Make Money Writing E-Books
February 22, 2009 by admin
If you consider your writing to be pretty good, and you want to make money online, then maybe you should consider writing e-books. It can be a very profitable business and it even offers the advantage that you can do it from home. Actually, it’s simpler than it looks. The question of being a good writer shouldn’t even have been brought up because you can always outsource the actual writing as long as you can provide your ghost writer with a detailed outline of what you expect from him/her.
In any case, whether you’re planning to write the e-book yourself of you’re considering outsourcing the writing, you need to do some research on the topic. Soak up as much knowledge as you can about it. This is an important step because as you’re reading, you will likely have questions that will make you dig deeper to find the answers. Those questions are probably the same ones that other people are asking themselves, and if your e-book can provide the answers, then it will be a valuable resource and will be easier to sell.
Also, being knowledgeable about the subject will give you a more precise idea of what you want to finished product to look like, and that will be important whether you’re the author or someone else is. Remember that if you don’t really know what you want, you can’t expect a hired writer to know what you want. While doing your research, don’t hesitate to take a lot of notes. You’ll be surprised at how many details will remain on your mind and that you’ll want to use in your e-book.
As for length, shoot for fifty (50) to seventy-five (75) pages, depending on the topic and how thorough you want to be. Once your research is done, the first thing to do is NOT to start writing, but to create a table of contents. Doing so will help you structure your ideas and your e-book’s chapters will flow gracefully into each other. make sure that with each chapter, you cover everything that you wanted to cover before you move on to the next. If you go back and forth, your readers will just be confused.
Being structured is especially important with an e-book because most people will be reading it on their computer screen. As such, they don’t want to have to go back and forth in order to follow your thoughts. If it’s like that, then they might as well have just looked for the information scattered online, for free. They want something that’s concise (meaning you don’t say in 250 words what you could have said in 100), easy to read, and interesting. The ultimate compliment to your e-book is if people consider it to be worth printing out for future reference.
Now we’re not saying that you have to produce Pulitzer-worthy material. It just has to be decently written, but most importantly, it must be organized in a way that makes it easy to read. And if you don’t feel like you’re up to the task, you can always outsource the project on the many freelancing websites and find someone who will give you good results at an affordable price. If you have a good idea for an e-book, please don’t let the fact that you don’t consider yourself a good enough writer keep you back!
Finally, always spell-check and edit your work when you’re done writing (or when it’s handed back to you by your hired writer). Break down the chapters and see if they stand on their own. Then take a day or two to come up with an attention-grabbing title. Do the art cover (or have it done) and there you go! Your e-book is ready for public consumption.
At this stage, you can build your own website and go it alone, keeping 100% of the proceeds, or you can use Clickbank to get hundreds of affiliates selling your e-book, against a cut of the sale price. If you have the technical knowledge and the ability to drive targeted traffic to a website, then by all means go it alone. On the other hand, if you don’t, it might be better to go with Clickbank and get a percentage of the sales instead of 100% of no sales.
