Write an E-Book in Two Weeks
January 10, 2008 · Written by Melissa Donovan
Jennifer Mattern over at All Freelance Writing has issued a 14-day e-book writing challenge. The goal? Write an e-book in fourteen days during the latter half of January. But how? And more importantly, why?
Niche Marketing
Have you heard the buzz about niche marketing? Basically, the world’s gotten so big that it’s become a waste of time trying to sell your product or service to everybody. The new business model is find a niche, master it, then find the niche market and sell, sell sell! E-books are popular in niche markets because they are usually non-fiction, industry-specific guides, which offer insight and knowledge designed to help a reader become more proficient in a given field.
Establish Your Credibility
If you truly know your niche, publishing an e-book will help to establish you as an expert in your field. Because they’re bought and sold online, word spreads rapidly when there’s a hot e-book on the market. Bloggers blog about them, commentators recommend them, and there are even affiliate programs which allow anyone with a web site to sell them. So if you can put forth a successful e-book, which people find useful and informative, word will get around and your reputation will grow. In a good way.
Build Your Brand
Whether you’re a poet or a freelance technical writer, you have a brand to build. If your e-book takes off, your name will literally be all over it, so you’ll become better known. Think of an e-book as a really long blog post with your business card attached to it and the message, contact me if you’d like to do business written on the back. Keep in mind that the e-book itself shows off your writing talents as well as your niche expertise, and there are streamlined channels through which you can sell your e-book to ensure they fall into the hands of your target customers. Who doesn’t want that?
Diversify Your Revenue with Passive Income
Some e-books are free, and there is a good tactic behind that. Note the two points above about establishing credibility and building your brand. Obviously, if you give your e-book away for free, tons of people will be more willing to check it (and you) out. However, there could be some drawbacks. For instance, some people might think you’re giving it away because you can’t sell it. Or, it could take off like a rocket and you’ll be sitting there wondering how much money you would have made if you’d only charged $6.99 for the darn thing. E-books are especially great for bloggers because they look cool in the sidebar. You can write posts to sell your e-book and of course, you will then be able to say that you have, in fact, written a book. If you already have ads generating some money on your blog, adding an e-book helps to diversify your revenue stream. Plus, once you write an e-book, you can keep on selling it without doing any further work. That’s passive income.
Back to the Challenge
If all this has piqued your interest and you want to learn how to write, publish, and sell an e-book, Jennifer is going to be blogging about the e-book basics until the challenge begins, and offering some helpful guidelines throughout the challenge as well, I presume.
Here’s What I’m Thinking
E-books are still pretty new, and I’m betting there are several huge untapped markets. One thing I’ve noticed out here in the blogosphere is a lot of people slap up blogs and web sites but they really aren’t writers (you guys know what I mean). Plenty of those e-books could benefit from proofreading, editing, ghostwriting, and other services that freelance writers offer. Could e-books lend themselves to collections of articles, or a magazine format? I’m just kind of brainstorming here, but I’m thinking there are loads of opportunities for writers in the e-book market, which by the way, is slated for considerable growth this year.
Questions:
Do you think e-books are just a tech trend? Could there be an opportunity for fiction writers or would fiction and poetry e-books go the way of self-publishing? Would you write one? Buy one?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
A word of caution: Writing an ebook requires discipline, a plan, and time.
We have seen so many people - clients and writers - believe that it’s fast and easy to pull off a quality ebook in a short period of time. Yes - if you have no other obligations, can write quickly and KNOW what you are talking about. (And assuming you’re not plagarizing by rewriting content, as so many “writers” are wont to do.)
Miracle ebooks - they’re a dime a dozen. They’re also a scam if you aren’t putting in quality information that is worth paying money for.
So if you’re going to sit down to write an ebook in 14 days, it had better be short, you had better have a plan, you had better have disclipline, no distractions, and know what the hell you’re talking about.
James, I definitely agree that a lot of planning needs to go into an endeavor such as this. I’m not really sure how Jennifer is going to run the challenge during the two week span, so we’ll see.
It may be more like a workshop, or NaNoWriMo — a process to get something written and learn a thing or two about e-books — I wouldn’t expect to have an e-book actually ready to publish and sell at the end of the two weeks. It sounds like a good opportunity to lay some groundwork though.
What are your thoughts on publishing a free e-book?
Taking the definition of publishing as being “making a written work public” (which means that all web content writers who put their name on their work and post it on a website are published authors), we’ve published a free “ebook” (a report) and posted it to our main website. Still there at http://www.jcme.ca, if you want to get it
Did it work as we’d intended? Nah. Did we push and market the snot out of it? Nope. Viral? Sure - if your ebook leans to being something that is in high demand that people want.
If it isn’t in high demand or is too common a topic, forget it. You’d have more chance of catching a virus that lays you up in bed for two weeks.
Ebooks are a lot of work and they don’t promote themselves. They don’t sell themselves either. You have to push at getting them out, spreading the word, driving traffic, and getting people to WANT what you have.
If a writer isn’t going to do that, then he should put energy towards something that will benefit, pay off, or increase income.
I find this interesting however I am not writing an ebook during the last two weeks of January.
I have considered the possibility of an ebook some time down the road. I am of two minds about whether epublishing is going to replace a significant portion of paper publishing as the ebooks I have found worthwhile so far have been connected to something else like a workshop.
This is still open for more research and consideration.
James, yes, I’ll definitely read your free report. Actually, I’m already on page eight.
E-books, like blogs, definitely require a lot of marketing energy.
I think that marketing is a great challenge for writers, especially in the online venue. There is no end to the e-books and blog posts about internet marketing, but I find that very little of it actually addresses the step by step processes one needs to take in order to effectively market products or services online.
Deb, I’m not sure I’ll be writing an e-book this month either, though I do have a whole bunch of ideas. I’m definitely going to follow the challenge, however, and try to learn everything I can.
As for electronic publications, I do think the market will grow. However, paper publications will not phase out anytime soon, especially considering everything I keep hearing about the cost and quality of e-book readers.
I’d love to get together an e-book or three or four.
I have a few basic concepts written down and your post made me think of polishing up my old poetry workshop to transform into e-book form. There are many possibilities with this option.
I don’t think e-books will replace regular books. I, for one, hate reading in e-book form. Web content is (usually) designed for quick, easy consumption but e-books often contain more content and require longer time commitments. Of course, with the advancements of e-book readers perhaps we’ll soon have an affordable opportunity to treat e-books as if they were regular books and read them while settled back in bed.
It’s a good time to go ahead with an e-book project if you have one and I’ll definitely follow along with the project and see what happens.
Those tempting lures of ebooks in two weeks or less always make me think of scammers with their headlines: “Write an article in five minutes and become a millionaire!!” I’m jaded.
Re: print versus ebook - I can’t stand screen reading (which puts me at a distinct disadvantage). I would LOVE to print out all my ebooks to read them. I can, but it’s time consuming and expensive.
An alternative is to produce an ebook and spread it around or sell it, and then head on over to Lulu.com or some other POD publisher, and offer your readers a second print format. That’s what they did with Rockstar Freelancer at Freelance Switch, and we opted out of buying the ebook to get the print version.
There’s just something about holding a real book in your hands and never have to worry about losing a file.
That’s a brilliant idea, James! It allows readers to get a taste of the book and those, like us, who prefer a print version but don’t want to use much needed ink and paper could then get a copy prepared as a real book. I’m definitely taking that idea to my Lulu account when I’ve put my ebook together.
I agree with the others. I detest online reading when it becomes too long. There’s nothing like curling up in a comfy chair with a good book!
I fear an e-book written in that short amount of time might be sloppy. I also agree that it’s just an opportunity to get the ideas down. That’s what our first drafts always are. Then we go back and edit and polish. So, it’s definitely a good way to force yourself to get those ideas out of your head and onto the page….
James and Rebecca, I really like the Lulu idea — offering a print option. I haven’t dug into the e-book publication methods yet, though I have heard of Lulu as a self-publishing service for print.
There are a lot of benefits to writing an e-book, but I don’t think any of them will manifest if you don’t treat it as a serious project and put substantial effort into it. E-books are sometimes promoted as get-rich-quick schemes and my feeling is none of those schemes are real anyway.
Michele, I can handle reading on the screen, but I certainly wouldn’t want to read a novel that way! I guess it depends on how long the text is.
If I decide to do the two week e-book challenge, I would definitely approach it as a brainstorming and rough drafting project, and plan on spending much time afterwards on editing and revising. Either way, I definitely want to learn more about e-books.
PDFs are the way to go. We’ve done the research, and it’s the easiest, most commonly accepted and preferred as well as the safest method of delivery.
I wrote an ebook that people seem to like in less than two weeks over the holidays. I also wrote most of an ebook in 4 days two years ago — and STILL haven’t finished.
I have two thoughts on writing an ebook in 2 weeks
1) You’d better know your topic reasonable well, or two weeks is too short.
2) Deadlines are good! You NEED to finish the thing or it just doesn’t matter!
Ted, it just goes to show that the creative process is different for everyone. Some people spend years on a novel, while others can pump one out in a month or two. I have an idea for an e-book simmering in my brain, and I’m guessing that if I think about it long enough, when the time comes to sit down and write, the process will go quickly.
Melissa, thanks for bringing up the e-book challenge. I just wanted to clarify a few things:
1. I wrote my first e-book in a total of 5 hours (yes, hours), and it’s sold well and received nothing but positive feedback in close to a year now. It’s short, I knew my subject matter well, I knew there was a demand for it (because clients repeatedly asked me to write one), and I have a promotional background which made the sales easier on me (not that I didn’t make plenty of mistakes along the way - the challenge is largely to help new e-book writers avoid the same mistakes).
2. The other key point I’m working to drive home is the fact that people have pre-conceived notions that e-books are either difficult to write or have to be long (and therefore be extremely time-consuming) - both incorrect. How long e-books from the challenge will be will depend entirely on how much time the writers can devote each day.
3. The challenge in absolutely no way condones releasing shoddy work or compiling the information of others instead of writing unique material.
Frankly, a lot of people think about writing e-books, but far fewer actually do it. The challenge is meant to be a motivating factor to get people moving on their ideas, while providing a supportive environment where others are doing the same.
It’s definitely do-able.
Jenn
@ Jenn - Considering “Rockstar Freelancer” took 80 hours and three people (or more, not sure) to produce, that’s two intensive 14 days and three times as much labor as one person has in them. Granted, the book was 212 pages long, but we’ve produced numerous short ebooks and we know full well that it’s labor intensive no matter what the length.
My concern isn’t that it can’t be done - it’s that people will scramble to meet an unrealistic (for them) deadline and produce shoddy work.
I too, can write an ebook (short, as you mentioned) in five hours, but to put it through the full production, including editing and a full graphics package, is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
The risk of your challenge is setting people up to fail, instead of prompting them to take action. Everyone is unique and quality work can’t be rushed. Ebooks are not difficult to write or have to be long, but they do have to be GOOD.
Do able? Maybe. Realistic? I’m not convinced in the least.
I think those of us who participate in a challenge like this realize that 14 days is the ground work. The real point is, after a year of thinking, “I really should put together an ebook” the 14 day challenge puts thought into action. Once the momentum is built the project cycles to completion.
People WILL produce shoddy work BUT those people would have produced shoddy work in 14 days or 400 days. If they’d let something go out the door before it’s finished then it wouldn’t matter how long they took putting it together. Those of us who want professional results take the time to lay the ground work and then go that extra mile to polish it.
The claim “eBook in 14 days” is just the same promotional claim as “book in 30 days”. Not everyone can put together a smashing eBook or book in that length of time but the courses that come from these claims offer a formula for getting from A to B. The time it takes to get between the two is entirely in the users control. How fast can they work? How much time do they have to commit to the project? How enthusiastic are they? And how committed are they to getting this project done in the time frame?
@ Rebecca - Now *that* is an excellent comment and I agree with everything you said. Stimulate action? Definitely. If you’re taking the challenge with this attitude *knowing* that by the end of 14 days, you won’t have a completely polished, clean, beautiful ebook and that you have just one more mile to go, then I’m all for it.
But my question is - how many people have the same attitude?
I think everyone has made good points, and what it all comes down to is the individual writer. We all have such varying approaches to our writing that a project which might take one writer a few months can be completed by another in a few days. I think it also depends on how well you know your subject matter (that makes a huge difference). I know that for me, it could take two hours to write an article one day, and twenty minutes to write the same or similar on another day.
The comments one-book are very nice.I think everyone has made good points,People WILL produce shoddy work BUT those people would have produced shoddy work in 14 days or 400 days. If they’d let something go out the door before it’s finished then it wouldn’t matter how long they took putting it together.
Isn’t that what I said?
It’s spam! Slipped right through! I’ll get the hose!