If you started the 14 day e-book writing challenge with me yesterday, you’ve already gotten off to a great start! You’ve likely chosen niche ideas, conducted market and keyword research, narrowed your options down to your final idea, chosen a working title for your e-book, and you may even have chosen your domain name and hosting options. Go you! :)
Reminder: Visit the official challenge thread to access all of the pre-challenge reading on e-book publishing, and for a running list of daily challenge tasks. If you can’t participate during these 14 days, you’ll be able to use the information in that post at any time later to challenge yourself as well.
Today we have just one task, but it’s still work.
Task Summary:
- Today you’re going to create your basic e-book outline. Think of it in relation to top-level items in a table of contents. We’ll include your primary e-book sections / chapters, and some of the basic pages your e-book should have.
The Basics:
There are a few things all (or at least most) e-books will have. Include these in your basic outline if you’ll be including them (whether or not they’d be listed in your table of contents – you’ll want them for more detailed notes and outlining in tomorrow’s task):
- Title Page
- Table of Contents
- About the Author
- Introduction
- Disclaimer
- Copyright / License / Usage and Resell Rights
The Rest
I don’t need to tell you how to create your outline. Just choose a system that works for you. Normally I use index cards, as I talked about in Planning and Outlining an E-book. This time I’ll probably use a notepad. You could also a simple word processing document.
Just write down the main sections of your e-book, in the general order you plan to cover them, trying to come up with some kind of section title / headline for each as you go along.
Example
Let’s take a look at the free e-book, The Netwriting Masters Course, for an example of what your very basic e-book outline might look like (although I’d probably be more descriptive in the sub-titling, at least for the outlining phase):
- Title Page
- Introduction
- Join the 2% Who Succeed
- The Winning Formula…
- PREselling… Your #1 Priority
- Setting Your MWR… Before You Start Selling
- Write for Your Ideal Customer
- The Mindset is Everything
- Benefits Make the Sale… Not Features!
- Keep Your Visitor on Your Site!
- Build Relationships
- The Wrapup
Note that some of the basic elements I mentioned above were not included here. I suggest you include them.
You should now have a bare-bones outline of your e-book. Tomorrow, you are going to flesh it out to prepare for writing. :)
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Cathy Miller
Amandah
Andrew Kardon
Amelia Ramstead
Lori
Wow! I discovered as I did this exercise that I want to cover a huge amount of content. I’ve decided I probably need to break this into five sequential ebooks rather than a single overloaded one.
I wonder, if I rinse and repeat every day’s steps for all five will I end up with five ebooks in 14 days? ;-) Too ambitious? I think it is the content writing which will be considerably time consuming so if I can only get one or two done I’ll still be ebooks ahead of where I am now. :-)
Thanks for the inspiration, Jennifer!
Glad to hear you’re feeling ambitious. :) As to whether it’s too much, that depends a bit on your schedule, and how long you want the e-books to be. I know it took me just 5 hours to write my first e-book, which was short and only around 20 pages (including research and all of that jazz). I’d expect the one I’m working on now to total about 10 hours over the two weeks. So if you had 25 hours for 2 weeks, I’d say 5 e-books are certainly possible. :) Then again, it might be a better idea to just write the first and see how the market responds before investing too much time on the same topic.
Jenn
Rebecca brings up a good point. I have a lot of information to cover, too. Oh boy, decisions.
What criteria should we use to decide how to bundle our information (breaking it up or combining all into one ebook)? Any good rules of thumb?
14-Day E-book Writing Challenge : All Freelance Writing
We’re going to jump more into lengths with tomorrow’s tasks when we really flesh out the outlines (which is a perfect time to cut things if you feel like it’s simply going to be too big when laid out in front of you).
In general though, think about what kind of length you want to shoot for, and how much you’ll even be able to write in about a 4 – 5 day period for the e-book content. If you have just 1 hour a day to put into your project, you’ll need to be more conservative with space than someone able to devote 5 hours per day, for example.
Also keep your audience in mind. Are they a group that’s going to want a lot of information, or just the bare bones? How general does the information have to be to appeal to them? (the more general, the more background info you’ll have to write) Are they big readers, or do they prefer simple step-by-step instructions, lists, templates, etc.?
Also consider your motivation. If you’re doing it as an income source, will you make more money selling two or more shorter e-books, or one larger e-book that you can charge more for? It depends on your market, and whether they’ll need all of the information, or if too much could be a turn-off – for example, you may write a 100 page e-book at $47, or you may find that 4 25-page e-books at $17 (with more specialized info in each) would be more profitable (especially if you think most people would still buy them all).
Unfortunately there’s no single right answer here.
When I came up with the website yesterday I realized immediately that the topic had lots of potential for other e-books, so I purchased a more general website. This book is more specific than the website itself, but will hopefully find it’s audience. Although it is specific, it still does have the potential to get even more specific if it seems popular. We’ll see. So, if it’s possible for you to not get too specific with this book, and then write subsequent books that hit on some of the generalizations made, that could be an option. Or you can go ahead and do 5x the work until the daily assignments get to overwhelming, and after the first book’s done you can immediately work on your next books.
Thanks for the replies! I think I’m going to try to keep this as general as possible since I’m targeting a ‘beginner’ market. Then I’ll write several more specialized ebooks for the niche if it appears they’re going to be profitable. At least I think that’s how I plan to approach it. Early days, yet, so I could bery easily change my mind.
I may have to go the more than one ebook route.
My outline is ten chapters long, and I outlined (listed) beneath each chapter what I’d like to include.
to do it the way I have it outlined would be just too huge.
Cut and snip! That’s difficult, however, because at this stage, I believe everything I was planning to include is essential.
I think I’ll do one generalized ebook, kind of an overall introduction to what I wanted to cover, then work on the other stuff from there.