What Is An Ebook?

An Ebook is simply an electronic version of a regular book.  They are usually less expensive due to the method of delivery since you can download an Ebook immediately after purchasing it or receiving the link from the author.

E-Books are an excellent tool to help build your business.  You can use an E-Book as a give away for opting into your website or as a bonus for purchasing a larger product or you could just charge a flat fee for the E-Book. 

Whatever the case writing an E-Book will help to establish you as an authority in the area you are writing about.  If your E-Book is about fishing, and you put out an informative E-Book that’s not the same rehashed information that everyone else puts out, then chances are you will peak the interest of your readers and develop a loyal following.

Are you thinking about creating an E-Book but don’t know where to get started? 

Writing an E-Book can get overwhelming if you don’t follow a specific method.  Let me help you make writing your first E-Book an easy process. 

Step #1 – You first have to pick and research your topic

What Should I Write About?

1. Write about things that you know 

2. Write about things that interests you. 

3. Write about what is popular right now in your market 

Now that you have figured out what you want to write about you next want to be sure that there is a market for it.  If you don’t have an eager audience waiting to read your new Ebook then what is the point in writing it?  Here are some ways you can find out if your subject is one worth writing about: 

Use the power of the internet.  The best places to go and get real time results is to search the internet You need to visit online chat rooms, forums, blogs, survey sites and newsgroups.  When you are searching these areas it’s important to pay attention to what people are discussing on these sites.  Let’s say you are on a gardening site.  If you dig deep into the site you will find a dozen or so ideas about problems that gardeners need help solving or common questions that need to be answered, you can also participate and make post on the forum asking them what their biggest problem is with gardening.  That is all the ammunition you need to get started with your ebook. 

Keyword Research.  Another helpful method for researching your topic is to search the internet for keywords that are related to your topic.  There are many different keyword tools that can help you to find this information but a free one is the Google Adwords Tool.  Some of the more advanced keyword research tools will give you tons of valuable information about your topic like the competition for the keywords and the demand for the information.

Find a niche.    For example, if you want to write a book about scrapbooking that may be to broad of a subject.  Instead you can write about organizing your scrapbooking materials or a beginner’s guide to scrapbooking.  That way you have a more specific niche which makes your book more appealing and more beneficial to specific readers.

Step #2 Outline. 

You have to make a general outline of your book layout.  You want to outline it chapter by chapter, then break it down further with the key points for each chapter.  Doing so will make it easier to write your Ebook and will keep you on task.

If you want your Ebook to be let’s say 100 pages then you can outline a general rule for how long each chapter needs to be to make it to the 100 pages.  In this case if each chapter is 10 pages then you need 10 chapters to reach your goal of a 100 page Ebook.

List the ten to twelve most important topics that you want to address in your book.  You would already have these topics from the research you had done previously.  Each topic can be a chapter, then you want to take each chapter and write down five to ten questions that you had uncovered that were related to that topic that you want to answer.  For example if your chapter is titled Buying Your Scrapbooking Materials then five questions could be:

 1. What are the cost for scrapbooking materials?

2. Where should I buy my scrapbooking materials?

3. What are the essentials?

4. Can you save money and materials by joining a scrapbooking group/club?

5. What are the different types/qualities of scrabooking materials?

Once you start writing you can give each question a page or two and you will see that your new ebook will be written before you know it.

Step #3  Write, edit, and polish. 

Set a goal with a specified end date for the completion of your Ebook.  So if you want to have your book completed in a month then you can make smaller daily goals of writing 3 to 4 pages a day if your Ebook is to be about 100 pages.  Then you want to do some editing and polishing.  My best advice is to first write the book without worrying about any editing or the sentence structure or grammar issues, then when you go back you can just focus on cleaning up the ebook.  Or maybe you want to have the editing outsourced to a fresh pair of eyes for a second opinion.

That’s it.  Writing an ebook is really a process of clearly defining your topic, making sure there are going to be readers and demand for it and then planning the outline of the book and following through on it.  If you follow those three steps your ebook will be a success.

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