The parts in this series so far are How to Write an Ebook: The Guide, Why It's a Good Idea, Choose a Sellable Topic and Preparing to Write.
Time to write. For me, the writing is the worst part, but my guess is that for many of you, it's the best part. For that reason, I imagine you all have some excellent insight. So if you have anything to add, please feel free to do so in the comments.
My number one writing tip remains: establish a writing habit.
But here are a few more:
Pretend you're your target.
The ability to see things from the perspective of your reader is key. Sometimes we know a topic so well we forget that others may be seeing it for the first time.
Do some serious thinking about who your target market is. Define them. Picture them in your brain. Anticipate their questions. Pretend you are them and think about what would most connect with you. Then, write that.
Biz Tip: From writing to marketing to selling, and whether I'm communicating with my readers, my affiliates or other bloggers, I consciously try to put myself in their shoes and ask myself what they would appreciate. The ability to do this — it's empathy and treating others as you would like to be treated — is probably one of my top business tips of all time. It literally shapes just about everything I do.
Combat writer's block.
I'm not sure if I had more writer's block than the next guy, but my advice here is, just write something. Anything. Even if it's horrible. Look through your outline, pick the thing that feels the least daunting at that moment, set a timer for 15 minutes and just write.
By the time the timer beeps, it's likely you'll be on a roll and can keep going. You know how sometimes when you try to get lotion out of a bottle that hasn't been used in a while the tip is clogged, but if you give it a good pump or squeeze, the clog gets unstuck and the lotion flows freely? It's kinda like that.
Don't format as you go.
By formatting I mean bolding, italicizing, adding bullets, creating headings, etc. — basically all the stuff you would do to make your ebook look appealing and be readable.
Open a very basic text editor and write. Skip a line between paragraphs perhaps, but other than that, save formatting for the end. (I use TextEdit on my Mac. You might have NotePad or something similar on your computer.)
Limit your editing as you go.
Likewise, resist the urge to do any major editing as you write. Save that for the end, otherwise, if you're like me, you'll never pass "Go!" and you certainly won't collect $200. You'll just be stuck writing and rewriting page one forever (ahem).
Save often AND in multiple places.
I said it last time, but it's worth repeating. Save your work constantly. A simple yet frequent click of Control-S (Command-S on a Mac) is a small price to pay in order to make sure you don't loose your precious work.
Another thing I recommend is to find an alternate place to save your work, preferably not on your computer. Last time I encouraged you to create an easy-to-remember file on your computer for saving. That's good, but what happens if your computer decides to die in the middle of your project? Yowza.
So, here's my recommendation: At the end of every power writing session, copy and paste your draft into an email and send it to yourself. If you're using Gmail, just archive it and you'll always have a copy not on your computer too. (Of course there are many online data storage services but I find email is easiest for me.)
Pick a ship date and hook.
Once you mind map, complete an outline, start writing and get into a rhythm, you'll likely be able to estimate how long this thing will take you to complete.
Next, pull out a calendar.
Determine a "ship" date (as Seth Godin likes to say). In other words, what day will you launch your ebook? The reason I suggest you pull out your calendar is to make your launch date coincide with calendar events on which you can "hook" your launch.
For example, you may remember me saying I originally had my launch date set for July. The reason I chose that date was because July is when things start ramping up for back-to-school sales and events. It's a time of year when people are in the mood to get their schedules in order and therefore, I had a hook for selling my ebook about time management. Lots of people (i.e. potential affiliates) are writing about back-to-school things in July and August, so they would be more likely convinced to promote my time management ebook at the same time.
Now, for me, July came and went, so I had to think of Plan B. The next logical time of year when people are thinking about time management is the New Year. That would have been fine, but I launched in late October instead. Doing so had several advantages:
- One message I used for promotion was "Get your schedule under control before the holiday craziness hits. Enjoy the holidays this year, eliminate stress and get a head start on the New Year."
- It allowed me to take advantage of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend which was a huge selling weekend for me. (Everyone's looking for a sale that time of year, so I discounted the ebook and pushed #1 above.)
- I was able to promote it to a captive audience of potential affiliates at the Relevant Conference (along with the huge help of Crystal).
- I still had another sale the first week of the New Year. The benefit was that plenty of people had read the book by now so I had testimonials to bolster my sales pitch.
We'll talk more about selling and promoting later, but my point here is to set a "ship" date. Give yourself enough time to get the ebook written, prepared for launch and launched, but challenge yourself to get the thing done in a timely manner as well. Setting a "ship" date gives you something to work towards instead of just letting the project drag on indefinitely.
Read the next post, How to Write an Ebook: Editing and Naming.
So, those are my writing tips. Got any more to add?
Other posts in this series
- How to Write an Ebook
- How to Write an Ebook: Why It's a Good Idea
- How to Write an Ebook: Choose a Sellable Topic
- How to Write an Ebook: Preparing to Write
- How to Write an Ebook: Writing Tips from a Non-Writer
- How to Write an Ebook: Editing and Naming
- How to Write an Ebook: Formatting
- How to Write an Ebook: Setting Up Accounts
- How to Write an Ebook: Pricing
- How to Write an Ebook: Distribution
- How to Write an Ebook: Creating a Sales Page (or Site)
- How to Write an Ebook: Preparing for Affiliates
- How to Write an Ebook: Taking care of your affiliates
- How to Write an Ebook: Paying your affiliates
- How to Make Your Ebook Available on Kindle & Nook
I have nothing to add, but wanted to thank you for this.
It brings me hope to see a blogger who is a non-writer. I'm not a writer, yet I feel God calling me to help others. So therefore I write and re-write and cringe when I read my posts.
Yet, I get emails from people thanking me for a post that helped them.
I guess God might be right after all!
Again, thanks for blogging even though you don't like to write.
So glad to know there are others who feel like I do! You're welcome.
I am a non-writer as well. A new blog post takes me at least 2-3 hours!!! ugh. so a daily post is almost out of the question for me. But I also see how I have grown over the past year in my writing. I started writing complete sentences (LOL) – watch my spelling but I also know that I have focused on 'information', which has become my safe-haven (who can argue with information
I guess, there is hope for all of us.
So much hope.
Your writing tips are spot-on. I am a natural writer, and I still have to tell myself some of those things, especially not to format as I go. I'm so visual, that often as I write, I can SEE how it should be laid out on the page. I make notes about those ideas, but try to stay focused on the WRITING task. Writing is a multi-faceted task, so it's hard to keep your mind from going on tangents like that.
I have a ship date, but wow, is it coming up FAST. I don't know if I'm going to make it. Although I have the guts, I still have so much to do — format, convert, sign up at E-junkie, promote. I think I've pushed it too close. I may have to postpone. Oh well, my hero Amy did that, and it worked for her.
(That box down there gets me every time.)
Well, I canned my first ship date completely, so…
My vote is to challenge yourself to meet your deadline, but not to the detriment of the overall quality of your ebook (or, more importantly, the detriment to your other responsibilities or your sanity!).
I am a writer too, and I have found that if you put these tips into practice, you'll end up at least getting close to that ship date. Realistically, for most people without the ship date there would be none at all.
I currently use some of these already, but I look forward to employing others. In particular, I find it helpful to have the goal of writing at several points every day. Nothing helps the process like having a routine. Thanks for the advice.
I just found your blog and I'm loving the challenge of writing an e-book. I never thought about it before. Just coming up with the right idea is going to be a challenge!
So glad you stopped by!
I may have missed this but what is an approximate word count for a decent e-book?
Well, I'm not sure what the word count for a decent ebook is, but I can tell you mine was about 5250 words and was about 28 pages long. My formatting had quite a bit of intentional whitespace. My advice is to write only as much as is necessary to cover your topic sufficiently. Remember that ebooks must either be printed out or read on a computer or other digital device so unless the reader can read on a Kindle (or something similar) they'll probably appreciate something a little shorter.
I can't tell you how much you writing the background has REALLY meant to me. I have had an idea in my head for awhile, even have an outline, but what has stopped me is not really knowing the ins and outs. I guess you could say, the process has had me stymied. What is strange is that since I am a book reviewer by profession,
I know what the process is for an old school novel. That process doesn't scare me a bit, but the idea of an e-book? I get the shakes. Just reading the subscriber email that you sent out today has spurred me on even further. THANK YOU!
You are more than welcome! I'm so glad it's helpful.
I've been really enjoying your e-book series and your newsletter that I read today! I've been umming and ahhing about an ebook idea for a while now and you've convinced me that I should give it a go…. now I just need to decide if I will sell it or give it away (not sure the mummy blogger niche does well with for sale ebooks?) oh and do all the hard work LOL.
Thank you!
Selling or giving it away — both are great ideas! I vote for you to give it a go.
Thanks for sharing about e-books. I haven't wrote one yet, but I was thinking about taking some of my blogs that were in a series and compiling them into a e-book. Thanks for all the info.
Encouraged by my husband and my father-in-law (both very wise men!) I have decided to write an e-book. I'm sooo grateful I knew just where to go for step-by-step advice. I'm following every step as I read through this series. Which means, tomorrow I start writing. I can hardly wait. Amy, you are wonderful! Thank you for using your gifts to help other people fulfill their callings!
(Oh, and why did I not know until reading the comments on this post that you have a newsletter? Maybe 'cause I shy away from newsletters as a rule, but I want as much of Amy as I can get – going to sign up now!)
Congrats! I hope writing your ebook is a great experience.
Hi Amy,
I am working through your starting a blog and popped over to your ebook section and I want to thank you for breaking this all down to manageable chunks! I am moving right along, hope to be up an running soon, with an ebook to launch in August. Thanks again!
Awesome! Glad it's helpful!
Great advice, Amy!
A really useful safe place to store documents is in dropbox – 2gb for free and you can access from wherever you are. A real life-saver
ken
Yes, love Dropbox! (If anyone wants an invite, got here. It's my referral link which gives me extra space if you sign up for a free account.)
So 10 months later I'm writing my ebook. I've decided that instead of being a "non-writer" I'm a teacher.
Helps me get over the thought that I write on my blog….instead, I teach what I know.
Thanks for everything you do Amy!
My pleasure! You go!
How long should an e-book be? Shortest it should be? Thank you! Learning a lot from yoU!
I'd say it should be long enough to say what you want it to say well. That's the beauty of ebooks. There's no "right" and "wrong" way to do it.
Thank you so much. As someone who is intimidated by having to write, this was great advice! I am setting my timer right now!
Thank you!
Awesome!
Hi, In my rough draft of my ebook, I have sited several sources. Are citations allowed in e-books?
Do you mean including something like a bibliography? See the note on Creating Back Matter here.
Hi Amy,
Thank you for the wonderful tips and information. This is something I had been contemplating and then: WHAM! I received one of Anna's emails with a link to your blog! I believe that is a sign. How could it not be?
At the rate things are going with my eBook, it may end up being a series. I'm going to finish writing it first before making that decision.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge!
Take care,
Michele
You're welcome, Michele! So glad you stopped by!