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Posts Tagged ‘ebook business’
How To Write An Ebook That Customers Will Want To Buy
Written by Robert W. Smith
Monday, 29 March 2010 19:47
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Knowing how to write an ebook that customers will wish to purchase involves using the age old marketing maxim of finding out what they want, then giving them what they want. This applies just as much for authoring ebooks as it does to the traditional book publishing industry.

Fledgling ebook business entrepreneurs that are writing ebooks should therefore take the same approach as corporate publishers in deciding how to write an ebook. This article will detail how to research what your readers want and how this can inform how to produce your ebook.

If you are somebody that is very much in tune with your target audience then perhaps you already know what your readers want. If on the other hand you are unsure, or you wish to confirm your hunch, then thankfully there is an on-line tool that can facilitate authors.

Google’s Adword Keyword Tool (just search for the tool name to locate it) is a tool that can analyze all the popular phrases that are used on the internet. It facilitates researching specific words/phrases and also querying websites. The results it provides show the popularity of terms and words used regularly on internet searches.

For anyone authoring an ebook it should be apparent from the results it returns that this tool can give you an insight into people’s needs. If a large number of people are searching for a specific phrase then this informs you that (a) there is a market and (b) what specific sub-areas of a subject people are interested in. The results often show popular searches for sub-areas you may not have considered writing about (e.g. ‘taking better holiday pictures’).

If your book is going to target a specific group of people (for example, amateur photographers) then you could use the tool to enter a website URL for a web forum. Doing this provides a profile of the forum showing key terms that are regularly used. For example, the term ‘photography lighting’ might appear popular in the tool results, so if this is something which you feel that you are an authority on then it would make an ideal ebook concept.

Don’t rush this research phase. As the saying goes, an inch is better than a mile in the right direction. Bring together a list of terms and phrases that appear to be popular (according to the tool) and have a close relevance to the subject area you wish to cover in an ebook. Try to focus in on just one phrase that you consider using as the core theme of your ebook. This key concept forms the main thread through your book along which you can introduce related concepts (perhaps using the short list of key phrases from your research to guide sub-concepts).

Lastly the phrase should be incorporated in some manner into the title of your ebook. This improves the book’s chances of being found in web searches relating to the phrase. Use the exact phrase if possible (i.e. if it reads well) or embellish it so that it attracts in readers. For example, the photographic term used earlier could be incorporated into a title such as ‘Photography Lighting – From Beginner to Expert’.

Writing ebooks? Want to sell them yourself? Then read my review of DLGuard – the one-stop solution for selling digital downloads.

 
Ebook Business 101: How To Keep Writing Ebooks To A Plan
Written by Anne J. Mahon
Sunday, 28 March 2010 19:25
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Creative writing can be such a difficult activity to estimate. Some would say that plan creativity, and time restricting creative writing, goes against its principals. Strict planning of other artistic and creative processes (films, music, etc) does occur and helps focus the participants in on the value of their time.

One approach to take is to treat your writing like creating a physical product such as a plane. Thinking like this involves prototyping in the early stages to create an abundance of ideas and fleshing out those ideas that interest you into prototypes. Ebooks are no different. Prototyping ebook ideas can be done using whiteboards, mind-maps or story boards (to define the arc of a story line or simply the chapters you intend writing).

Prototyping leads into the execution phase – writing ebooks. It is this phase that can benefit from planning to ensure your book adheres to the goals and ideas that you wish to put across.

Spell out the book’s goal.

Set the goal or goals for your book. Don’t try to muddy the waters with a multitude of goals. Think of any of your favourite books and they probably have a small amount of objectives and one central goal.

Specify all the tasks involved in writing the book.

This can be as simple as taking your rough listing of chapters, add any formatting/presentation that will be required and not forgetting research that you (or others) will need to do. You’ll have your own list of add-on tasks specific to your eBooks subject. Give each task a rough level of effort (e.g. 2 days to complete chapter 1).

Analyze the list for external dependencies (third parties) and arrange this work early on.

Planning to use a personal assist to do some research for your book? Intending interview some industry leaders to add some real world insight? Well, then you’ll need to front load booking their time and add this to your list of jobs/schedule.

Put in a margin of error

Knowing this margin of error as a percentage only really comes to you with some experience of knowing how many days over your writing will go. As a starter, add 10 to 15% contingency.

By this stage you now have a list of all the work to be done. You could use project management software to plan this out and establish the duration of all your work. Alternately, use a whiteboard with the days of the week and add post-it notes for each action to be completed. Or just keep it simple by adding the actions to your diary along with any planned holidays you wish to take (so you know to work around them).

Keep on top of things as you implement your plan so that you always know if you are on track.

As the saying goes “create a plan, and then work the plan”. As you start implementing your planned tasks you can tick them off of your list as completed. Keep track of tasks running over. Use your contingency/margin of error for these. This should not suppress the creative writing process. Instead, this is focusing your mind on the value of your time.

Report milestones.

A milestone report is intended ‘for your eyes-only’. It is a motivational technique to show you how much progress you have made. When looking at the work ahead focus on the upcoming milestones. Consider it like climbing a mountain and aim for the next base camp. Focusing on the summit from the foothills is too daunting.

Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Last thing to do is a post-mortem.

Congratulations on getting to the end. One last thing to do is a post-mortem on your plan to highlight delays, unforeseen task/issues, inaccuracies in defined level of effort and how much contingency was used. These can feed into plans for future books and help you grow your fledgling eBook business to greater heights.

Writing ebooks or software and want to sell them yourself? Then read my review of DLGuard review – the one-stop solution for selling digital downloads.

 
Pioneering DRM Innovation In The EBook Business
Written by Robert J. Webb
Monday, 15 March 2010 15:57
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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is one area of publishing and the eBook business that should be of particular interest to any author who wishes to protect their written work when using digital formats.

DRM relates to protecting creative output in digital media formats (CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc.). DRM technology attempts to stop your written eBook being resold or duplicated without your permission. The music industry was slow to react in protecting their music in digital formats, meaning tunes were widely available on the net without the music publishers profiting.

The eBook business is different from the music industry though as eBooks are a result of the software sector rather than the book publishing sector. Consequently, written eBooks have incorporated innovation in DRM from the early days to protect the eBook’s contents.

In the early days, Adobe championed the PDF file format. Their software can constrict what PDF readers are permitted to do with a protected file. In particular, a PDF can disallow copying of the eBook text (a simple copy and paste of text to another document) and also stop the user from printing hard copies of the PDF file. This is DRM technology in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

In recent times, the Kindle Reader can notify their home servers over an internet connection if eBooks are being illegally shared. The vendor can then decide how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through the courts). They could infact take the option of remotely removing the file off of the player (as they have already done http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). The ramifications of this to device owner’s privacy are yet to be fully understood but it is certain to be a hot topic over the coming years.

Software developers are now also including the ability to disable eBooks remotely. Some vendors can render a PDF unreadable using remote notifications if the customer uses a stolen credit card or is looking for a refund (2 widely used means of acquiring PDFs freely). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF export/creation software is a simple solution that most will welcome.

These technological advancements in the eBook business may be too late in coming for the existing published PDFs. These still have copyright protection on their intellectual property once it is written. The new advancements in PDF security and copy protection should however make it even more secure and viable for the average person to start writing eBooks and start profiting from selling eBooks online.

Writing ebooks or software and want to publish and sell them online? Read Robert’s DLGuard review and get your software or ebook business online today.

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