Writing an eBook to publish on Kindle might not be as expensive as writing a physical book that will be sold at Barnes & Noble but you may still have to spend some money on tools to help you write your book, the graphic for your book cover if you?re not a Photoshop expert and maybe even an editor to proofread your book.
You may be doing the work and spending the money up front but what you?re really doing is sowing the seeds that will bear fruit for years to come.
In the following sections I?m going to go through every single step I took to write the eBook that led to what is now De-CLASS-ified on the Kindle Store. We have a lot to discuss so let?s get started.
If you?re like me, you have ideas for products or services running through your mind all-day, every single day. If you?re serious about moving forward with some, or any, of those ideas you have to write them down, plain and simple. So step number one in creating your very own eBook is mapping out your mind.It doesn?t matter if you have an idea for a product or if you want to organize the sections for your eBook, mapping out your thought process is the most import step you must take.
Again, this is the most important step you must take when writing your eBook. Part of being an entrepreneur, and in this case ? an author, is visualization.
Being able to visualize what your eBook will look like when it has been put together is what?s going to give you the inspiration you need to keep writing, because trust me, there are going to be some nights when you don?t feel like writing and when you even question whether what you?re doing is even worthwhile. You?re going to need that inspiration to sit in front of your computer night after night until your books I finished.
It?s all a part of being an entrepreneur and taking the risk of spending time writing a book which you could have otherwise devoted to your spouse, your friends, your family or even a favorite hobby.
Mapping out your mind will also save you time because, although you may revisit the specific components to your book, you wont have to keep re-writing them or keep rethinking about how you want to structure your book. You?ll do it once and you?ll be finished with it, ready to write the actual content of your book so that you can publish it on the Kindle Store and start making some passive income on a monthly basis.
So, what?s the absolute best way to map out your thoughts?
I use MindMeister, an online mind mapping and brainstorming software service.The reason I really like and use MindMeister is because of their super cool software that makes mind-mapping a breeze. You can always write down your mind map on a piece of paper but because Mind Meister is all done online, any time you make changes to your mind map it is all saved automatically for you and you never risk losing it.
Another great feature to MindMeister is that you can access your mind maps from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection and now you can even access them directly on your smart device with the MindMeister app. I cant tell you how many times I was out and about running errands when all of a sudden I thought about a section I wanted to add to my ebook and I was able to edit my mind-map directly from my iPhone through the MindMeister. It?s awesome!
Of course, MindMeister is a paid service but it?s supper cheap with plans that start as low as $4.99 per month, which is what I use. There are other plans that offer more features and are more expensive but I find that unless you?re managing a team that needs access to the same account, the basic plan is perfect and you don?t need to pay more money than this.
Create an eBook Cover
The second step in publishing your eBook to Amazon?s Kindle Store is to create your eBook cover. This is the cover that potential customers will see displayed on Amazon when they make the decision to, or not to, buy your book.
We often hear, ?Don?t judge a book by its cover? but the fact us that many people do exactly that, especially when it comes to purchases of books that are ?digital download? copies only.
The online shopping customer is becoming savvier and when it comes to eBooks, although they may not have any ambition to produce and sell their own eBooks online, they know that just about anyone who wants to do it, can.
That?s why producing an eBook cover that looks professionally done, and not something that looks like you put together in five minutes using Paint in your computer, is extremely important.
Some people will suggest that you not create your eBook cover until you?ve finished writing all of the content for your book. The reason being that even after you?ve mind-mapped every part of your book, there is a possibility that as you write you decide to make significant changes to your content that would change the over all theme of your book and ultimately render your original cover useless.
Although there is some merit to that, personally I think that if the theme of your book changes while you are writing the content of your book, you didn?t do a very good job during the mind-mapping step and you won?t have a good quality book anyway, so I don?t necessarily agree with waiting until the very end to get your eBook cover designed.
For my eBook, getting my cover designed was the second step. After mind-mapping the sections of my book I knew exactly what my book was going to be named and exactly what I was going to be writing about, so my theme never changed.
There are quite a few advantages to designing your eBook cover up front. First, you get to visualize what your eBook is going to look like. Again, notice how in this step I am also talking about visualization and how important this is. After my cover was created I printed a color copy of my cover, put the original publishing date on it, signed it and stuck it to the wall right in front of my desk so that I could look at it every day as a way of keeping myself accountable to the product I had committee to delivering.
Like I mentioned in step one, as you go through your writing journey you are going to have many distractions. Being able to have your book cover in front of you and see it on a daily basis is going to be an excellent reminder of the product you are creating which people will ultimately pay you for. That alone should be incentive enough to keep you productive.
If you?re good with Photoshop and think you can take some time to create a professional looking cover, great. If not, you can get someone to do it for you at 99Designs.com.I?ll be the first one to admit that I am not good at using Photoshop so going with 99Designs was a very simple choice for me.
What I love about 99Designs is that all you have to do is have an idea for the cover you want to get designed for your eBook, create the contest and then you can sit back and watch all the entries come in. It?s literally three very simple steps that can get you up to 99 different designs to chose from and you?ll have tons of designers competing for your business, so finding the great design is almost guaranteed.
Of course, there is a chance that you may not get the design you?re looking for so when you create the contest you have the option to not guarantee the funds, meaning you don?t have to pick a winner if you don?t like any of the designs submitted. Personally, I always guarantee my contest because I find that doing so attracts a lot of high quality submissions, so I always recommend guaranteeing your contests.
Getting a cover created for your eBook is not cheap and can cost up to $300 but I definitely don?t mind paying this much to get an eBook design created because like I mentioned before I am horrible with Photoshop, don?t want to take the time to learn it and by basically hiring someone to do it for me I can concentrate on actually doing what is going to generate income which is creating an awesome book.
As an internet entrepreneur, there is a tendency to want to do everything yourself but the most valuable lesson I have come to learn is that hiring the experts to do what I don?t know how to do is what allows me to concentrate on creating the product.
Lastly, keep in mind that in order to get the best quality image displayed on mobile devices when people buy and download your finished book, it will have to be saved in JPEG or TIFF and should be 1563?2500 (WxL) pixels. If you chose to select 99Designs or go through a different source to get your eBook cover designed make sure to let your designer know this head of time.
Writing the Content for your eBook
The third step is to write the content for your eBook.
Knowing what you?re going to write about should be the easy part because you should have already created the guideline for your eBook during the Mind Mapping session, in the first step. Writing the actual content is totally different.
This is obviously the hardest part of the entire eBook creating process. This is the time when you really have to just hunker down and write your book. Depending on what kind of book you?re writing this is also the time when you may have to do some research.
For De-CLASS-ified, it literally took me about a year to write the content for my book because it required that I know a lot of economics and finance, so part of the time I spent in the third step was basically just coming up to speed with all the information I needed to write my book.
Also, because my book was about Internet Entrepreneurship, during this time I also reached out to some of the Internet Entrepreneur I planned to highlight in my book. These guys were going to be showcased as examples of what is possible in the world of internet business and as a courtesy I had to let them know that I was planning on sharing their success story.
This serves two purposes. First, it gives them a heads-up that I am writing a book and plan to include them as part of it (my intention is to get their acknowledgement), and Second, it creates an opportunity for marketing as there is a possibility they may want to share the news about your book with their email list, which in turn could result in more customers.
One of the guys I emailed was even generous enough to give of his time and write five-pages of my book, sharing his story of success in internet business and even validated everything that I had taught in my book up that point. I can?t explain how awesome if felt to basically got the endorsement of a six-figure per year internet business owner. In my readers mind, this proved that I knew what I was talking about and it proved that six-figure per years results were possible for them too ? and all I had to do was ask.
When it comes to writing the content for your eBook it doesn?t matter where you decided to start. What I do recommend however, is that you concentrate on one section of your book at a time. ?It would be very hard to produce a well written and nicely flowing eBook if you?re jumping from section to section and not really concentrating on any particular one. My take on it is that you should treat every single section like a blog post, if you have experience writing on a blog.
In other words, by thinking of each section as a blog post you are concentrating on writing your book one section at a time and not on the entirety of it, which can seem a little overwhelming.
When it comes to punctuation and sentence structure I don?t worry too much about that either. That?s not to say that you?re careless in the way that you write your book. You still want to do the best job you can but to be frank, I didn?t graduate from college with an English degree so I leave that to the English majors, which leads me to step number four.
Get Your Book Revised
When you submit your eBook to Amazon?s Kindle store and make it available for the world to purchase, you better believe that your customer is going to expect your eBook to be up to par with the quality of every other book released by top publishers.
Those books have been edited, reviewed, and re-read time and time again to ensure the reader will have an optimum quality book.
Granted, you don?t have thousands of dollars to invest into hiring the best editors and publisher ? that?s why we?re self-publishing ? but you still need to get your book proofread by someone who has a good level of expertise.
If you have a friend, a relative or a neighbor that you know of who has excellent writing skills, ask them to look it over. I didn?t know anyone who graduated college with an English degree or with the experience I wanted to proofread my book and if you?re in the same boat, you can do what I did ? hire an editor on eLance.Using eLance also very simple. With eLance you submit a job that you need help with and in minutes you people submitting bids to win over your business. Of course, they all have portfolios you can review to make sure they have the experience you are looking for and what I love about eLance is that, if the freelancer is motivated enough, the freelancers can take internal eLance certification tests and rank themselves is specific skillsets against every other freelancer on eLance.
When I was working on de-CLASS-ified I found my perfect proofreader ? an English graduate student from the Northeast who ranked in the top 3% of every skillset I was looking for and charged a whopping $58 to proofread my entire 150 page book in four days!
How awesome is that?
It turned out that I made an excellent decision in hiring her and I instantly fell in love with her work ethic and attention to detail. It was awesome. She did such an amazing job that I gave her a 100% bonus upon completion. Of course, extending bonuses to the people you hire is not mandatory but if you feel like they did a great job it?s always good to be generous.
Submit Your eBook to the Kindle Store
Once your book has been proofread and you are 100% confident that you are ready to make it available to the world to purchase, it?s time to submit your eBook to Amazon?s Kindle Store. The sooner you submit your eBook, the faster Amazon approves it and the faster you can start making passive income.
If for whatever reason you don?t already have an Amazon account, the first thing you have to do is create a user account on Amazon. After your account has been created, the next thing to do is to submit your eBook to Kindle via Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP. To submit your eBook to Kindle, you?ll have to save it as a ?web page? (htm.) HOWEVER before you do that note that you?ll have to create a Title Page, Copyright Page, Dedication Page, Table of Contents, etc. These are optional and are not mandatory but I highly recommend that at the very least you have a Title Page and a Table of Contents. The TOC will serve as easier navigation through your eBook and will let your reader fully leverage their smart reader by being able to click on links. Here is an excellent step-by-step resource on how to create all of these pages. https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A17W8UM0MMSQX6.After the content for your eBook and your Cover have been uploaded, the next step is to select your Royalty and to Price your eBook.
If you want to take advantage of Amazon?s 70% Royalty program, meaning you make 70% of each sale of your book, you have to price your eBook between $2.99 and $9.99.
The other option is to price your eBook higher than $9.99 and only earn a 30% royalty.
You definitely want to price your book fairly and what you think you deserve for the value you provide in your eBook. My thoughts are, the cheaper your eBook actually is, the more people who will actually buy it, especially if this is your first book or product.
After you submit your eBook to Kindle for approval, it usually takes about 24-48 hours for the approval process, but once approved ? Walla! You can start marketing your book on your own blog or Facebook and Twitter and start making passive income!
Some Final Thoughts?
Again, writing an eBook is not rocket science. All you need is the passion and the desire to want to create an eBook that can start generating you hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars in passive income every month.
How would feel to dedicate yourself to writing an eBook, publishing it on Kindle, having it become a best-seller and completely transforming your life? What would your family say? Heck what would your friends say? How different would they you? How inspirational do you think you could be?
There have been stories of people just like you who self-published their eBook, became bestselling authors and became millionaires. ?It usually doesn?t happen overnight, but is it possible ? you betcha!
I spent a total of about $400 over the course of a year and now I have an eBook that is generating me passive income every single month.
I think it?s time you joined me on this journey!
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