Dear Great Documents Subscribers and Visitors: A good web-friend of mine from Indigo Byte Systems, Dennis Crane, has put together the following blog post for today. It is a fine post detailing the challenges of putting together a quality e-book. Indeed, there is much to consider. Special thanks to Dennis for this post. Regards, Keith

Going to Write Another E-book?

Here is some practical advice for you

The Mission

In my professional career and daily life I meet many outstanding people who are highly committed to their job, business or hobby. These people gather tons of interesting information about what they do. The information literally overwhelms them and they want to share it with the rest of the world. They usually begin to spread some bits of their knowledge through their blogs, articles, conference presentations, podcasts, seminars or social networking. Nevertheless, almost everyone finally arrives to the idea of summarizing the whole knowledge on a certain topic in a single document or informational product. Writing and publishing e-books, therefore, is an easy way to share this accumulated knowledge with other people.

Let’s name just a few benefits of e-books as information media:

• E-books are cost effective. In comparison to paper book publishing, you can actually spend nothing to make and to publish a good e-book, except your time and knowledge. No need to pay for publishing, printing, shipping and distribution. Nowadays, bytes cost much less than paper, ink and gasoline.

• E-books are easy to make. E-book authoring tools are simple and common. These may be familiar text editors, like MS Word or Open Office with further compilation in PDF format. For better flexibility you may use specialized packages for technical documentation writing or help authoring tools (HAT), like featured Madcap Flare, upmarket Adobe Robohelp, agile Dr.Explain, or even freeware utilities. These tools will boost your productivity and enrich your e-book with many useful features like search, keyword indexing, flexible structuring and cross-linking, and availability in different formats, e.g. HTML, DOC, PDF or CHM which is a de facto standard for help files on the Microsoft Windows OS (Operating System). Commonly, the entire process of creating e-book consists of just two technological steps: author and compile. Both tasks can be accomplished by yourself and right on your own PC.

• E-books are products. Information is around us. Atomized bits of information cost pennies or even nothing. Once the information is concentrated, focused and structured it gets a product of great value. Experienced professionals may earn much by offering their on-topic e-books to colleagues, customers and niche partners.

• E-books add value to your business. Even a freeware e-book will add value to your business as it will help the professional community get aware of you, your expertise and experience. A good e-book that helps people solve their problems definitely adds credibility to your professional background and expands your recognition as an expert.

The Problem

Every coin has two sides. Everyone who is going to write another e-book should thoroughly think over some serious problems. The above benefits and technological simplicity attract many scammers who have hacked and vulgarized the concept of e-book writing. They have filled up the web with tons of low quality e-books. Due-to low expertise, they prefer to grab information from other e-books, magazines and sites, slightly recompile it and aggressively sell such plagiarized compilations under attractive titles. The common attributes of such e-books are lack of original and factual content, poor and sketchy structure, massive usage of buzz words in title and aggressive selling language on distribution web site. The sites of such low-grade e-books are usually one-page long copies full of call to action headers, fake special offers, unverifiable testimonials, and containing no real author contacts or bio.

In the past years such low-grade e-books produced the huge informational noise in the Web that hides the really valuable and worth-while information. This discourages many people from e-books as a trusted source of information and knowledge exchange media. Writers should take care of these problems and find a way to overcome them and to stand out from the pile of digital garbage.

The Solution

Before you write a first paragraph of your e-book think thoroughly not only about content but about the ways of its promoting and marketing. Yes! The marketing! You must seriously consider your e-book as a product. Below there are several tips on how to write a really good e-book and to efficiently promote it to the target audience.

• Realize your target audience. The first question you must ask yourself is “Who will read my e-book?” Understanding your potential readers is a key to success. You should think about what worries these people, what problems they face, and how your e-book will help them with these problems. Moreover, if you know your audience well you may choose the right writing style to speak the same language with them and to be considered as a member of the same community, not alien.

• Provide unique content. Find a demanded and original topic for your e-book. Include information that cannot be found anywhere else except your e-book. Don’t derive much content from other sources. The best way is to write about your own experience in a certain field because you are the only one who has this information and your personal point of view might be really interesting for other individuals.

• Structure your content. Assuming that your e-book is not fiction but a professional problem solving tool, make it easy to use. Explain to readers clearly what is your e-book about and what parts and structure it has. Divide the content in semantic blocks, map and group them logically, e.g. problem\solution, input\output, method\example, or use other patterns. Consistently follow the chosen logical patterns throughout the e-book. Actively use headers, sub-headers, blocks, visual anchors, and references to simplify the navigation and daily use.

• Use real cases and examples. People like to read success or failure stories. This is the so called “meat”. Add more meat and less water. Prove all your ideas and theories with actual facts and examples. The live stories, real figures, and actual use cases will make your e-book practical and will add credibility to your professional qualification as well.

• Provide the evidences of your expertise. Before people even download your e-book they must understand that you are a real expert with great experience. Don’t hide the whole story into the e-book. Make some parts freely available for everyone on your web site or blog. Tell people not only about why they need your e-book, but also about why you wrote it, who you are in the industry, what projects you accomplished and what results you achieved.

• Be open for contacts and feedback. As I said, many of low-grade e-books are anonymous in fact. The author name is usually faked and no real contacts are provided except free e-mail or a contact form. Give more credible contacts to receive feedback from readers. Prove that you are a real member of their community, not a bot or scammer. Be ready for communication with your audience to show that you are seriously going to improve and to develop your e-book even further, not just to sell it and then to melt away.

• Position the e-book just like a proof of your expertise, not your main business. Some authors may write e-books on any hot topic just to sell them to trendy people. Their main business is e-book writing. Show that your main profession is not e-book writing. You must be regarded as an experienced professional in a specific field who writes e-books to share the real knowledge not to make business purely on them. E-book is just an add-on for your main services or products.

• Collaborate with professionals. Collaboration and networking is another key to success. Your colleagues and partners will help you on every step of your project. They may provide you with unique content, interesting cases and facts. They will give you a valuable critics and suggestions about what should be improved or changed in your e-book. Don’t be just a taker. Give a favor to your collaborators in return. Mention them in your e-book and on web site. Help your pals with their projects. Share some valuable information with them. The people will pay you back with reviews and testimonials upon the e-book release. Some of them may even offer their distribution channels for your e-book, e.g. announcing it for their audience, customers, colleagues and partners, or include as an option in their product bundles. Remember that all viral marketing campaigns are based on people collaboration and networking.

• Provide verifiable testimonials. Testimonials and quotes are good marketing tools. Unfortunately, many sites that sell low-grade e-books are filled with fake testimonials “given” by fictional persons. Stay away from this technique. You may solicit a testimonial by directly asking for review from a well know person, but never write testimonials yourself. It’s a taboo! All testimonials must be real and verifiable. Provide as much information about reviewers as possible – give their contacts, photo, link to site, article reference or else. Of course, don’t forget to ask for people permission to publish the quotes and their personal data. Respect their privacy.

Conclusion

I’m not an e-book writer. However, as a software vendor, I deal much time with digital media and informational products. After many years of learning the Web, information technologies and marketing, I’m able to distinct valuable pieces of information in the digital noise. I saw many poorly written e-books or good e-books with weak promotion and I really want your next e-book to be great and successful.

All The Best,

Dennis Crane
Indigo Byte Systems