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Monday, November 26, 2012

eBooks Made Easy

EBooks made easy! What a title! No doubt you've already ready several articles on how to do this. So why should I write another one. For the simple reason that another explanation may be the one that you need to create your first one, or write your next much more quickly than you ever dreamed possible. Are you interested?

A great friend of mine, with more than 100 books under his belt, once told me that the fast way to write a book is to "outline the whole thing; and then fill it up." It's the best advice I've ever heard, and I wanted to pass it along to you.

Before I talk about the outline, I want to explain how you need to think about the book itself. In other words, I want you to think of the whole thing first. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1. What is the number one message I want people to take away from the eBook?

2. What sections do I need to cover in order to communicate that one message?

3. How long do I want the eBook to be?

4. Who am I writing it for?

5. What do I want readers to do as a result of reading the eBook?

Once you've answered those questions, you'll not only have a broad outline, but you'll have a direction. Both are essential.

Now you need to develop your outline.

Count up the number of sections that you've decided you want to write and add two to them. So for example, if you had 10 sections that you wanted to write, then add two to that total. That would mean that you were actually going to write 12, instead of just 10.

The first section will be your introduction. Then you'll outline your 10 sections. The 12th section will be a conclusion.

Now you need to outline each section. The introduction is the beginning of your book. In it, you will describe briefly what readers can expect to find in your eBook. In most cases, one page (250-300 words) will be enough.

For each of the remaining sections, except the last one, decide what the most important message is and how it ties to the overall message of the book.

In your conclusion, briefly summarize the highlights of what you've written in the book itself. This section should give readers a sense of closure.

Write and Cash in on Short Ebooks Now How to Write an eBook Fast and Not Fail in the Attempt Writing an eBook - The 5 Most Important Tips for Newbies Success Is Subjective When It Comes to EBooking the Author of the Article Explained How an eBook Makes You an Expert in Your Field

Using Free Marketing To Promote Your Ebook

There are many ways to profit with ebooks. I personally love ebooks because of the incredible lifestyle that it gives me. You can wake up with money in your inbox on autopilot. You can come and go as you please. You can maintain your customer service efforts via phone. And there's no boss over you telling you what to do. With all that said, I think now is a great time to start selling your own eBook right away.

Now with that being said, there are a lot of people who are struggling to get a lot of sales with their ebook. In fact, almost none of these people make money with their ebook. For whole entire year, they will have only made around $100 total from their eBook marketing efforts.

Now there are a ton of reasons why this can happen. Sometimes the person doesn't give their eBook business 110%. Most don't believe that free marketing works, and are convinced on the idea that paid marketing is the way to go. And some just simply put in no effort in learning about internet marketing and promoting their book online.

Quite simply, you can't make money this way. If you want to make money with your ebook, you need a supreme marketing strategy that is unrivaled with anyone else. Marketing plays a very important role when it comes to selling your ebook, and if you don't know how to sell and promote your eBook successfully, then this is a problem.

You should first start off researching and learning about the best free traffic strategies out there so that you can tap into these lucrative strategies that will bring your eBook the sales and profits that you have been looking forward to. There are a lot of free traffic methods out there, and sometimes... these free traffic methods can get you more traffic than from the paid advertising sources.

Some of the best strategies out there are article marketing, forum marketing, video marketing, blog marketing, and search engine marketing. All of these traffic strategies can yield you a ton of traffic - but only if you're willing to put the work in to make your eBook business a success.

One thing that you can't afford to do is to make excuses. You have to be responsible for your own efforts and not blame the traffic techniques for not working. If you think that paid advertising is the way to go, then you should try it. But don't be surprised if you end up spending a lot of money on a traffic source that may or may-not be profitable for you.

I've been marketing my website for a short period of time now, and I can truly say that free marketing works. In fact, 98% of my traffic comes from free traffic methods. So that says something in and of itself. Don't get down on yourself if you've played the "pay per click" game and have come back unprofitable. Pick yourself up, and focus only on free strategies that can earn you the most traffic and money.

Take these tips and use them to propel your online business today.

Good luck at using these tips to make more money in your business simply and easily.

The Most Common Mistakes Made When Writing eBooks

Writing eBooks is something that can be really enjoyable. But, the first few times you do it can be very intimidating and there are always a few problems that may be encountered. This is especially the case if you've never written eBooks before. Your eBook may never even be read by the audience that it was intended for. The more you write eBooks the easier it will be to not have these problems. Even so, having more experience doesn't make sure your eBook will be launched. That is the reason why I put together a list of the seven mistakes that are often made by eBook writers. Look over the following list carefully and you won't make the mistakes.

1. Procrastinating due to a lack of self confidence about your eBook A lot of people that consider writing eBooks never even begin. The main cause of this is that they don't think their eBook is of a high enough quality to be written. This isn't true at all. You know something or have a new perspective on something and I guarantee that someone will find it helpful. You don't need to have a college degree to write a good eBook; the best ones tell us exactly what we need to know without too much excess. Thinking that your eBook won't be good enough isn't something to get caught up on.

2. Spending too long on research I realize that there are many writers in the world that spend a lot of time researching before they begin. If you're knowledgeable on the topic that you're writing about and have a solid outline, don't waste your time with long hours of research before you start writing. The recommendation that I give is for you to spend no more than a day on research before you begin to write your eBook. If there are topics in your eBook that require you to do additional research, all you have to do is make a note of it and continue the research when you edit.

3. Writing and editing at the same time Editing yourself while you're writing is not a good thing to do. You definitely should edit and revise your eBook, but that should be done separately from writing. Don't start editing during the process of writing.

4. Getting distracted from you writing It's vital that you become engaged in your writing. You have to create an environment for yourself that allows you to really think. That is why it's detrimental to edit and write at the same time. An important thing to do is to get into a rhythm that allows you to write your best.

5. Never finishing the eBook because your expectations are too high No matter what you do your eBook will never be immaculate. A wise decision to make would be to stop trying to obtain perfection. You should still try to make it the best that it can be but you should realize that when it's very good usually that's enough.

6. Leaving your eBook unedited and unrevised I've already stated that it's bad to edit and write at the same time. Once you've finished the writing stage it's still important to make sure you proof-read and edit. After I've edited the eBook myself I usually give it to a friend to look over. Someone else can almost always help you catch your mistakes. If you don't think anyone you know is good for that kind of thing you can either hire someone or get software to help you.

7. Letting your insecurities prevent you from launching the eBook There is no point to writing an eBook if no one ever reads it. Your work should be profitable either from selling the eBook or from obtaining email lists. Despite this you may be afraid that your eBook will be received badly. Even after I was done writing my first eBook I took two weeks before finally releasing it. Don't let this happen to you.

The solution to all of this is to create a system for yourself that's broken down into many different steps. If you follow the system one step at a time you should be able to avoid the problems.

How to Use a Blog to Sell Your EBook

One of the questions I am frequently asked is "How Do I Promote My eBook?". There are lots of answers to this question, but the most important aspect is that you should have a centralized hub for your promotion efforts. This hub is usually a blog or web site that links into your other promotional tools, like Facebook and Twitter.

You can design a hub web site using a free Blogger account on Google so the only real cost for the web site is the cost of the domain name. Speaking of Domain Names, a good idea is to host a Blog on its own domain instead of showing the standard Blogger account URL, that is fairly easy to do using instructions from Blogger, especially if you are hosting your domain name on Go Daddy, Blogger has a simple link to set up the forwarding automatically. You can also buy a domain name right through Blogger and have the forwarding set up automatically. If your domain name is hosted somewhere else there are easy to follow instructions on Blogger for that as well.

The first thing you will see on a Blog is the look and feel, this is set up using a standard template from Blogger with a few customizations for the type style and color. Next you can add stand alone pages as tabs, for instance Home, Sign-Up, and Books. Blogger makes it easy to create specialty pages for your blog. The Home page is the standard blog page with all of the nice blog features, auto date inclusion, archiving of past posts, ability to set up favorite links, etc. All of these are easily included using Blogger's tools. One of the reasons to use a blog as a web site is that they are so easy to set up using the supplied templates, you can get a web site up and running in a week or less with no trouble. Once you have gone through the steps you could actually set up a Blog in an afternoon, I have done several of these to promote individual titles or topics.

The Blogger Tabs are special pages that contain static information, more like a traditional web site. A standard blog will have a list of posts with the most current post at the top, and the rest below or included in the archive. But if you want some information always readily available then adding in additional pages is the way to go. You could create a Sign-Up page that contains basic instructions on using the email sign-up form on the right, along with pointing out the Sharing buttons and links. This page would be basically for people who are new to blogging. Most experienced users will have already spotted these links, but it doesn't hurt to put in some instructions as well, just in case.

Blogger allows you to customize the blog by adding in what they call Gadgets. Depending on the template you use you can add several of these Gadgets in different places on the page. As an example there is a Gadget that contains share links for Facebook and Twitter. Of course Blogger automatically puts in Share buttons at the bottom of each post as well.

You can make income directly from your Blog by putting in an Amazon Affiliate box, placing ads from Amazon directly into your Blog. To add one of these you need an Amazon Affiliate account, then you can simply do a search for a book title on Amazon using the Amazon ASIN number or ISBN number. Set this up as a box using your Amazon Affiliate account and Amazon does the rest. You can sign up as an Amazon Affiliate using the link at the bottom of the Amazon home page titled "Become an Affiliate". There is no cost to join Amazon Affiliates.

You then grab the HTML code supplied by Amazon and put that onto your blog. I like to use a HTML Gadget (used to hold basic HTML or text) and paste in the HTML from Amazon. Amazon then serves the ad directly from their servers. By default the ad will align itself to the left side of the Gadget area, but by putting a Div tag around the Amazon code (in the HTML Gadget) you can then put in an align="center" attribute in the Div tag and align the ad to the center of the Gadget area if you like.

Another useful box to include is an email sign-up box. You could call this "Join My List" or "New Releases & Signings", or whatever you feel is appropriate for your site and audience. This is placed into another HTML Gadget. It is best if you use a service to handle this type of email box, one that I like is aWeber. The whole thing is set up over on AWeber and then the code is simply pasted into the HTML Gadget just like we did with the Amazon code above. The aWeber form takes you to a confirmation page, plus you will get a confirmation email. If you confirm through the email link you will then be taken to the blog's Book page. The confirmation page opens in a new window so you will not lose the Blog page. All this is set up using aWeber's service and is handled by them. All you need to do is configure the aWeber account, then grab the code and paste it into a HTML box on Blogger.

Other items that you might want to include in your Hub page are, a button to join the site using Google Friend Connect, an About Me link, a Favorite Links section that is another Blogger Gadget, and of course the Blog Archive (also a Gadget).

Once you have your Hub page set up, using Google's Blogger, other blog software, or your own hosted account you are ready to begin driving traffic to your hub page. The idea of course is to give yourself a central location to send traffic to. That central location will then have all the links you need to market to your list or prospects.

One final nice feature of Google's Blogger, since it is owned by Google your site is listed in Google's Search Engine practically as soon as you publish your blog.

Tips on Marketing Your Ebook

A lot of people are already discovering the merits of writing an ebook. Whether you intend to use your eBook to showcase your literary targets or use it as a marketing tool, you should know how to promote your eBook and make sure it reaches it gets downloaded by your target market. There are those who can easily create ebooks but not all of them know how to market them properly. Do not let your hard work go to waste and start marketing your eBook the right way.

Tease your audience

Treat your eBook just like a new product or service that you have to promote. Products and services are given hype through advertisements to entice the audience. Musicians release teasers for their music videos, and the same goes for movies. Apply this type of treatment to your eBook to be able to build anticipation among your audience. The easiest way to do this is to make a blog post regarding your upcoming ebook. Build rapport with the readers by letting them become part of your project. You can ask for suggestions and feedback while you are at it. During the writing process, you can give them brief updates about your progress. It's all about whetting their appetites.

Ask your friends to help you out

What are Facebook friends and Twitter followers are for, right? Use your connections to help spread the word about your project. Your friends can use their statuses to inform their friends about your work. Of course, make sure that these friends will buy your book as well. Word of mouth through social media is a very effective way to promote your project.

Provide previews

As part of your "tease the audience" move, you should provide a chapter or two as previews of your ebook. You can post them on your website or offer it for download. This will give your readers a taste of what to expect from your ebook. Never underestimate the charm of free material. If they like what they will read, they will be determined to buy the finished product.

Get recommendations from other bloggers

Your fellow bloggers can help you out by giving reviews and recommendations about your ebook. Once you have finished the book, you can send free copies to select bloggers and ask them to publish a review on their websites, which you can link to your own. Recommendations from famous bloggers will increase the interest in your work and raises its credibility too.

Keep the price down

A minimal price tag never fails to attract the attention of the audience. People tend to buy stuff even if they are not fully acquainted with it if it comes cheap. Unless you are already an established author or blogger, stick to a lower price bracket to attract readers.

Marketing your eBook should go side by side with the writing process. By doing this, you're making sure that there are people who will be waiting for you to finish your eBook so they can buy it.

eBook Formatting For Amazon Kindle and Epub Kobo Writing Life - A Step by Step Guide For Beginners

Get Your Novel Selling On Amazon Kindle

First you're going to transfer the words you've been slaving over, correcting, deleting, etc to PLAIN TEXT. This will get rid of any hidden formatting glitches that suddenly make your words appear in places on the page where you don't want them.

BEFORE you transfer your text to this document, make a SAFE COPY so that you can't lose all your work.

To make a SAFE COPY:

FILE > SAVE AS > In 'Save As' line write SAFETYnameofdocument. In WHERE - select somewhere you'll find it easily like 'Desktop'.

Click > SAVE

CLOSE that document.

Now return to your original final document.

Transfer all your text to TEXT EDIT/NOTEPAD:

OPEN a blank TEXT EDIT/NOTEPAD document:

MAC: Find the TEXT EDIT Application. Click FINDER (funny blue face at the absolute bottom left of screen). Click the APPLICATIONS folder. Scroll down till you see Text Edit and double click on it. This opens the Application Icon (A piece of paper and a pen) in your control board running across the bottom of the screen. Click on the Icon to open a fresh Text Edit Document.

On very old Macs this App is called Simple Text

PC: On PCs this App is called NOTEPAD.

Highlight all of your text:

Return to your original Master doc. Click EDIT (right at top of screen) > SELECT ALL

A shadow runs across all of the text.

Now transfer it:

Click APPLE + C (CONTROL + C on PC) which copies the text somewhere deep inside your computer

Move cursor to your blank Text Edit/Notepad page

Click CONTROL/APPLE + V

Your text is now on the page.

Click FORMAT (right at top of screen) > Make Plain Text.

All your fonts and formats will disappear, leaving just the writing.

OPEN A FRESH NEW WORD DOCUMENT don't worry about the page sizes or anything like that, you don't need to bother with that as long as it's a basic, standard kind of a page layout.

Now cut and paste your plain text back onto this fresh Word document.

The text will appear in the font you have set in Word. Use a basic, standard font like Times New Roman.

This is now, technically, a clean copy ready to be transferred to Kindle. Save it and name it KINDLE-booktitle.

Now, before transferring to Amazon KDP, the Kindle sales platform, you'll need to:

a) Go through the text and re-insert any text formatting that's been lost like itallics/bold. Don't mess with the spacings yet, leave them completely alone.

b) Justify the margins. Remember, this document will not appear on Kindle as you see it written on the page. The machinery transfers your text in its own way, so only do the basics and you'll be less likely to screw up.

Kindle automatically indents the first line of every paragraph. To keep it simple, therefore, justify your margins to the left. In your Toolbar look for the rows of parallel lines, they're called Align Left, Centred, Align Right, Justified.

Highlight all your text EDIT > Select All.

Then Click the first on L parallel lines icon Align Left.

c)Now add your front matter, title, copyright etc. You don't need a picture cover inside your document. See Amazon Kindle's Simplified Formatting Guide.

d) Now for the spacings. This is where it's a bit weird. Have your text run continuously between each chapter, if a heading within a chapter is at the bottom of the page don't move it to the next page because once it transfers to Kindle the text will keep on running consecutively. Keep sub-headings close together, don't space things out or huge gaps will appear in the kindle doc. What you do need to do is space between the front pages and between the chapters. So when you want a new page click PAGE BREAK at the top of your screen (Sometimes found at INSERT > Break > Page Break).

e) Check your spacings by hitting the Backward P in your Word toolbar (CTRL+8/APPLE+8). You will then be able to see where the page breaks are and make sure they're all there.

Don't worry about hyperlinking chapter headings. It's necessary for non-fiction so that readers can jump to the required chapters, but not absolutely needed for fiction. Don't put page numbers in either, ebook Masters don't need page numbers.

Save Word to HTML Web page (if you have pictures, you can skip this and load in Word, spacings may be less accurate & need more adjusting. If you have "HTML Filtered" option, choose this, pictures sometimes load well with this, sometimes not at all.):

Click FILE > where it says Save As > scroll down to "Save As Web Page".

You'll now have 2 files, your Master and your HTML Web Page Master. The latter is the one you load to KDP. But first load to your Kindle (or Calibre see below) read through to check for formatting and spacing issues.

LOAD TO AMAZON

First, if you have any problems, Amazon digital email help:

kdp-support/at/amazon.com are helpful and usually quick to respond.

Now go to Amazon's Digital Text Platform, KDP https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin.

If you don't have a reader account with Amazon, create one.

Click GETTING STARTED & FAQs. Under the GETTING STARTED GUIDE > Publish Your Content

Scroll down to START HERE TO PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT > Enter Your Product Details

And you arrive at the first page of your dashboard.

Bookmark it so that you can find it easily whenever you need to:

Click BOOKMARK at top of screen > Bookmark this Page

Enter Details

The dashboard is your control panel.

Add:

The title of your book

Add Contributors:

Put your author name in.

Language etc are self-explanatory.

Ignore ISBN, you don't need that.

As long as all the work is your own, click 'This is not a public domain work'.

Target Your Book to Customers comes next. Choose two categories that most closely fit your title.

Search keywords: enter up to 7 key words that relate to your book. Separate each one by a comma. Think carefully as keywords really are key to bringing readers to your book sales page.

Upload Your Book Cover. Have it ready and waiting on your Desktop - click Browse for image and select the file name.

Enable DRM - click "Do not enable digital rights management" (see main book for details).

Upload Your Book File. Hit Browse and select the HTML file you made earlier. When you get the green tick and 'Upload and conversion successful, click PREVIEW BOOK.

A little screen will open with your Kindle book on it. Now go through the preview window and see how it looks. To correct any spacings, put your original Word Master MS up on the screen, click on the backward P thing to bring up the tab marks and other indent marks and go through your Kindle Preview and your MS together.

Retransfer your new Word Master to HTML, marked 2-titleoffile so you don't get it confused with your earlier draft. Browse and upload. Correct again until your satisfied. Keep words and headings close together for best results.

Click SAVE AND CONTINUE

Verify Your Publishing Territories

Click Worldwide rights, assuming nobody holds rights in any other country.

Choose Your Royalty. For a 70% Royalty charge $2.99 or above. For anything lower you'll need to go for the 35% royalty.

Kindle Book Lending. Tick Allow.

Tick Accept Terms and conditions.

Tick Save And Publish.

You're on.

It takes anything from a couple of hours to 48 hours for your book to appear. When it does, buy it and read it through again. If anything's not right, go to your bookmarked dashboard page and upload a corrected version. You can change your book as often as you like. You can change your price as often as you like. See what other books in your category are charging and take it from there.

Step by Step Guide To Making A Basic Epub Master for Direct Loading To Kobo Writing Life (Plus Other Epub Sales Platforms - iBooks, NOOK Etc.)

Make a new copy of your Kindle Word document and label it TitleofBook-KOBO.doc.

Go through the text and take out any references that you may have in your front and back idents which refer to Amazon. You may be asking readers to kindly think about reviewing your book on Amazon, for example. Delete, or change 'Amazon' to 'Kobo'.

Make sure your chapter listings are listed straight through from beginning to end with no breaks. How To Publish An Ebook On A Budget - An Author's Guide, for example, (from which this guide is extracted) is divided into four parts. My original index was divided by these part separations. This threw up an almighty storm when it came to the ePub reader trying to decipher chapter separation in its Table of Contents and the whole thing crashed. So it's chapter listing, if you have them, at the front of your document reading simply all the way through: 1,2,3 etc.

Save as HTML ("Web Page") ("filtered" if you have that option).

Now to download the free ebook reading and creation tool Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/. If you're using an older version of Calibre on an old Mac this might not work. You'll have to beg or borrow a PC or modern Mac that will download the latest version of Calibre which is a breeze, formatting-wise, compared to the older versions. Watch the simple tutorial video which shows you what all the basic buttons do.

First make a new file on your desktop to store Calibre ebooks. Open the list of computer files and folders at your computer START or Apple Finder button. The list will be something like ComputerUser'sName/Documents/Music/Games/Computer/Control Panel. You need to click the Computer User's Name, which will probably be your login name at the top of the list. Then go to > New Folder and label it CALIBRE. You will now have a Calibre Folder on your desktop.

Open the Calibre Dashboard. Click "ADD BOOKS" top Left. > Look for your ComputerUsersName label > from there you can get to your documents. Select your Kobo HTML file.

It will be added to your Calibre library.

On the Calibre Dashboard, select little arrow next to Blue EDIT METADATA icon, top row left.

Select "Edit Metadata Individually".

Check title and author are filled in correctly. If your ebook is already online, go to bottom and click "Download Metadata" and Calibre will automatically fill in description, cover etc.

If the ebook and/or cover isn't online click "Change Cover" "Browse" to find your cover to add.

Now click the brown "convert books" icon at the top next to Metadata icon.

A window will open. On the left near the bottom you'll see the blue EPUB OUTPUT arrow. Click.

A wheel will spin on the bottom right. When this has stopped. You'll see, on the right just below the cover image, that EPUB has been added to the formats.

Now get rid of the ZIP format. Right click the ZIP ident and hit delete.

Click on the title in your Calibre listing. A window will open, select the 3rd option down "SAVE TO DISC" > then 4th option "Save only Epub Format to Disc In Single Directory".

Click "Desktop" > highlight "Calibre Books" and click "Select Folder".

You are now done with Calibre. Don't forget to Donate if you can afford to give the Calibre people anything for providing this service free of charge.

Now go to Kobo Writing Life. Scroll down to bottom of page and click START PUBLISHING.

The interface is very simple to follow. Fill in the title, author details and book description.

When you're prompted to upload your Epub book, you'll see that Calibre has exported 3 files to the folder on your desktop. Select the top "EPUB" file, not the jpeg image or the OPF File (idents are on the far right of the line).

When it has uploaded you're invited to preview your Kobo ebook.

Look through - checking especially for spacings and that the chapter listings on the left hand side have come out OK.

If you're happy with the content, continue. If not, delete the file from Calibre, re-edit your master, retransfer to HTML and load to Calibre again.

Next you're asked to apply Digital Rights Management, which is set to default at YES. And then Geographic Rights, default set to YES.

My query to Kindleboards on DRM resulted in the advice not to apply DRM, so I choose not to do this and select NO. As I hold world rights on my title I keep the YES there.

Set the price and hit PUBLISH.

Don't forget to fill out your account details so that royalties can be paid directly into your bank account every month.