Welcome once again to Internet Business DiY’s project on How to Create an eBook. In Part 3 we take a look at some of the tools available to you that can be used to create your eBook on your chosen topic and a few things that you need to be aware of when creating your final eBook file.
Hopefully by now you have determined what you will be writing your eBook about and what your main purpose is for creating an eBook and now we need to get you kitted out with the right tools for the job that will get you started.
There are just two tools that are required to create your eBook – a Word Processor and a PDF Writer. Let’s begin by taking a look at these tools and what they can give you.
Welcome to Part 2 of How to Create an eBook. In Part 1 we discussed why you should be looking to create an eBook. Hopefully this started to give you a few ideas and got you thinking in new directions.
So now that you have the “Why” under your belt, we can now move forward and explore the “What”, in particular, what is it that you could write about. I know that when I wrote my first eBook, I struggled for a long time thinking of which subject I could write about and questioned myself so many times as to why other people would want to read my creation.
In Part 2 we explore some options to get you thinking about what subject to choose and address the quality of the content that you should be looking to achieve. Let’s get started!
Deciding What to Write About
Before we dive in and explore some of the subjects that you could write an eBook on, let’s stop for a moment to consider the question: “Why would somebody want to read my eBook?”. This is important, and for me was more important to answer before I even looked at what to write about.
It is human nature to want to both give and receive information. From the many legends and myths that have been told for centuries to the more modern social networking websites on the internet, sharing information is something that human beings tend to do all of the time and sometimes, whether you want them to or not. By sharing this information we can expand our knowledge in new areas and learn how different people live their lives around the world. People just want to share.
Each person’s life is completely different to the next. We all experience life in different ways depending on our environments, our social circles and our beliefs. It is virtually impossible for two individual people to have had exactly the same experiences and thoughts as each other throughout their lives. This makes each one of us unique. As a result, we all have experiences and ideas that we can share with others they have no idea about, that could in fact, change the way they live their lives forever.
What Can You Offer Your Readers?
Understanding that we have all had different experiences in life opens up the possibility of sharing our unique information with other people. Let’s look at the 3 main areas that are more commonly addressed in both eBooks and physical books and what they offer their readers.
Solving the Reader’s Problems
If you have read any information at all as to what to write a book about, you will come across this area the most. Solving a problem for your reader is a sure-fire way to get people interested in your eBook from the outset.
Maybe you have a top-class solution as to how people can overcome shyness, stop smoking, sleep better at night or become a better parent. Perhaps your readers want to know how to get rid of acne, warts, how to be more confident or want to lose 20 pounds by the time summer comes around.
When people have problems they want to know how to solve them, usually quickly, effectively and using unique methods. Maybe in your life you have been in these situations and found a good way to accomplish what you set out to achieve or perhaps you know somebody who has?
Teaching the Reader Something They Want to Learn
Another way to share information with others is to teach them something useful and that will add value to their life. Having been in IT for many years, I taught people all the time. Teaching is one of the only ways of sharing your information where teaching concepts are familiar to others, so that they too can benefit from our knowledge. After all, we have all been conditioned since school to the way that teachers pass their knowledge on to us.
It could be that you have learnt something in your personal or professional life that will be valuable to others and that they will want to learn. Maybe you have got a technical skill that you could share, or maybe you have discovered a new way to cook a chicken that makes it taste extremely awesome!
In my own personal life, I trained as a martial artist for many years. I was also interested in the power of the mind and what it could accomplish. After trying out a few techniques, I constructed a solution where I could perfect new moves overnight and teach myself to react fast to situations that I had never before experienced, with extraordinary results. I used to teach these techniques to my students and what would normally take 10 weeks to learn and perfect, could be learned in a day or two.
There are an inexhaustible number of subjects to write about from sport, stamp collecting and computers, through to kayaking, skiing and ice-fishing. Each one of them has its own challenges and each one of them has a solution where somebody has found a different way to do things that make life easier for them. Why would it not make life easier for others?
Entertain Your Reader
The last area that we will look at is entertaining your reader. You may have some funny situations that have happened during your life that you want to write about, or maybe you are a good comedian and a master of writing jokes and anecdotes, perhaps you are a great magician and can handle a pack of cards with eye-popping speed.
Maybe you have a good story to tell, whether it’s a life-changing personal experience or a fictional, romantic, murder-thriller with a gripping twist. It could be that you just have different ideas about things that you would like to share with others.
People like to escape from life by reading novels and stories that they can get engrossed in. For many it’s a way to relax and de-stress after a hard day’s work.
Choosing a Subject
So now that your brain is whirring as to what you can offer your readers, we now need to look at some of the things you could write about.
What are you Passionate About?
The first thing that I would encourage you to explore is find out what you are passionate about. What do you talk about to others all the time and what keeps you awake at night. Being passionate about something means that you probably already have the knowledge to start writing about your subject, or readily know where to find the information. It also means that you will enjoy writing your eBook and it won’t become a task.
If you’re not sure what you talk about all the time, ask somebody you talk to a lot. The next thing that you need to do is find an angle that you can use to share this information with others in your eBook and something that’s a little different to what others have already written about.
What are you Learning About?
A lot of people write about what they are learning. It is not always necessary to know everything and be an expert. It has been shown time and time again that when people write about what they are learning about, then others who are in the same boat and learning the same thing can easily identify with the information. Furthermore, for those people who are just starting out on the same road as you, you will become a great source of information for them as they read about the struggles you had and how you solved them, in effect, making their life easier.
Maybe you have some information to offer with regard to how to best learn a particular subject. It could be that you have found a way to do it faster, cheaper or more efficiently that other people are unaware of. Perhaps you have just finished learning about the subject and you want to share your experiences of your learning process with others.
Personal Experiences
Our lives are ever changing but we all go through similar events such as getting married, having babies, coping with illness and building family relationships.
Other people are eager to know how others are “doing it”. New mothers may want to know about some of the problems and challenges that motherhood brings, as well as tips and ideas on bringing up their newborn baby.
Getting engaged and preparing a wedding is always a subject that is shared among brides-to–be and maybe you have some valuable information that can make the preparation or the actual day, easier and more memorable, or a “DIY Guide to Your Perfect Wedding”.
Illness is another subject to write about and even though it may seem a bit negative initially, people want to read about other people that are going through the same problems as them. Maybe you or a close family member or friend has had a hard time recently due to losing a parent or child, maybe you were depressed or maybe you suffer from migraines. Identifying with somebody going through similar experiences is a natural process and something that human beings tend to find comfort in. However, people do not just want to read how depressed you are, they want to find out how you overcome your challenges and went on to lead a powerful and fulfilling life.
Keep it honest and truthful and you won’t go far wrong.
Professional Experiences
Just like our personal experiences, we also share similar experiences to others in our workplace. We are employed in similar roles and are expected to achieve similar goals. Seeing as we are all individuals with different ideas, it may be that we have discovered alternative and more efficient solutions to our work.
Personally for me as an IT Manager for a few different companies, I was required to provide top-class solutions with minimal budget. It would have been practically impossible to accomplish these goals using industry-standard solutions and so over the years I became adept to providing alternative solutions that kept within the provided budget and provided the same results.
Perhaps you have similar knowledge that you could use for your eBook? Maybe you have learnt something by experience or just finished a course on the latest “bio-mechanical robotics techniques” (if there is such a thing) that you could share with others or even something a bit simpler, like “How to Grow Humungous Marrows!”.
There is a wealth of knowledge that we learn in our workplaces that we use each and every day and take for granted. By paying attention to the things that we spend time doing and how we do them, we can look for tips and ideas that could become the main core of our eBook subject.
Interview Others
Perhaps you know of somebody who has something interesting to share that would make a great book? You could set up a few sessions with them where you could interview them about how they accomplished something and then write your eBook using their experiences.
This is seen quite often and one book that springs to mind instantly is “The Snowball – Warren Buffet and the Business of Life”. This book was written by Alice Schroeder about one of the World’s greatest investors. From interviewing Warren Buffett on various occasions she compiled all of the information she needed and then wrote a book about him.
Use Unique & Valuable Content
A lot of the teachings that I find on the internet on how to create an eBook seem to focus on creating an eBook without writing a word. There are products out there known as “Private Label Rights” products that allow you to purchase content that has been written by another author and publish it as your own.
The result of this is that a lot of eBooks out there have exactly the same content as each other, just with different titles. Just think how annoyed you would be if you purchased a book titled “The Basics of Investing” and then went on to buy “How to Get Maximum Return on Your Investments” and they had 100% exact same content.
Although it may be tempting at first when starting to think about your content, to purchase this type of package, it is not something that I would never recommend doing.
Your eBook needs to provide value to your readers and therefore should contain original content that you yourself have written, in your own words. The information needs to be of good useful quality and deliver on its promise.
“How-to” style eBooks need to contain the correct information which is repeatable by the reader. It’s no good writing about “How To Make a Hovercraft”, if you haven’t been involved with such a project, have gotten the information from somewhere else and not even tried to build one yourself following those same instructions.
Technical books need to be technically correct and comedy books need to be funny! I know that you know all this, but it is amazing how many people that write eBooks do not pay attention to this at all and provide eBooks with no quality in them.
By ensuring that your content is unique you will create an eBook that is not available anywhere else and one that hasn’t been written before in the way that has been written by you.
By paying attention to these few points, you will ensure that the information in your eBook will be of value to your readers, keeping them coming back for more when new books become available.
Make Your Content Engaging
It’s no good selling an eBook if your readers get bored after the first page or two.
By keeping your content engaging and interesting, you will ensure that your readers will enjoy the book. Draw in your readers by giving examples, setting tasks, telling stories and adding humour at appropriate times during your book. Each chapter should leave them wanting to read the next one, then the next and the next.
Getting Ideas for Your Subject
Go and visit a book shop over the next week and take a look at the types of books that are being sold. See how many books solve problems for their readers, teach them something or just provide a method of getting the reader to escape the realms of reality into the fantasy world contained within the book. This will be almost every single book in the shop!
Think about things that you have read and have thought to yourself “I could write it better than that”. Think about the challenges that you have overcome and what you have learnt from your life experiences.
Finally, get in touch with your passions. What do you love to do and what drives you. Speak to those people who are close to you and get their thoughts on what you talk about often. What are your hobbies and interests and what could you be interested in learning?
Make a list of a few ideas of eBooks that you could write, their subjects and what they would contain. Think about what quality information that you could provide to the person who reads your book and the different angles that you could use to get the information across to your readers.
Finally, get on the internet and surf. Find out if there is an interest in your potential subjects by searching for other eBooks on similar subjects and try to find forums where people are discussing the issues surrounding them.
If others have already written eBook on the same subjects in a large market, don’t immediately get discouraged, find a way to explain the information differently or offer your readers better quality or even more information. A large market means more competition but it also means more readers, embrace the challenge. If you are addressing a smaller market and writing a book about “Brass Button Polishing”, you may want to rethink your idea if you are not able to find a lot of information on the internet. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you are the only person writing about that subject so you have to have the monopoly, there is probably a good reason as to why others haven’t ventured down this path and perhaps it isn’t really that popular.
Coming in Part 3
That’s it for this week. Next week, in Part 3 of How to Create an eBook, we will look at a few of the tools that you can use to create your eBook. The main tools that are covered will get you started on your road to getting your fingers tapping those keys and starting to write your very first eBook.
Until then.
Welcome to Part 1 of How to Create an eBook. This is the first of 9 weekly posts designed to get you started creating your very own masterpiece. By the end of this period you should have all the information that you need to create your own eBook and hopefully be encouraged to take up the challenge and get going. It’s very easy to do and what’s more, it’s enjoyable and rewarding.
Before we get too involved in the mechanics of actually creating the eBook itself, we will take a step back to one of the very first questions that you should ask yourself before even starting to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys. This question is not “How to Create an eBook” but rather “Why Create an eBook?”.
Different people will have different reasons for creating an eBook and it would be impractical to cover all of the ideas here and what’s more, I doubt if I know every single situation where a person may decide to create an eBook. Instead we will take a look at a few of the more common reasons that people decide to write and eBook. This should get your creative juices flowing in the right direction at least.
To Help Promote your Business
Many people, me included, decide to produce eBooks to market their business. This is a very good way of giving away high quality information to potential customers. By communicating what your business can offer, together with your views and some tips and ideas that will give value to others, you will give your readers an insight to what you and your business are all about, pass on some valuable information and can attract the right type of people who are interested in your subject, to your website.
Obviously, the information contained within your e-book will need be relevant to your chosen niche or area of business. It’s no good producing an e-book about your Fly Fishing interests, when your internet business concentrates on providing information related to computer and Video Gaming.
When you create an eBook to market your business, it is important to bear in mind that the material that you put in your eBook will reflect on you and your business. Using foul language or consistently running your competitors down would not be a good way to encourage people to read, let alone part with their precious time in order to check out your website. Create content that will allow others to perceive you as you want to be seen and more importantly, live up to the picture that you create.
Your eBook does not necessarily have to be very long, but it must provide useful information. A 10-page high quality eBook would be perfectly fine as a marketing tool as long as the information is to the point and of interest to your target market.
An Eye for Quality
There are so many eBooks out there that have just been cobbled together without much thought and look extremely basic indeed. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than just starting up your word processing application and starting to type using its default settings, without first paying attention to how you want your book to look.
Most of the time it’s because of ignorance that people don’t bother to take the time to plan out the visual appeal of their creation and I don’t mean that in a nasty way. People just don’t know how to do anything different or choose not to spend the time learning.
These days though, it is very simple to create a good looking publication. By paying attention to typefaces, by using colour and holding back from putting everything in bold in order to highlight them, it only takes a small amount of time to produce the look that you are trying to achieve. By spending time looking through other books and magazines, you can very quickly get some ideas that you could use when producing your eBook.
The result is a high quality looking book and more customers being attracted to your site.
Marketing your eBook
Once created, your eBook can then be circulated across the internet in order that people may read it. In this instance it is probable that you would want to give your book away, as it would be a pointless exercise selling a book in order to market your business. Your goal should be to get your book circulated as quickly and as easily as possible in order to attract new potential customers to your website.
Maybe instead of sending your new eBook all over the globe, you wish to use it as an incentive for people to sign up to your newsletter and announcements. This is a very good way of tempting people to part with their precious e-mail addresses and getting them on your mailing list.
Due to the vastness of the entire internet marketing subject, we will address this in a later project and so it will not be covered within this one. However, if you want to learn more about marketing your eBook, a quick Google search should provide you with some information of how to go about this.
If you haven’t yet signed up to the Internet Business mailing list, do so now and download your free eBook “Internet Business & A Life of Freedom”. You can then get an idea as to the way that I have chosen to lay it out, give my views and opinions on internet business and why I started Internet Business DiY. I am sure that you will find it a good read and you may learn a few things that you didn’t know!
To Make Money from Sales
Another reason that you may want to write an eBook is to make money from selling it. In this case your eBook is likely to be much larger than one that has been created to market your business. Maybe you wish to write a “How-to” style book instructing people in the dying art of finger painting, or may be a technical book an configuring the newest piece of software. You could decide to write a course on your chosen subject, or even a novel if that is what you desire to do.
This is exactly the same as the types of books that you see and buy in the book shops and the only difference is that it’s in electronic form. However, you can still publish your book using self-publishing and can even apply for an ISBN number for it!
The aim at the end of it all though, is to sell your eBook. It goes without saying then, that the subject you choose to write about needs to be in demand to a certain degree, otherwise you will never attract any buyers and ultimately never make money.
There are a couple of ways that you could choose to sell your eBook; sell it yourself or get others to sell it for you.
To Establish Yourself as an Expert in your Field
This is similar to marketing your business, but in this instance you are effectively marketing yourself. You may decide that you will write some excellent content and instead of selling your book for a standard price, you will supply the book very cheaply in order to attract buyers. Once your customers have read one or two of your publications, or maybe a series of them, they will get to see you as an expert in what you talk about.
It may be that you coincide this with the business promotion idea and just give away your eBook to others. Or maybe you will give away a small portion of it, say one or two chapters, to entice people to buy the full version.
Consistency will be the key and once you have defined yourself as an expert, then people will stay with you for as long as you provide quality information to them.
You Have Always Wanted to Write a Book
This is one of my favourites. I know a lot of people who have said to me that they have always wanted to write a book, but none of them ever do. Why not? “I’ll never be able to get it published”, they say or “It won’t be good enough”. In this day and age these excuses are rubbish!
It is possible to write your own book, circulate it digitally for people to read, provide it in digital format for those with eBook readers and computers and even self-publish it into a physical product – all for either nothing, or such a small amount of money that it’s not even worth talking about the cost.
The bottom line is, if you want to write a book there is nothing to stop you. Indeed, this project alone will get you in a position where you can write and produce an entire book on your most passionate subject. Saying this, I would encourage you to let people know about this particular project, if you know that they have always wanted to write a book and didn’t know where to start, even if they do not have an interest in internet business.
Get Your Creative Juices Flowing
You will hopefully have a few ideas buzzing around you head as to why you would want to create an eBook. Why not surf the internet for a while and see how other people are doing it? Sign-up to a few websites, download and read their offerings. You will get some great ideas of why others have produced an eBook.
For me it is two-fold. To start with I wanted a way that I could market my business and provide a way to let my potential customers know where I am coming from and secondly I have a passion to teach people what I know and help them on their way to success. For you, it may be completely different.
Coming in Part 2
Next week, in Part 2 of How to Create an eBook, we will look at deciding on what to write about. This is an area where some people get stuck and the stage where you will need to give some thought as to the overall content of your eBook.
See you then.
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