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Producing Information Products – eBooks

I finally completed the dating eBook, proofed, formatted and delivered with client approval so now I just have to wait for the payment to arrive and then I can get my car out of the garage and back on the road.

Ahhh…genteel poverty and the life of a scribbler!

Honestly, seeing the 76 page long eBook with someone else’s name on it did give me pangs of something I know not what.

I wrote that blasted thing !

What the experience has done is make me look a lot more closely at producing eBooks with my name on them and I have one in the can already. Now I’m just formatting the beast and looking at where and how I can get some money on the creation.

Before I go to the e-Press however, I’ve been taking a good hard look at what I’ve produced.

The book deals with …writing for profit.

Shock! Horror! – not much of a surprise there then 😉

From my research, the best sellers for eBook sales statistics are dominated by the “How to” genre. It appears that demonstrating how to solve a problem is the key to generating eBook sales. To this end,the tome need not be several hundred pages long, in fact many of the best sellers are less than 50 pages of double spaced, font size 12 pieces of work that probably run to less than 10,000 words in length. For a writer like myself that is a days worth of work including the research!
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Planning a Document

Anyone who travels around a lot knows that planning contributes towards making the trip a success. Certainly, the unplanned jaunts and routes taken in a trip come as side-kicks or bonuses— in both ways, making your trip ripe in experience. However, without the bone structure of planning you will fall face-down-in-the-earth.

The foundations of any document are the planning of its “rhetorical strategy”. To get one’s point across to an array of audiences, as wide as possible, is the main focus of most document writers. One needs to be clear in purpose of the message to be conveyed through the project. When the purpose of the writing becomes clear, this becomes easily possible. Some of the major points involved in creating a successful document presentation include the following:
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Cooking for Writers: A Recipe for a Great Paper

Writing for a writer becomes a habitual process where the flow comes and just gets rolling. Pages and pages full of words course from our brains and through our hands in no time at all. It’s like giving a knife to a cook. The meal doesn’t take long at all to be ready.

Staying with the cooking analogy, someone who doesn’t know how to cook stands dumbfounded looking at ingredients and wondering what to do with them all. The same happens with someone who isn’t very familiar with the writing process. Thoughts are streaming through your brain, but you can’t get them out on the page. You can’t get them started.

Writing shouldn’t be as difficult as most people think. If you can talk to your friends, you can write. You’ve learned enough to start what you want to say, say what you want to say and sometimes you even get a chance to wrap up what you want to say. All you have to learn now is how to get it down on paper.

Just Begin

What stops most people from writing is getting started. How to begin is the question. Don’t look for some dramatic way to begin your document whether it’s an essay for college or an article for a magazine. Just begin.

What is the point of your paper? Start with a sentence that pinpoints the answer to that question and then go for it. Write the first paragraph with supporting sentences. Write your paper with supporting paragraphs and then, wrap it up in a nice little conclusion. Now, you can go back to the beginning and go for a more impressive, dramatic introduction if you want.
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5 Tips for Writing with Persuasion

My bread and butter is writing sales copy or at least promotional copy of some description and that accounts for the vast majority of the demand in the market for scribblers today.

It makes sense to pick up on some techniques for writing in a persusive fashion – it makes no sense to write something that will not help sell or promote the product or service of your commissioning client.

#1 – Repetition

Repeating yourself helps get the point home to your audience. My view is to make your point in several different ways in order to avoid the appearance of treating your audience as if they are brainless. To this end I use quotes extensively both from individuals or from trusted reporting sources e.g. I quoted the “BBC” and “Angelina Jolie” when I wrote about Hoodia, a diet pill.

#2 – Consistency

Keep yourself on-message and on-topic. This will help you maintain a consistent approach to generating copy and advancing your message.

I tend to use this by advancing a position that a reader will find hard to disagree with and then following up with supporting evidence that leads to a hopefully, inescapable conclusion e.g. smokers die younger than non-smokers is a hard to disagree with statement.

#3 – Social Proof – Peer Pressure

I was told once upon a time that “The trend is your friend” and though this was in the context of foreign exchange dealing as traders would look for market trends in order to judge when to make trades, it has direct relevance with our writing as well.

I look for testimonials that can be cited and especially valuable are the rich and famous who use a product or service. You only need look at those companies that bear the Royal “By Appointment” signs to understand the significance of this.

PROBLEM-SOLVING STRATEGIES IN TECHNICAL WRITING

It is not always appealing to always write just about technical information, whether it is in parts or in detail, especially when you are writing a technical document. If your thoughts are clearly communicated through your writing, then it is likely to be understood and read by a wider audience. So, as a writer you need to build a bridge to obliterate the gap that often lingers between the writer and the reader of any technical writing material.

For example, to win a bid, a company’s project developers need to write a proposal in order to convince their potential client that they are the best team suited for the job. Their entire presentation is focused around this. Precise development of connection between the presenters and the viewers or the readers will do the trick. It is necessarily to place clearly in your reports the methodology, resources used, final results and the compatibility with legal regulations. Statistics, appropriate data collection, graphs, illustrations and necessary reports also need to be placed along with the main report(s).

To make the report justifiably free to access and easy to connote, appropriate footnotes also need to be placed. At the end of the report a lucid bibliography should be given, indicating all the detailed sources used, otherwise you could be accused of plagiarism! Also, remember that overused sources can tarnish your originality and create unfathomable boredom, so keep your source-details neatly piled.
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Aristotle Returns – Brainstorming with Relationships

Aristotle wrote about brainstorming a couple of thousand years ago. He didn’t call it brainstorming, but “Common Topics” as part of his work on rhetoric. These common topics are relevant today and summarise the use of definitions, relationships, comparisons, testimony and circumstances as tools to use to question our topic and approach it from different perspectives giving off new ideas in the process.

Today we’ll take a look at the use of relationships to help us generate ideas with which to attack our topics.

Asking questions about how the topic interacts with the rest of the world leads to a greater appreciation of X or whatever you want to call your subject. Cause and effect, role in the world,what happens with X, what occurred before X and developments or actions after X are all reflections on the relationship that X has with the rest of the world.
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