Ebooks are a great tool to use to boost business. You can use them to gain email subscribers and position yourself as an expert in your field. You can also use them as a means of revenue by selling them once you’ve got your name out there and built a loyal following.
According to Statista, ebook sales account for a quarter of global book sales and 20 billion dollars in revenue. They hold a lot of potential for business growth and boost conversions.
If it’s time for you to write your first ebook, here are three tips to help you do just that.
1. Plan the fine details
If you want the process of creating an ebook to go smoothly, you have to plan everything out first. There are a lot of ways to go about creating an ebook successfully and you won’t know what works best for you until you feel your options out.
You have to establish the technical framework of your ebook starting with a few factors:
- Are you going to self-publish, go through a professional publisher, or use an online publishing platform?
- Who’s going to be your distributor? How will you distribute?
- Are you going to charge for people to obtain it or will it serve as your lead magnet to gain more subscribers?
- How long do you want it to be?
It’s never a bad idea to have your ebook serve as a lead magnet to bring traffic and new leads your way. Offering visitors something of value for free that teaches them something builds a relationship of trust between brand and consumer. It shows authenticity. In a world where millions of ebooks exist and people can choose those millions of options over you, you want people to choose you.
2. Get the design right
Whether you hire a freelancer or do it yourself, you have to design your ebook with your brand in mind. Keep the same color scheme and add your logo to the cover page. You want people to see your ebook and know it comes from you.
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There aren’t any hard-line rules for how an ebook should be formatted, but most go by chapters and segment information with subheadings. It’s also important to make sure there’s whitespace in between paragraphs and the text isn’t clunky or difficult to read. If someone wants to skim your content, make that possible.
Treat your ebook like it’s the first piece of information readers are seeing on that subject. You want to speak conversationally so that they understand the material easily. Unless it’s specified that this is an ebook for experts, you have to assume your readers are beginners and you’re their teacher.
3. Have the right tools
Creating an ebook from start to finish is no easy task. It takes hard work, dedication, and lots of focus free from distractions. Luckily, if you have the right tools, your writing life can become so much easier.
To start, you can use a tool like Toggl to track how you spend your time. It’ll show you how long you took to work on parts of your ebook project and allow you to plan for better execution in the future. It’s also helpful in general to see how long each part of the ebook creation process takes you so you’re aware of your strengths and weaknesses in the writing process.
There are a lot of options for where you can draft your ebook. Google Docs isn’t a bad place to work. It’s free and you can access your ebook from different devices since it’s all stored on the cloud.
To catch spelling and grammar mistakes, Grammarly is quite popular. It offers a free extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari so that your errors get corrected right in your browser. Now text you write on sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Gmail can get corrected by the app.
It’s time to get published
Ebooks are a great way to connect with visitors and offer them valuable information as an incentive for their loyalty. Creating one isn’t easy, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. There are steps you can take like planning ahead utilizing tools and software to simplify the process. In the end, it’ll be worth it because you’ll be able to say you wrote your first ever ebook that will hopefully bring you the results you’re looking for.