing has helped him be massively productive at his craft, and now more authors will have a better idea of how they can, too.