How To Write An E-book (A Step By Step Guide With Examples)
Writing an e-book is not as easy as other forms of content writing such as writing for websites or blogging. It requires good writing skills to make content readable and convey the purpose seamlessly.
“How to write an e-book” is one of the most asked questions by aspiring writers and also for those who have just started their career in content writing and are interested in writing long-form content pieces such as books.
Unlike writing a blog or writing for any website, e-book writing needs proper planning with a lot of patience.
Writing blog posts or website content would require one to write anywhere from thousand to seven or eight thousand words maximum, depending upon the purpose of the write-up.
WHAT IS AN E-BOOK?
Before understanding how to write an e-book, one must understand what exactly an e-book is.
E-books are the same as normal books. Just the medium being electronic media, these are called e-books.
E-books demand proper planning and patience as one has to devote many hours writing every day, to finish a proper e-book.
Now that we have known what an e-book is, it’s time to understand how to write an e-book.
In this era, it will be profitable for content writers to invest their time and money in writing e-books. This is because, very few people these days prefer paperback versions, but a bigger portion of people prefers to read e-books.
The e-books are easy to read and one can save it on their phone and read on the go.
Writing e-books comes with a lot of challenges. It doesn’t require any major investment other than time, but at the same time writing an e-book comes with any level of difficulty.
Writing and publishing e-books isn’t the primary goal. Just like all the forms of content writing, this too needs to reach people. There is a variation in how it reaches the selected audience but the purpose is the same as any other form of content writing.
The structure of an e-book, in general, cannot be defined because it varies depending upon the type of book.
The basic difference between writing an e-book and writing web content is that the web content is written for the selected audience keeping in mind what they demand and what they want to learn from any content, but in the case of the e-book, unless the motive is to market a product or specify a service, one can write on any niche and publish it in public platforms to get readers who are interested in that niche.
This is exactly how writers form their audience bases who are genuinely interested in their niches and that is why writers love to express their purpose and motive in their way absolutely uninfluenced by the audience strategies
Writing is an art and a form of expression, unless one uses the content for commercial purposes, the content piece is just an idea or an opinion expressed in words.
Here are some of the best tips and tricks that would help one get a clear idea about how to write an e-book:
1. WRITE ON A NICHE YOU ARE GOOD AT
The first basic thing to learn about how to write an e-book is to understand the niche one is going to write about.
E-books are not always novels or stories, many times these books are based on a specific niche like business or any other topic.
Unlike researching and writing on any niche which is demanded more, it’s highly suggested to invest time in researching on something one genuinely wants to write.
This would help the writer to express the very depths of a topic and make it reach the people and audience with the purpose.
So, it is highly recommended to write on a niche which one is interested in. In the competition, writers often forget that the world has a population of 7.7 billion and more than 40% of this is internet users, which means any niche or topic would have enough audience to make it a good selling book.
All of the needs to make effort on are, to try their best to convey the purpose of the book and make it reach more people.
So, this is the very first process one should know while learning how to write an e-book.
So, to write an e-book, one has to start with writing on a niche, they are genuinely interested in.
2. RESEARCH IS NECESSARY
No matter how good or bad one is at writing about a particular topic or niche, research is a must. E-books need more research and analysis than regular web content articles.
So, research is the second most important thing for writers who are trying to learn how to write an e-book.
This is because one has to build context and then switch to core content with the transition happening very smoothly so that the audience should not be confused about reading it.
While writing, one may have to mention a few facts and figures to express information statistically. Now that the book after publishing has to reach millions of people, the information has to be very authentic and therefore proper research should be done.
The research is important to plan the entire content of the book, for there, has to be an orderly arrangement of facts and figures.
So, for those who are looking for answers to how to write an e-book, research is necessarily important to write a good e-book.
Therefore, researching on the niche is a must, and one of the most important factors responsible for a good e-book is good research.
3. FRAME THE ENTIRE CONTENT
To learn how to write an e-book, one should be very clear about the content they are going to write. Once the content is decided, it becomes easier to frame the content depending upon what kind of e-book is being written.
It is very important to have an idea about how the book is to be written. Writing randomly and then arranging all the write-ups could be a really difficult task.
The writer has to maintain the relation of the core content with the context created and therefore one has to plan the order of what and how the segments of the e-book should be written.
The people who are interested in e-book writing and also those who have just begun or aspire to become an e-book writer are strongly advised to frame the entire content before even writing, this would help them to work on a single plan and later make changes if required.
This is always betters than writing in bits and pieces and then trying to merge them in a way that makes sense.
So, while learning how to write an e-book, it is very important to develop the ability to frame the content in a way the write-ups could be executed.
So, therefore one of the important practices of writing an e-book is to frame the content and be very clear about how it is going to be written.
4. AVOID GRAMMATICAL MISTAKES
To know how to write an e-book, one should very clearly keep in mind to avoid grammatical mistakes. E-books are very obviously long-form content pieces. People who read books are often amongst those who like to read long-form write-ups or those who regularly read.
Making silly and grammatical mistakes could be frustrating for the readers, as many a time grammatical mistakes confuse the actual meaning of the sentences.
Making grammatical mistakes is not at all a good approach towards the readers and it may result in bad reviews and losing the audience. So, one should be very good at writing readable content that consists of no grammatical mistakes.
For those who are thoroughly trying to understand how to write an e-book and also those who genuinely want to write an e-book, avoiding grammatical mistakes is a must.
It is very important to take care that grammatical mistakes should be avoided as much as possible, especially when one is writing their very first e-book. This reflects intensely on how people are going to react and respond to the upcoming books and future releases.
Therefore avoiding grammatical mistakes is necessarily important while learning how to write an e-book. Use Grammarly or Hemingway for that.
So, another important thing to be taken care of while writing e-books is avoiding grammatical mistakes as much as possible.
5. PERCEPTION AND CLARITY
While the above points were important aspects in terms of writing while trying to learn how to write an e-book, it is equally important to focus on the pre-writing things.
To know how to write an e-book, one needs to have a clear vision and how having a vision helps is described below.
As a writer one needs to have a vision or purpose. Having a good vision can not only help one to write good content but only make the e-book exactly the way they want it to be.
Many times, there is a difference between the intent and the impact because of a lack of vision. This means, the writer aims to feed the audience with a purpose, but lack of vision reflects straight on the content. This changes the context and therefore the impact is very different than what is expected.
The representation of the book should be pre-planned, and not just the content but the entire representation of the book should be planned and executed accordingly.
This process usually consumes a lot of time, and therefore e-books demand a lot of patience and dedication. E-books, therefore, are the tasks to be carried out with great focus and concentration.
So, it’s very clear that to write a good e-book, one definitely needs to have a definite idea about how the book should appear to the audience and therefore it is very important to have a perception about the appearance as well as the purpose of the book.
Therefore, it is very clear to have a vision and perception over how things should be represented to understand how to write an e-book.
6. PROOFREADING
While perception and clarity are the pre-writing aspects that should be taken care of, but some post-writing practices should be exercised to learn how to write an e-book.
Even if, grammatical mistakes are avoided, proofreading is still a very necessary procedure. Any content, no matter how carefully it is written, should go through the proofreading process.
This is because no matter how carefully one writes avoiding grammatical errors, there are still many elements that are filtered through the proofreading process.
Elements like the use of words, repetition of phrases and many other things that are not filtered during the writing process is evaluated during the proofreading process.
For writing and publishing a good e-book, it is quite necessary to evaluate the book at multiple levels to ensure that the book has no major or minor mistakes.
This procedure of proofreading helps the e-book writers to feed the audience with satisfactory write-ups. As in e-books and long-form write-ups, it is relatively easier to spot mistakes, as one tries to understand the texts deeply and therefore the proofreading helps in making the e-book readable for the audience.
Therefore proofreading is a very important procedure to understand how to write an e-book.
So, proofreading is an important process as final evaluation, for content to be readily represented for the readers.
7. CULMINATE
While trying to understand how to write an e-book, it is important to keep the audience interested through the entire content and therefore, creating climax and concluding it in a relevant manner is necessary.
E-books are like movies, not just a novel or a storybook but the general format of e-books is the same as movies.
This is because; any book needs an ending that is not necessarily dramatic but conclusive. The context and the core content of the book work as the build-up for the main purpose of the book.
While a lot is conveyed as the reader progresses through the book, but the conclusion holds very different importance.
Therefore the writer should be able to culminate the facts and information which was conveyed throughout the text.
Like mentioned earlier, e-books don’t have a definite structure to be defined, rather they can vary based on the type of e-book such as novel, story, poetry, business, etc.
Many of the formats have separate conclusions at the end of every chapter, or every 2-3 chapters and therefore, it is suggested that the writer should highlight the conclusions properly to concentrate the audience attention on them.
To understand how to write an e-book, one needs to understand the use of climax segments and how to conclude them.
Therefore, the culmination should be done properly, to make the conclusion worth the entire content combining of both context and core information.
8. CONVERT INTO READABLE FORMATS
Deep analysis over the publishing formats and which formats are compatible with most devices is important to learn how to write an e-book,
To serve the raw yet polished and finished edition to the publisher for further procedures, the e-book needs to be converted into a readable format.
Readable format, in the sense the written content format should be supported in mobile phones, laptops and other communicative electronic devices.
There is no point in publishing a book if devices do not support the format. After all, these are not paperback versions of books to be purchased and read physically. The devices are the only media through which these e-books can be read.
The most popular format in which almost all the e-books are published is in pdf format. There are also apps, which allow one to store e-books without having to download the pdf to the device storage.
There are many other formats in which the e-books could be published but all of them are relatively less popular and known to people.
Another such popular format used for publishing e-books is the EPUB format, which is an abbreviation for electronic publication. This was used a lot when e-books were developed initially. These are still in use and are used by many. This was used back then to make the e-book support in various devices.
Now that almost all the electronically communicating devices support pdf, therefore maximum e-books are published in PDF format only.
Therefore it is important to choose the written format to learn how to write an e-book.
9. PUBLISH THE E-BOOK
After finishing the writing, proofreading, editing and other important procedures which are mentioned above, the e-book finally comes for the final procedure which is publishing the e-book.
Now to publish an e-book, there are a variety of options. Many websites and online applications are there which allow one to publish on their own.
This means the book will be published on that specific platform or website only. Many such apps do not pay. Writers can initially test their write-ups and audience response, at the very beginning of their e-book writing career.
Another method is to publish e-books on commercial platforms which are very popular and though they might take the commissioned amount for every sale, still, a greater percentage of the sale is credited to the writer.
Now that these platforms are very popular, it helps the book to be recognized by many. Still, this platform is crowded with millions of other writers and therefore it is difficult to get a good sale and to build a separate identity amongst the other writers.
Many people have become extremely successful and recognized writers through these platforms and a lot are still seen to be making efforts to find a spot amongst them.
One such platform is Kindle, developed by Amazon.
Another method to publish an e-book is to publish it through any of the many e-book publishers in the market. Publishing the book with a good e-book publisher can help one to be recognized easily.
The reputed publishers have many readers and popular publications make it easier for the book to be recognized because people always have attention to the new releases of such publications.
The only benefit of such a publication method is that the e-book gets recognized relatively faster than any other platform.
10. PROMOTE
As mentioned earlier, e-books, if published on crowded mediums like Kindle has to face difficulties finding a spot in such densely crowded platforms.
So, for such platforms where the writer has to make the product recognizable and identified, the writer himself has to exercise a few essential marketing practices.
So, here are some methods that writers can use to make the e-book reach more audiences:
PRE-RELEASE POSTER
It is a very normal tactic to make your audience aware of future releases to keep their attention on you. It also helps the audience to have an idea about the upcoming e-book. It is just like a trailer, that communicates on behalf of the entire e-book.
∙GIVEAWAYS
Giveaways have always been the method used by not just writers but for anyone who ones their product to be discovered. Giving a few e-books for free, on its initial level, makes the audience aware of your product and people are always attracted to free stuff. It is very normal human behaviour. Another benefit of the giveaway is that it forms a chain of people (winners) who genuinely follow the book and this chain continues to grow to make more people aware of the e-book.
HOW TO WRITE AN E-BOOK
The above mentioned were some of the most effective and helpful methods that the e-book writers, and also the people who want to learn how to write an e-book can use to develop a good e-book.
These methods, if used properly, could prove to be very effective for a writer in building an e-book that is recognized and identified by many people.
So, the mentioned methods along with the promotional tactics can prove to be helpful in the entire procedure from writing a good e-book to publishing it and then promoting it to reach a larger audience that identifies the e-book.
The above-mentioned points and descriptions can be beneficial for the new writers who have confusion on how to write an e-book.
On the other hand, you can start by learning a Content Writing Course.
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