The How
March 16, 2009 by careercreator
How to start your own ebook business, step-by-step.
When we first started looking into the concept of writing and selling an ebook, we were a little overwhelmed as to where to start and had very little knowledge of how to implement our idea.
Even as a published author of over 10 books, I didn’t exactly realize what goes into publishing a book, but we decided to jump in with both feet and learn as we went.
Because there are probably other people out there liking for the same information, we’ve decided to write a step-by-step guide “how-to” about our process of bringing our ebook, “Create Your Own Job: 365+Ways to Make More Money Now” to the market.
1.) Outline the Book
We had a loose idea of our product: a collection of ways for people to make more money by starting their own business. We also wanted to market our idea to parents, retirees, students and teens looking for ways to make extra money by.
At first we wanted to come up with 100 ideas for making money by working for someone else on a flexible schedule. We’d had experience with creating various small business ventures, and working with different legitimate work from home companies, so we knew those were a starting point for our book.
As the outline grew, we decided that book would be more valuable if we had 365 ideas (one for every day of the year) for making more money, so we expanded our outline to include all 365 ideas…and actually ended up with nearly 400, which is why we included the “plus” in our book title.
2.) Start Writing the Book.
There is a LOT to be said about plotting and planning an ebook, such as picking your target audience, determining the length, getting it done quickly and more.
Just as we were beginning to feel overwhelmed with our ebook creation, we stumbled across a super-informative series of blog posts by Mark Widawer.
Mark’s written over 20 ebooks, and he shares a lot of helpful information for free on his blog. If you really want to get more in-depth ideas about the ins and outs of bringing an ebook to market, check out his 11 part series, Ebook Answers.
*We’re not sure, but he may have all of those blog posts together in a short ebook format somewhere so that all of the posts in the series are in order and easy to print.
3.) Find a Web Host
We’ve blogged before, and had already found a host that works for us. Look around the web and find a host that fits your needs. For the time being, Bluehost works really well for us.
Besides being really affordable, and easy to navigate, we also like that they have programs like Fantastico and Simple Scripts in their cpanel that allow for really easy installation of programs like Wordpress, phpBB and Joomla.
If you’re interested in seeing what Bluehost has to offer, click here to learn more.
4.) Build Your Website
We knew we’d need a website to sell our ebook from, and even though we are tech savvy enough to do basic web things, we are not code experts. We’ve blogged before and really enjoy the ease and simplicity of operating a site based on the Wordpress platform, so we decided to use a Wordpress platform to sell our ebook.
A lot of ebook sales pages have a long sales letter format, but because blogs appeal to us, we decided to break our sales pitch up into individual blog posts.
We also found a theme that we liked. The magazine style themes really seemed to be the best choice to really present our book and the different categories of possible job ideas, so we chose the MMOzine theme by ChiQ at WPthemedesigner.com.
There are some really nice looking themes there, so look around and see if any appeal to you. The theme itself that we’re using is free, but ChiQ or the support team can be hired to make changes and tweaks as necessary.
5.) Finish the book
Of course this is easier said than done, and there are lots of areas where you may have questions along the way. If you’re looking for real help, advice, answers and insight on starting and completing an ebook from a true ebook expert, check out Mark Widawer’s Big Bucks Ebook membership site and forum.
We did, and we’ve learned so much in a very short time. In fact, his site was the missing part of the equation we needed to get the book done and ready to sell.
Don’t be put off by the term “Big Bucks” in his site name. He doesn’t make sweeping claims or constantly pester you to buy more products you don’t need.
However, he does offer useful advice and seasoned knowledge about the subject of ebook publishing.
To learn more, visit the Big Bucks Ebook Website.
6.) Copyright the book
This can be done online using the Library’ of Congress’ website. It does cost $35 to copyright a manuscript online, which was technically the most expensive part of the process. Some people choose to skip this part of the proess, for different reasons, but we decided to proceed with this option for our own records and protection.
http://www.copyright.gov/register/
7.) Format the book
There are different ways to format an ebook. We decided to go with .pdf format.
One more thing about Mark Widawer…he offers a FREE Microsoft Word template you can use to create a professional looking ebook in minutes. All you have to do is type the book! Check out the Big Bucks Ebook Template.
8.) Choose a way to process your ebook sales
You can process the sales simply using Paypal and their “buy” buttons. But we wanted a bit more of a shopping cart functionality, as well as the ability to setup our own affiliate program.
Clickbank does this as well, but we’d heard good things about E-Junkie, so we decided to give them a try. If you’d like to know more about E-Junkie, click here.
9.) Choose an autoresponder
Part of selling a product is building a list, so it’s important to use an auto-responder. Some of the companies that offer this service are Aweber, GetResponse and Constant Contact. For now, we’ve decided to take a chance and go with a newer company called GetResponse.
We’ll update later to let you know how the service is working for us.
10.) Build a sales page to hold the auto-responder form that you’ll use to build your list
Part of any successful online business is building a list of potential clients. To do so quickly and easily, you can add an auto-responder email address collection form to a very basic sales page.
We’re no HTML experts, so we built a very simple sales page using NVU, an HTML editor that you can use for FREE.
If you’d like to watch a quick video tutorial that shows you step by step how to use NVU Web Authoring Software to build a squeeze page (the technical term for a sales page) click here.
We also used NVU to build a thank-you page that brings viewers into the main portion of our site-the blog area.
When you finish building the pages, use FTP to upload the page to your web host once you create it…and
YOU’RE DONE!
p.s. Ok, so it’s not really, “THE END” just yet.
At this point, there are other tasks to be done like marekting and publicity, but this does cover the basic steps needed to bring your ebook from an idea to an actual product.
As we learn more, we’ll update this page and add anything else we discover that may help you in your ebook creation.
Thanks for visiting and please come back again!
www.TheCareerCreator.com
