Publishing a ebook seems like such a simple process (the mechanics are not that complicated) and they are blinded by dollar signs as they fantasize about how they will spend all the money that they earn from selling their ebook.

Within minutes of deciding to publishing an ebook, wannabe digital authors are busy writing about their favorite hobby or whatever great idea they dream up that they’re convinced will be the ticket to easy street.

After weeks of work preparing the ebook and learning how to create a website to offer it for sale, they sit back and wait for the money to star rolling in.

And they wait, and wait, and wait!

Very often nothing happens at all and they quit in disgust and claim that “the ebook publishing business is a scam and it doesn’t really work.” Or, they earn a few dollars, but not nearly enough to be worth all the effort.

You and I know that the reality is that those wannabes don’t understand who buys ebooks, why they buy them, or what makes them willing to pay top dollar for an ebook. In short, they haven’t done their homework first and researched the marketplace.

There is a wide range of information that sells well on the Internet and some very simple ways to do research to determine niche markets were strong potential exists. But, there’s one specific style of the book that sells well all the time and commands high prices.

9-1-1 ebooks

When we stop and think about it, the primary benefits of buying ebooks online is immediate access to useful and well researched information. People in the middle of an emergency need to instantly solve their problem.

9-1-1 ebooks solve the kinds of emergency problems that people desperately need help with. Tony Shepherd and Alexis Dawes both write extensively in their own ebook products about how to quickly identify 9-1-1 problems that can be solved with simple ebooks.

There isn’t room in this article to explain the full process of identifying topics, researching, writing, and formatting ebooks, and marketing and selling them (Tony and Alexis both do a phenomenal job of that in their ebooks.) But I will steer you in the right direction. There are also other articles that cover those subjects on this site, so look through the article list in the side navigation.

To identify a profitable topic, look and see what kinds of problems people around you are struggling with. Soothing colicky babies, repairing holes in drywall, stopping a leaky sink, resolving a credit card dispute, avoiding foreclosure, the list goes on.

If you can imagine a desperate person searching the Internet for help, you have a potential product.

So, try a 9-1-1 product and see if your ebook business soars.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Desperate Buyers Only, by Alexis Dawes
Double Genius, by Tony Shepherd

There is only one way to climb a mountain: step by step.

Now think of writing your profitable E-Book in the same light. You must create it step by step, and one day, you will take that last step and find yourself standing on the summit with your head in the clouds.

The first thing you have to do, as if you actually were a mountain climber, is to get organized. Instead of climbing gear, however, you must organize your thoughts. There are some steps you should take before you begin. Once you’ve gone through the following list, you will be ready to actually begin writing your E-Book.

Beginning Steps to Writing a Profitable E-Book

First, figure out your E-Book’s working title. Jot down a few different titles, and eventually, you’ll find that one that will grow on you. Titles help you to focus your writing on your topic; they guide you in anticipating and answering your reader’s queries. Many non-fiction books also have subtitles. Aim for clarity in your titles, but cleverness always helps to sell books as long as it’s not too cute.

Next, write out a thesis statement. Your thesis is a sentence or two stating exactly what problem you are addressing and how your book will solve that problem. All chapters spring forth from your thesis statement. Once you’ve got your thesis statement fine-tuned, you’ve built your foundation. From that foundation, your book will grow, chapter by chapter.

Your thesis will keep you focused while you write your E-Book. Remember: all chapters must support your thesis statement. If they don’t, they don’t belong in your book. For example, your thesis statement could read: We’ve all experienced insomnia at times in our lives, but there are twenty proven techniques and methods to give you back a good night’s sleep.

Once you have your thesis, before you start to write, make sure there is a good reason to write your book. Ask yourself some questions:

• Does your book present useful information and is that information currently relevant?

• Will you book positively affect the lives of your readers?

• Is your book dynamic and will it keep the reader’s attention?

• Does you book answer questions that are meaningful and significant?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can feel confident about the profit potential of your E-Book.

Another important step is to figure out who your target audience is. It is this group of people you will be writing to, and this group will dictate many elements of your book, such as style, tone, diction, and even length. Figure out the age range of your readers, their general gender, what they are most interested in, and even the socio-economic group they primarily come from. Are they people who read fashion magazines or book reviews? Do they write letters in longhand or spend hours every day online. The more you can pin down your target audience, the easier it will be to write your book for them.

Next, make a list of the reasons you are writing your E-Book. Do you want to promote your business? Do you want to bring quality traffic to your website? Do you want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing. Do you want to sell it as a product on your website and generate huge profits, or do you want to offer it as a free gift for filling out a survey or for ordering a product? Do you want to use the chapters to create an e-course, or use your E-Book to attract affiliates around the world? The more you know upfront, the easier the actual writing will be.

Decide on the format of your chapters. In non-fiction, keep the format from chapter to chapter fairly consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to your chapter topic, and then divide it into four subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

How to make your E-Book “user friendly”

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep the reader turning the pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up the density of the page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader’s respond to the feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up the length and structure of your sentences so you don’t hypnotize your readers into sleep. Sentences that are all the same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about the process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; the more you write (and read), the better your writing will become. The better your writing becomes, the bigger your sales figures.

In an E-Book that is read on the screen, be aware that you must give your reader’s eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as “negative space.” Reader’s eyes need to rest in the cool white oasis you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives the reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after the other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that’s easy on the eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they’ve gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on the screen, but small enough so that the whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find the right combination.

Of course, don’t forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don’t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By the way, that’s called a “comma splice.”)

Last of all: create an index and a bibliography. That’s it! You’ve written a book! Now all you have to do is compile and publish your E-Book online, and wait for download request from your website visitors!

To speed the process and maintain a high quality product, I built an ebook template in Open Office that I use for all of my ebooks. Open Office is a free office suite software package that includes a first-rate word processor. This word processor also has a high quality PDF exporter built into the software which creates beautiful ebooks for your business. It is my favorite software to use.

The basic settings I modify for my ebook template are the fonts, the font sizes, the line spacing, a page header, a page footer, and a few other bits of ‘boilerplate’ content. I also like to put a border around the pages to dress it up a bit.

Font Settings For Ebooks

Font size for my ebooks is set to 14pt and the line spacing to 1.5 or 2. It’s important to remember that many people will be reading the content from the screen and a larger font is easier on the eyes. The increased line spacing also helps with on screen readability. These settings also look pretty good when printed, so it is a good compromise.

For fonts, I use a sans-serif font for the headings and titles and usually pick Times Roman or Bookman for the body copy.

Layout and Design for Ebooks

Next comes the header and footer for all of the main pages. The header usually contains the name of the ebook and the footer has a promo teaser on the left and the page number on the right. Some people like to include copyright information at the bottom of every page as well. I also like to separate the header and footer from the main text with a divider line.

Standard Content for Ebooks

Finally, I create some boilerplate legal pages, an index page, a resource page and an about the author page to round everything out. These might get modified from book to book, but they are always present in every book so it saves time to have them as part of my template file.

Putting It All Together

If you want to see an example of my template in action, here is a recent free report I created using it:

How I Made My First $100 Online

It took a little while to figure out the nuances of creating page styles in OpenOffice, but now this it’s done and I’ve built the framework for my ebooks, I just cut and paste content into my template. Working this way easily saves 1 to 2 hours on every single project.

Your e-book will probably be delivered in PDF format and you could simply upload this file and be done with it. But, you have an opportunity to re-enforce your customer’s purchasing decision, encourage consumption or usage of the product, and cross-promote other products. You can also slip in some unannounced bonuses too. The way you do this is to include several files into one single ZIP archive file for delivery.

Typically, I create a document labeled ‘Read_First’ which thanks the customer for purchase, recommends the next steps the customer should take to benefit from the product, states the rights that the customer has purchased to the product (this is particularly important when selling resale rights products or permitting others to giveaway your viral ebook), and usually includes a promotion as well. If you want to encourage customers to sign up for an email list, one good strategy is to offer an unannounced bonus and require them to sign up in order to get the download link for the bonus. The ‘Read_First’ file is the perfect place to announce the bonus.

Creating a ‘Read_First’ file is even more important when you are selling resale products that you have purchase the rights to distribute. Many resale products do not allow you to modify the content of the e-book, so you do not have the opportunity to add your own links inside. The addition of this extra file inside the ZIP file you deliver to your customer is your chance to build your business beyond a single sale.

If you would like to see an example of a download package for a resale product, check out www.InfoProductSeminar.com. This site promotes a resale product I purchased the rights to sell. Feel free to read over the sales page (its not my best work), but what I really want you to see is the exit pop-up and the product package I deliver with the free sample.

When you try to leave the sales page without purchasing, a pop-up window appears offering a free sample download – in exchange for your email address. Once you download that free sample audio, unzip the file and you will find a ‘Read_First’ PDF file and the audio MP3 file (the seminar is one of my favorites – I hope you listen to the first hour.) The ‘Read_First’ PDF file includes a special offer to purchase the rest of the seminar audios at an amazing discount that is designed to be so tempting that no one could resist purchasing.

Let’s review what happens here. I tempted a visitor who wasn’t prepared to buy with a free sample. And got his name email address in exchange. This gives me an opportunity to contact the visitor in the future with other information and offers. Then, inside the distribution package, I included a special offer in the ‘Read_First’ file designed to entice an order for the full audio seminar package. The ‘customer’ can sample the product, decide if it is right for them, and then take advantage of my special discount offer.

I could have easily used the ‘Read_First’ file to promote another product or encourage prospects to visit a specific website. The key element involved is to make sure to include some type of promotion and not to offer more than one (the more options you give the less likely your customer will take any action.)

It’s worth going through the sequence on this website just to see everything in action. (For anyone who might purchase the full set of audio files – they are excellent – you will see the E-junkie e-commerce system in action – including the use of discount codes. And, you will experience how fast the download speeds are for large files. E-junkie is the primary e-commerce solution I use in my own business.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgWHM38-uq4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvn21Al665Y