Somehow, I missed this great reference to Ron Galloway’s outline for using Org mode to organize a book. Fortunately, Sacha had me covered with her excellent Emacs News.
If you haven’t written a book before, it may be surprising how necessary Galloway’s template is for the actual mechanics of writing a book. Even if you’re organized and divide your book into a main file and separate files for each chapter, you’ll soon discover that you want some place to put notes, log your progress, track your references, and brainstorm ideas.
Every author solves these problems in different ways with different file structures but Org is especially amenable to providing a useful framework for organizing these things.
I wrote my books before I discovered Org mode—or perhaps before it existed—but my structure was essentially the same. The nice thing about Org is that you can access—and work on—all those files from a single top level file.
If you’re writing or considering writing a book, take a look at Galloway’s outline. It’s an excellent starting point for our own project.