How to Write an Ebook that Doesn’t Suck

Let’s face it, most ebooks suck.

They have too little information, bad English and worse graphics. They’re written because their authors wanted to write them, by which I mean they are ego exercises and do not serve the needs of an audience. If you think of yourself as an expert in something, you may feel obliged to spew forth your expertise in a giant stream of words that’s much bigger than an average blog post. Why? Because People Need To Know.

Here’s something you may not know about me: I’ve written books for private companies designed for software training and education. I’ve written hundreds of pages on all things Microsoft Office (and a few other topics). I have over eight years of experience teaching people via the written word (and also in live training). I’ve received many heart-warming compliments (heart-warming for me, anyway) from readers who feel that I’ve explained complex concepts in a way that’s easy to understand. And they’ve said the same thing about WordPress SEO Secrets and other ebooks I’ve written.

I’m not trying to be all brag-a-licious about this, but because I’m going to talk to you about ebooks, I wanted to present my “credentials” so you can decide for yourself about the information I’m presenting here.

So, how do you write an ebook that doesn’t suck?

Write Something People Really Want

Many of you will read that subhead, think, “Yeah, yeah…” and not realize I’m talking about you. Yes, you: the person who thinks he knows what people really want to read, but has no evidence of it. As a blogger, you’re known for whatever your blog is about, so an ebook aimed at your own audience has to really meet some specific need you know they have without any doubt.

How do you find out this information?

Simple, really: you ask.

There are many ways to ask. I prefer to do this on Twitter, in emails to my Remarkanotes list, and sometimes by surveys. I favor heart-felt replies over bar charts, any day. I take your pulse, and then I check against my skills, knowledge, and passions, and see if I can find a match in there somewhere. You can do the same.

If you want to reach outside of your blog audience’s demographic or niche, it’s more work and can involve spending money on pay-per-click advertising as a way to test out your idea (market testing). However, I really want to keep this limited to helping out your own blog’s readers.

Two other places you can look:

1. Your blog traffic analytics for what are the most popular posts and keywords.
2. Your comments and trackbacks.

Once you think you have a viable idea, you can just start writing your ebook, yes?

Nope.

Write a post instead. Think of it as market testing, a trial. Publish it and see what the response is:

• Do you get many comments?
• Do you get enthusiastic comments?
• Do you get a lot of social media action (Stumbles, retweets, for example)?
• Do you get a lot of trackbacks?
• Do you get more private emails and direct messages than usual?

If you get a great response to your market testing post, treat that as a green light to go further and possibly develop an ebook. Pay careful attention to what is said in the comments and feedback you get, because what you find there will help you improve your product and answer objections to a purchase before you even create it.

I realize that “many” and “a lot” are totally subjective. Many comments for one blogger may be a trifling to another. Don’t worry about that, just compare it to your usual experience. If your audience is small, your audience for the ebook will probably also be small. Having a great ebook, however, can help you grow your audience.

In any case, writing posts and checking the response to them is a good way to float ebook ideas out to see if there are any takers. In fact, it’s quite possible I’m doing that very thing… right now.

Write to Teach

Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re writing an ebook to tell people about something, you’re writing it to show somebody how to do something or teach them information they don’t have but want badly. When you write a blog, you’re usually positioning yourself as an expert.

The problem with being an expert is that in no way, shape, or form does that automatically mean you can teach. How many of you know Brainy Smurf computer nerds who can’t communicate the simplest thing to someone else without losing their cool?

To teach something to someone, you have to learn it all over again yourself, as if for the very first time.

And in a certain sense, you are: you’re seeing your subject with beginner’s eyes (what the Buddhists call beginner’s mind). By the way, there’s an interesting paradox here: you’ll find you don’t know half as much as you think about something until you try and teach it to someone else. And when you do, you’ll be truly twice the expert you once were.

I’m not going to tell you everything I know about this, there simply isn’t enough room. But here are the meat-and-potatoes concepts:

• Understand the one overarching learning objective (what problem are you solving, what benefit is the reader gaining?).
• Break down the smaller objectives to be reached on the way to the main objective.
• Structure your topics in order of learning.
• Use the “3 Ts:” Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, then tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em.
• For steps in a sequence, use numbered lists.
• Use at least 2 levels of headings, but no more than 4 to divide your content into meaningful, digestible chunks.
• Avoid jargon except where needed, and explain all jargon on first use.
• Write in simple, clear language (not simplistic or dumbed-down–big difference).
• Give it to experts and know-nothings to read and get feedback (the know-nothings are the more important of the two).
• Give it a hyperlinked table of contents.
• Make the fonts easy to read.

Formatting is not your concern just yet, clarity is. Make sure it does what it’s supposed to do.

Package to Impress, Format for Easy Readability

People do judge books by their covers. You know it. I know it. Let’s not kid ourselves. Your ebook deserves a kick-ass cover.

A good ebook cover is a picture that portrays the desired emotional benefits of the contents.

I wanted people who read WordPress SEO Secrets to feel like they had received hidden knowledge, and that with that knowledge they can “bust out” and succeed. The image of fiery radience shining out from the center of a labyrinth (a maze, a mystery) couldn’t have been more perfect.

A cheap, crappy cover means you’re small-time or that you don’t care enough to put any kind of real effort into your ebook. If you’re the kind of person who can’t get his Garanimals to match, then doing ebook covers probably isn’t your cup of meat. Hire a designer (cheaper than you might think in this age of global outsourcing).

Keep your graphical embellishments to a minimum, but when you use them, make them clear, not pixellated mystery mosaics. This means you have know what you’re doing when you create the PDF file (nearly all ebooks are PDFs, Adobe’s Portable Document Format). Otherwise, your images will be over-compressed mush, which does not illustrate or impress.

There are ways to make great ebook covers that you wouldn’t believe were even possible. Again, I have way more info on this than will fit into this already long blog post. But with a little creativity and imagination, you can make super-fab ebook covers without using any fancy graphics software. And no, I don’t even mean the cool online stuff like Aviary or other online graphics tools. I’m talkin’ just good ol’ Microsoft Office.

In fact, Office 2007 is an ebook producer’s dream come true with all the easy cool stuff it does.

Despite the widescreen format of recent computer monitors, people just don’t like landscape-oriented ebooks. They want ‘em portrait-oriented because:

• They want to move through it with as little perceived effort as possible.
• Portrait orientation lets people zoom in more on the text while still fitting the line width into the screen.
• A narrower line width is easier to read.
• If it doesn’t look like how a book is “supposed to” look, you’ve just made your job harder for no good reason, because people will not “buy” what you’re “selling” when they feel this constant low-grade annoyance that the format isn’t what they expected.

Getting Your Ebook into the Hands of Readers

You have two choices when it comes to how you’re going to make your ebook available to the world: give it away or sell it.

Which one you do had better not influence the quality of the ebook. If it’s not worth selling, it’s not worth giving away. Nobody wants your leftover crap. Everybody, on the other hand, wants something valuable for free. I could have easily sold my ebook How to Start a Business Blog, but I give it away for free (it’s due for an update, so maybe the next version will not be free, heh…).

Quality ebooks are a great incentive to get readers to subscribe to your blog via RSS or email; it’s a fair value exchange. But you don’t even have to do that if you don’t want to. If you give your ebook away with no strings attached at all, you’ll find you’ll still get plenty of loyal subscribers who will not unsubscribe as soon as they have their “goody.”

If you’re going to sell it, however, then you need at least two things:

• A PayPal account
• An E-junkie account

PayPal is how you get paid and E-junkie is your digital download and affiliate program provider.

But that’s just the beginning.

Because if you’re going to sell it, then you have to SELL it.

When you read that, you may be conjuring up scary images of gaudy sales pages and harsh “buy it now!!!” tactics, and I don’t blame you. Selling from a blog is not easy. But it’s certainly possible. I’ve experimented a fair bit with this and I’ve learned a lot about it (mostly by making mistakes–my loss is your gain).

If you’ve developed a good relationship with your audience, and you’ve done everything described above, you don’t need a sales letter.

All you have to do is explain what problem your ebook solves, what’s in your ebook, what it does for people, and how much it costs.

Oh, wait… I guess that would be a sales letter, wouldn’t it?

Probably a long copy sales letter, I’ll bet.

Look, if you want to sell it, you’ve got to tell it.

This has nothing to do with being “sleazy.” If a sales letter doesn’t appeal to you, it’s because of one of three things:

• You’re not the target audience
• Whoever wrote it doesn’t understand the problem
• The offer isn’t valuable.

Because when those three aspects are in place, a lot else can and will be forgiven. If blaring headlines and yellow highlighter don’t appeal to you, that’s all that means (newsflash: you’re not the only person on the planet). It does not mean those technique are themselves bad. Good marketing appeals to its intended audience. Period.

But again, we’re in danger of getting sucked into the black hole that is all of internet marketing… so let’s not go there.

Pricing: It’s Not about You

If you’re going to sell your ebook, then you must put a price on it. How should you price your ebook?

Take your birthdate, divide by pi, add in the current phase of the moon, and then…

Just kidding.

Seriously, this isn’t a big deal but people make it into one because they associate what they’re charging with their own self-worth. If they don’t feel confident in their own product, they undercharge, which makes people not want to buy it (because it’s perceived as cheap and worthless) and so now they’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Ick.

I can’t help you with your self-esteem issues (loser ), but I can say the market has expectations which have nothing to do with your self-esteem. People more often than not sell themselves short, and I want to see you succeed. That’s why I’m bringing up all this stuff about pricing.

Ebooks need to at least cost as much as a real book. The price of an ebook is tied to the perceived value it offers the buyer–not the format of the book. If you think this isn’t true with physical books, think again. Ever look into the world of book collectors? It’s crazy how perceived value is at work in that market.

But even if you trot your ass down to your local meatspace bookstore, you will see this. How many pages are one of the recent Harry Potter novels? They’re huge (of course, if you took out all the uneccessary adverbs, they’d be much thinner, he said jokingly).

Contrast that with your average computer tome. About the same number of pages, many of them, but the computer book costs twice as much (with Harry Potter being a hardcover and the computer book being a paperback, even).

Why?

It’s not the paper or the number of pages.

It’s the perceived value of what’s inside, but within the confines of what the market will bear.

How is value perceived? Why, through your marketing information, of course. You establish part of that value in your sales letter and pre-launch marketing. You also establish that value through your existing relationship with your blog readers, and that carries a lot of force. It does not, however, excuse you from having to explain what your ebook is about or how it helps people (sales letter).

If you’ve bought ebooks yourself (and you had better not even think about selling one until you have bought at least several, and at different price points) you know how they’re generally priced: $19.99, $27, $39, $47 are common lower-end prices. Upper-end prices are $97, $127, $197 (and even higher, but then you’re usually looking at more than just an ebook).

So you see it’s really not about you: it’s about the market and about perceived value. If everybody in your space is selling $20 ebooks and you come in with a gorgeous $39 ebook that really does things the $20 ebooks don’t, then the perceived value of that is in line with the market: your ebook will be seen as a better value.

It is a long-proven fact that perceived value increases with a higher price tag. Use that to your advantage. This does not mean you can foist overpriced crap on the market. Anyone silly enough to buy from you will quickly ask for their money back and you will learn your lesson. You must under-promise and over-deliver.

In terms of simple math, the higher the price, the fewer you have to sell to make some decent coin. In an interesting paradox, lower prices do not automatically mean lower sales. People don’t buy things because they’re cheap, they buy things because they’re an excellent value for the money.

Now, having said that, you’re probably safer starting at the lower end. You can always raise your prices later (just remember to actually do it). A good way to do this is to come out with a new version of the ebook that has additional and updated information. That is a perfectly legitimate reason to raise the price.

Got Questions? Suggestions?

Your feedback is warmly welcomed. Leave a comment below.

If you’d rather contact me privately, email me: michael@remarkablogger.com or send me a direct message on Twitter if we’re following each other.