Write Your Own eBook

To write an ebook is a good and cheap way to promote yourself and your business and perhaps give some extra income to put out those small personal economic fires in the end of the month. It doesn’t have to be difficult either. If you are a blogger you maybe could take some of your best postings, edit them, and put them together in a smashing ebook.

It builds your online reputation as an expert worthy of bookmarking and seeking out for further consultation or purchases – and might also work as a viral traffic generator for your site or blog. There are many advantages with producing your very own ebook.

Wikipedia: An E-book is “an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a personal computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose”.

If you now are convinced of all the blessings with ebooks and decide to give out your own, we on Cashrevelations.com have put together some tips that might improve the finished ebook. These tips assume you already have chosen the topic for your ebook.

Software’s You Need

You need a few softwares. Namely one word processor, one PDF converter and an image processor. You can fetch them breathtaking and marriage destroying expensively, or you can get them free. Here we will introduce you to the completely free variant.

OpenOffice.org – The Free and Open Productivity Suite
OpenOffice is an office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It can also read and write files from other common office software packages. The advantage with OpenOffice is that you can save your word document as a PDF file, and an extra PDF converter won’t be necessary.

Wikipedia: A publisher has options when it comes to choosing a format for production. Wikipedia has a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.

Free PDF Creator – PrimoPDF
If you have an office software that can’t save your files as PDF – you will need a PDF converter. PrimoPDF is a free tool for PDF creation, comprising a user-friendly interface that enables printing to PDF from virtually any Windows application.

GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program
An ebook without images is boring. If you can’t afford Photoshop, then GIMP is for you. GIMP is a free software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter and so on.

If you already have word processor, PDF converter and image processor you can use them. There are also some competent free online alternatives you could use.

The Importance Of Research

Any subject you are capable of providing enough information on to write an ebook should be researched once again. Search for news and dissenting opinions about the viewpoint you are taking. Incorporate those opinions and news into your own ebook. This method will make your ebook much more interesting and useful.

If by researching you can come up with a wild and unique viewpoint building an ebook around such controversy will attract attention and more sales just be sure that you have enough information to back up your wild claims.

Wikipedia: Research can be defined to be search for knowledge or any systematic investigation to establish facts. The goal of research is to produce new knowledge.

Internet provides you with more or less easy accessible information on any topic you can imagine, if you use correct search method. Which search engine to use to find specific information can be a bit tricky and a question of experience, but a small hint about that is provided by NoodleTools: Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need.

Writing Method

Literature is told in the authors voice and you should think about to keep your voice clear and understandable. To keep the words flowing and personable – try to imagine while you are writing that you are explaining the subject to one specific person in your life.

Consider the questions that imaginative person may ask – use examples to visualize your concept. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who want to learn the information you are about to provide. What do they think? What do they feel? What do they already know?

Wikipedia: Electronic books use DRM restrictions to limit copying and sharing of e-books. Digital Rights Management is a generic term for access control technologies.

Perhaps they feel ashamed for not knowing the information? Putting that in perspective before you sit down and write can make a huge difference in how the reader feels toward you after finishing your ebook.

And don’t forget to be practical. Provide information that is useful for your reader – something they immediately can adapt for their special purposes or projects.

Touchy Subjects

Many go online to ask questions in anonymity that they would not even imagine asking their closest friends. Feeling like a novice or an idiot (or both) is not a pleasant emotion, unless one is somewhat orientated against masochism.

A gentle touch of reassurance backed up with some convincing statistics proving that they are not alone with their fears may make your ebook to appear so much better and might even be recommended as an authoritative resource on “touchy” subjects.

Use Illustrations

Any kind of publication, whatever it is a newspaper, novel, tutorial or ebook become better with some kind of illustrative images. Images help you to describe complex data so it appears much clearer for the reader. Images make your ebook more attractive.

You can use your own images, but be your own hardest critic when you judge the image quality. Blurry and badly composed images are only excusable if they show something truly unique or sensational. But a bad image can be better with some simple editing.

The truth is, almost all images become better with some photo editing – a little bit of cropping, some color adjustments, better contrast and so on, do good for the most of the images we take. The GIMP software above is a competent resource for tasks like that.

If you feel that you don’t want to use your own images, there are alternatives also for you. For example Wikimedia Commons have a huge archive of free images and illustrations you can use for your projects. We recommend that you use those images under GNU license or Public domain images. This article by SmashingMagazine on free images might be of interest for you: Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites.

Be sure to only use images you have right to use. Do not steal copyright materials. It is irritating and not necessary. There is so much free materials you can use out on Internet that any form of image theft is ridiculous.

Proofread

Before you publish, have your work proofread by as many people as possible. Few of us have the ability to proofread our own work. A mistake made in writing can easily be slipped over in editing if the same person does both.

The most important thing is to have the book understandable by your customers, so test out your ebook on a few friends. Ask for their input and take any advice they give you to your heart. By adjusting your writing so they can understand it, you will have a much more practical and useful ebook.