Here is a quick roundup of some of the latest digital publishing news for early April 2016. There’s No One Way to Sell an Ebook At Publishers Weekly, a survey of.
Come up with an idea. EBooks are no different from any other type of book except in their medium of publication, so the most important first step to writing one is to decide on, and develop, an idea for one. The basic way to do this is to sit down and write a brief phrase or sentence that encapsulates the information you'd like to put in your book. Once you have that, you can build on it to create a finished product. • Writers who plan to create a book of fiction will have to spend considerably more time coming up with ideas and plot points.
Read for more relevant advice. • The eBook format has the advantage of being not only open to self-publishers, but essentially free for them, which means that “books” too short to really be worth printing on paper can make perfectly valid eBooks. Therefore, feel free to use a simple idea.
Expand your idea. Start with the basic idea you wrote down, and think about different aspects of it. It may be helpful for you to draw a web of concepts to do this. For example, let's say you wanted to write a book about how to sell real estate for beginners.
You could write down things like “licenses and fees,” “selling techniques,” and “cost vs. Expected returns.” Connect specifics that are related to each of them, and so on, until you have enough detail to see the structure of the words in your head. • Different books call for different approaches. Memoirs and self-help books might do better with a vertical outline; a book of fixes for common household problems will probably come together faster using a web of ideas. Organize your details. After unpacking and expanding your core idea, you should have a lot of information about your basic topic written down. Rearrange and organize it in a vertical outline until it makes sense to you and matches the way you'd like your book to flow.
Think in terms of what your audience will need to know first, and put basics at the beginning. Once those have been covered, more advanced concepts can follow without losing the reader.
• Each step along your line will end up being a chapter in your book. If you can break the chapters into groups as well (for instance, if your book on home repairs has chapters that can be divided by room or type of problem), feel free to turn those into larger sections that contain a few related chapters each. Write the book. Don't worry about a title, table of contents, or any of the other stylistic elements of the book yet.
Just sit down and start writing it. You may find it's easier to “start in the middle” by writing a chapter of your choice first; you may prefer to start at the very beginning and write straight through. Just remember that you don't have to pick one method and stick with it. Use whatever techniques you need to complete the book. • Writing a book – even a short book – takes time. The important thing is to persevere. Set aside time each day to write, or write until you hit a certain word count.