Find Your Purpose - Part 6 - Producing eBooks as a Moneymaking Passion

An eBook is an electronic book. It is a book that is created on a computer and is made available to download though online channels. Finding and downloading eBooks online is a very easy way for people to acquire information quickly in an accessible format…you can read an eBook on your Kindle or iPad, mobile phone or laptop/pc or even get an audio version and play in your car or at the gym! And an eBook can just be a click of a download button away. 

Quite often people will simply buy an eBook on the internet on impulse, such is the ease of access to the content. People often don’t make an active decision to purchase an eBook – they just stumble upon it, like it and download it. Ensure that you produce an eBook focused on a topic that you (and hopefully a large audience out there) find engaging and you are on to a winner.

So how do you go about writing your eBook? 

The first thing is to focus upon the subject you wish to talk about. Naturally, you will be writing about the topic of your interest, but you can focus on one aspect that would be good for an eBook – don’t try to boil the ocean in your first book! After all, if you did that, what would have left to talk about? For example, if cooking is your passion, you could focus on just one aspect at a time. You could write an eBook on general baking techniques for example and then follow that up with more specific books e.g. bread making, cake baking, pie making etc. Once you have written a good range of books in the field of baking, you could go onto cooking or at least one aspect of cooking, for example barbecuing. This gives you better focus and leaves your options open for many more eBooks to follow. 

With the subject in your mind, think of the topics. It might be useful to create a mind map covering all the sub-topics within your chosen topic. These may then readily lend themselves to chapters in your book or you might discover they are broad enough in scope to justify a book in their own right!

Remember that these topics should be what people like to read. You will have to make a contents page, but before even doing this its worth thinking about the structure of the book, i.e. what chapter should come first, what then comes next and so on. A contents page without a structure risks leaving you with a book that doesn’t have a good natural flow. When the contents page is ready, you will know that you have covered everything you need to say when the eBook is finished. Laying out a structured contents page is a very important first step of building an eBook. It gives the you, as the writer, focus and direction.

For every eBook topic, you need to make sure you have good information to relate to the reader. The following kinds of information do well in eBooks:

• Tips and tricks
• Methods readers can try themselves
• Personal stories and experiences
• Motivational content
• Interesting and little-known facts
• Website links for getting more information

You get the idea…you have to add value to your eBook, and you can best do this by providing insights. Give as much helpful, insightful information as you can. 

Now, you can start writing. You are definitely going to put your passion into it because this is a subject that really interests you. Remember also to make your eBook well presented. The following are some useful tips you will need to use along the way:

• Use a great, engaging font 
• Use subtitles and headings 
• Keep the language simple and straightforward
• Think about the structure and flow of each chapter/section. 

Coming Next: Part 7 - To Blog or not to Blog, that is the question!