Book Blueprinting

by Ellen Fishbein

Book Blueprinting is our fundamental service for authors. It’s $5,000 and usually takes ~2 months.

Every one of our authors has started with the same problem: struggling to grow beyond blog-length writing. They often excel at social media and newsletter writing. They have exciting ideas and excited audiences. 

Sometimes they’ve spent many hours trying to use ChatGPT or Claude as a co-author. Sometimes they’ve been working with an editor. But they still feel far away from a book that would make them proud.

The problem is that a blog post is like a birdhouse, while a book is like a person-house. A good carpenter can build a birdhouse without even sketching it first. But building even 1,000 birdhouses doesn’t prepare you to build a house for your family.

That’s where we come in. Across all the different projects that have come our way, the solution has always started in the same place—with the same missing capability. One client described it as “holding a whole book in your head.” We call it book blueprinting.

Book blueprinting is the process of:

  1. understanding the ideas, 

  2. systematizing them, and

  3. determining the best way of sequencing and presenting them in a book. 

My co-founder Bill is the best book architect I know. He has advised on hundreds of books, ghostwritten a couple, and published a few of his own. He knows the architecture of a great book, especially a great nonfiction book. We work together to interview an author and tease out their expertise.

From those interviews, Bill creates a blueprint for how the ideas would be best shaped, sequenced, and presented in the book format. He can design a book with extreme rigor, so a reader will be able to understand the subject, even in the speaker’s absence.

For the subject-matter expert, working with Bill is like giving him the materials for a building. Bill’s architectural skill set allows him to make a blueprint of how those materials would fit together into a book. 

Book blueprinting is the most important phase in the process of writing a great nonfiction book. It’s also the phase in which LLMs have been weak so far. If you look back at the 3 pieces of the book blueprinting process, we’ve found that LLMs can help to an extent with (3), but they're useless for (1), and that's the most important step. 

We think it will continue to be hard for any LLM to surpass someone like Bill in book blueprinting. The reason is that it relies on very careful relevance filtering. When people talk about stuff in their area of expertise, even if they’re super smart and focused, they say a bunch of things that seem relevant, but aren’t. They also say a bunch of other things that are conceptually redundant. For example, someone might describe a major technological event as both “a tidal wave” and also as “reaching escape velocity.” A great book blueprint boils such metaphors down to a single canonical way of talking about the idea. Bill calls this “getting down to bedrock,” and LLMs don’t seem to be nearly as effective at it. (We’ve tried many experiments—and we’ve always been disappointed by how big the gap seems to be).

Once you get down to bedrock, the rest of the book-writing process can now be spectacularly accelerated using transcription software and LLMs. Once you have that architectural blueprint for the book, you can use AI to eliminate hundreds of hours of hands-at-the-keyboard time. Then for the final draft, a good human editor can quickly adjust the style of the document when needed to remove anything that could sound weird or embarrassing and make the tone clear, crisp, and friendly.

I think that last part is on its way to being mostly automated. I’m interested in using LLMs to answer: “How can we take those editorial decisions that we make at that stage of the process and automate those as much as possible?” 

If we can do that, then the book-writing process will be almost like drawing a blueprint for a house, dropping off some construction materials at the site, and letting a team of construction robots build and finish the whole house for you with great precision and reliability.

One crucial note: Not everyone is a good fit for that subject-matter expert role, a.k.a. the Author’s role. You have to be a very rational thinker with real expertise. The book blueprinting process doesn’t magically turn sawdust into high-quality lumber. And it doesn’t make it possible to build the Parthenon out of sawdust.

But, if you have substance, a great book is within your grasp. The blueprint is the missing piece.

I read every email and would be happy to hear from you: ellen@writing.coach.