It’s day one of NaNoWriMo and I’m already well under way toward 5,000 words for the first day. We all know how often this kind of progress will last, so it’s nice to get a head start. I’m hoping to get in a solid 5-7k by the end of the day so that I can take it easy if I have a busy work day coming up. Should be fun.
The all important part 2 of writing your eBook is here and is going to be an incredibly important aspect. Not only is this the part where you actually start to commit your ideas to the screen (a profound moment for any project), but it is where you start to see just how much cool stuff there is to talk about.
How Should an Outline Look
Personally, I like an extremely detailed outline – for a couple of reasons. When I used to work on projects, well before I became a freelance writer, I would just wing it. My college papers were done the night before and I didn’t outline anything. I got away with it, but I never quite learned how to balance my ideas and ensure everything was covered.
It's time to start writing
Once I started writing eBooks for my clients, that all changed. I didn’t have the luxury of winging it because someone was paying me money to ensure they got what they wanted. If I did it half-way, I’d probably just cause myself more work. So, I learned very quickly that before I started any project I would need to outline everything I could think of for their book.
With time, I learned that this wasn’t just good for my clients’ peace of mind, but for my own writing process. It makes it sooo much easier to be able to look back and see where I am between days, especially if I take two or three days off of a project and come back to it mid-chapter.
So, I’m going to show you my in-depth outlining process. Keep in mind that you can outline however you like, but to me, this is the best way is to know exactly what you’re going to write in the book from step one.
Create a Basic Outline
Start by creating a list of things that need to be covered in your book. You’ve already done a LOT of research by now (hopefully), so start listing out everything of value related to that research. If you were writing about dog training, you would start with puppy behaviors, clicker training, house training, and so on. Write it all down in one big, messy list.
Once you have that list completed from memory, take a few minutes and start researching elsewhere to make sure you didn’t forget anything. A method I occasionally use is to sift through the table of contents in books on Amazon.com and see what other subject areas I might have missed for the niche. DO NOT steal any ideas from these books – that’s plagiarism. Rather, just see if there was a general topic area that you missed. For example, if you wrote a Dog Training book but forgot to mention leash training, your book would be missing an important part. Never copy an outline from another book. This is why you create your own list first – otherwise the urge to just copy it out would be too great.
Fleshing it Out
Once you have a full list of topics, you should start filling it in. The easiest way to start doing that is to group everything in your list together by category. These categories will be your chapters. Ideally, you should have between 6 and 15 chapters, but no less or more than that. Too few chapters makes a book too bulky. Too many chapters makes it disjointed. Keep things combined for ease of flow.
Then, when the chapters are nice and organized, create a flow chart of what will be included in each chapter. Here is a sample of what an outline for this blog post would be (pretend it’s a chapter in an eBook):
II. Outlining an EBook
A. Introduction to Outlining
B. How Should an Outline Look
C. Creating a Basic Outline
D. Fleshing it Out
E. Creating Notes
F. Some Tips
As you can see, I’ve separated the chapter as number 2, then added each subsection below. You can add additional subsections below that fairly easily. Microsoft Word or Open Office SWriter both have easy features to do this automatically.
Creating Notes
Once you’ve created your organized outline, go through and add a short sentence or set of notes next to each marker to remind yourself for later what will be included in that section. Sometimes it can help you to remember what details are most important in that part of the chapter. Here’s an example:
E. Creating Notes – Describe the need to add notes for each part of a chapter. Show example.
I’ve just told myself exactly what I should write in that section, making the process much easier for me when I am in the middle of a massive writing project.
Some Tips
If the above seems a bit vague to you, it’s on purpose. Everyone’s outline is a little different and you need to find what works for you. But, I want to be sure I give you some parting tips to keep you from being totally lost when you get started:
Never understimate the value of research
The ideal outline is one that will prepare you for the writing process. It will create an organized timeline by which you can write your eBook without getting too overwhelmed with potential topics. If you can do that, you’ll be set when it comes time to start writing.
Next Time
In the next post, we’re going to discuss how to conduct research and gather information for your book. It may be dull, but it’s the backbone of all good content.
I try to be at least a little modest every now and then, but there are some topics I know pretty well, based pretty heavily on the experience I’ve racked up in recent years. One of those things is how to write an eBook, so I thought I’d bring that knowledge to bear here for a short course on how to do just that.
Grab Your Laptop and Write an eBook
The next few parts in this series will cover exactly how to brainstorm, outline, and write an eBook that can be sold as an informational product or used to promote something else you’re trying to sell. Despite what some of my colleagues would say, I always like to think that the content comes first, so I take this process very seriously and alway pour a good bit of energy into creating well written, highly focused eBooks that are actually valuable to their readers. That’s what we’re going to work on.
As a note, this is a guide for those interested in informational eBooks for distribution on the Internet – not for digital novels or non-fiction books. However, most of the tips in these guides will probably work just as well for those types of books if that’s your goal.
For the first message, I thought I’d keep things pretty simple and focus on how you’re going to choose the topic for your eBook. It’s probably one of the hardest parts of the process and for many marketers, if it’s done poorly, it results in a whole lot of work for not much gain.
What Do You Know?
Simple question. Probably lots of answers too. The first thing you should ask yourself is what you know about. If that fails, what are you willing to learn about. This has less to do with your innate knowledge (because god knows that research on the Internet is easier than ever) and more to do with your interest level and motivation. If you choose a topic you know nothing about, the odds are that you don’t care all that much about the niche in the first place. That may not be true, but it tends to hold course for most topics.
On the other hand, if you choose a topic that you know a LOT about, even if you don’t like that niche, the writing process should be smooth. You won’t need to rely on research alone to make it happen. Plus, when you’re an expert in a field, it tends to be much easier to find a unique angle from which to write the book – when you can tap into that unique angle, you will save a tremendous amount of time and energy and probably capture more attention.
What’s the Book For?
Before you can go any further, you need to know what the book is for. Are you selling it? Are you giving it away? Are you writing for the sake of writing? It doesn’t really matter what your purpose is in terms of how you write it, but when it comes to selling it, you had better be sure that the topic you’ve chosen is going to be marketable.
Can You Sell It?
This is the biggie. Can your topic be sold. I refuse to tell anyone that an idea cannot be sold, but I will sometimes hold my tongue as I wonder just how it is going to be done. The key here is to know exactly what kind of market you have. Are there people out there buying guides like yours already and if so, how many of them are there. How many people are in your niche and what kind of opportunities are there for growth?
An easy way to do some quick research, if you plan to sell your guide, is to look on Clickbank’s Marketplace. Here, you’ll find many of the top selling eBooks on the Internet. The higher the gravity, the more people are selling that book and the larger its niche probably is. I don’t recommend copying anything out right – but you may as well see how your niche is represented.
The Clickbank Marketplace
Case in point – I had a client who wanted a new guide written about how to create your own energy, like all the big Energy4Earth style guides out there right now. They asked whether I thought the guide would sell or not. I said, sure thing, but you’d better market it well because competition is fierce right now. I recommended a similar guide, but one that focused more on how to make a house’s existing systems more energy efficient. There were a couple of guides like that but none of them were all that good. Turns out, he did fantastic with that topic, just by finding a slightly different angle than what everyone else was using.
He still got the niche he enjoyed working in, but he managed to get a guide that stuck its landing well within a hungry niche that was interested in what had to be said.
A Short List of Topics
That’s about as far as I can take you in specifically getting you a topic for you book, but just to get you a head start, here is a list of popular niches that tend to remain popular regardless of things like the economy or the time of year. If you write a book that is different and interesting in one of these niches, you stand a good chance of creating something profitable:
(note: Click on any keyword below to do a Google search for it)
This is by no means a complete list, but it can help you get started with your new eBook if you’re looking for ideas.
Some Websites to Check Out
Want to do a little more research on your own while you’re at it? Here is a list of websites I use for niche research when I need new ideas to get an eBook started:
This is just a smattering of tools out there. You can also look on blogs, research local news and headlines, read up on the current trends on forums and much more. Don’t hold yourself back. Do your research and find ways to get the best topics out there.
Next Time
Hopefully this post has been helpful in preparing you for writing your eBook. Next time we’ll talk about how to outline your book before writing to minimize writer’s block and to be sure you don’t miss any important topics in the content.
It’s a bit early in the month, I know, but I am planning on taking a good bit of time off of writing beyond the bare necessities of work for the next couple of weeks, so I’m doing my mid-October update a little early.
I actually sat down for a few minutes the other day and did some basic outlining of my future novel. It turns out I had a few good ideas (cool huh?) and now I have the basic idea of a novel in hand for me to get started with when November gets underway. I never know for sure how much to outline though – I don’t ever want to get too far ahead of myself. When I do, I tend to fall behind a bit and then not get as excited as I could when it all gets started.
But, then there’s the other side of things – if I don’t do some outlining early, I tend to get really caught up when it’s time to write 1500-3000 words a day for an entire month. So, I opted for the former and have a nice little outline to get me started.
I also decided to aim for something slightly less messy than the last few years – I’m just writing something simple and fun in the fantasy genre. I’m also aiming for a really long book this year. The last few times I tried to keep it short and then got stuck in that in-between space where I couldn’t quite figure out where I was going to end the book and so even when I wrote 50,000 words, it ended up being about 40% of a novel. So, this year, I’m aiming for a finished length of 100K+. I know I probably won’t write that much in one month (unless work gets really slow), but it’s a good target and will actually end me up with a completed novel, which would be pretty fun too.
Anyways, I have an outline, I have an idea, and it’s a lot of fun. Anyone else out there wallowing through October before NaNo, make sure to spend some time outlining. It’s cathartic if nothing else, plus it keeps all your ideas fresh in your head as you roll into November and start writing.
I was going to write about something useful today – how to write an eBook or what I’m learning about Twitter these days, but I came down with a bit of something a couple days ago and don’t much feel like it, so we’ll have to come back to those topics in a day or two. But, just to give everyone an idea of what’s coming this month (and what I’m thinking about rather than working on this weekend), here are some upcoming projects:
- NaNoWriMo - Yup, if you know me, you know that I’m working on my fifth year in Nano, so that’ll be a big deal coming up soon.
- eBook Writing 101 – I’ve been working on an outline for a course about eBook writing, which I hope to get the first couple of posts up on this week sometime.
- How to Write about Gaming – I’ve been writing about MMOs for the past three years or so and do pretty well for myself. Find out how I got the work and how I keep up with multiple MMOs at once.
- Twitter and Me – For those interested, I’ve been taking some notes on Twitter and how it’s been working for me.
- PLR! – ArtisanPLR is up and running and starting to do pretty well. I’m excited about it and will continue to update the faithful out there.
Anyways, that’s what I’m thinking about – now, back to the couch and some football. Catch up with everyone in a few days.
It’s that time of the year again, which means I’m about to commit to NaNoWriMo, the national novel writing month event that kicks off in November. Usually around the end of September each year, I get very excited and start going on at length about what I’m going to write about, how it will be written, how you can keep up with the writing, etc.
This year, I’m going to minimize all that excitement, because I don’t want to jinx it. I’ve only completed a novel once – in 2007. In 2006, I got to 26,000 words and last year I only made it to 15,000. So, what exactly is it that slows me down in that awful 10,000-30,000 range?
My Novels and their Foibles
It depends really – last year I was just really busy. I write for a living, so spending another hour a day writing, while seemingly not that bad, was just too much. Plus it was November and things are always busy in November.
Second, I tend not to plan my novels ahead of time. I never paid this any mind before because I didn’t plan anything I wrote ahead of time. Now, I write all day and I tend to write a lot of eBooks for my clients, so I’ve come to realize just how much more effective I write when I have a very detailed plan to work from.
Finally, I occasionally start to dislike the novel I write. I don’t know why and it doesn’t always happen, but it’s happened at least once before. I think I’m overly ambitious and when I can’t do all the things I had in mind within 50,000 words and 4 weeks, I get frustrated.
The Solution
So, this year, I’m going at it in a different way. I’m going to start outlining the thing in a couple of days – probably when the forums go up on October 1st. Then, I’m going to not write about it here at all. I’ll just write the novel, not think about it at all and be 100% okay if the thing makes absolutely no sense when I hit 50,000 words. Finally, I’m going to actually have an ending in mind and attempt to get there. The 50,000 word count is extremely short, and even in ‘07 when I made it, the book wasn’t really done yet – so this time around, I’m going to stretch things out a bit and see what comes of it.
All I can do now is hope that I don’t get inundated with work like last year. Thankfully there’s no WoW expansion this fall.
So, I’ve been trying, to little avail, to use Twitter in recent months to do some basic networking and marketing. I know it can work because I’ve written about it a few times in the last year or so and seen the results of dedicated marketing only through Twitter. It’s pretty awesome when it does work – but I haven’t hit the magic formula yet.
Here’s the problem – I can’t get myself to post 20 times a day. I see people doing it and I’m sure they’re getting a lot out of those posts, but wow – really? Who has Twitter open all the time and who has something valuable to say that often. I’m probably just opening myself to a slew of responses about how many ways there are to use Twitter, and don’t get me wrong – I love it. I find all sorts of cool stuff on there when I’m reading other tweets and I’ve gotten some good answers at times when I need quick help. But, enticing people to click on links is harder and harder these days with all the marketing being done out there.
My bread and butter seems to be article marketing – that stuff is gold and I’ve been racking them up of late. In August I had one article that I posted on the 22nd get 1000 views and 545 clicks. That was only 10 days. Anyways, I’m realizing that this post has minimal value other than me complaining about Twitter and bragging about my articles. It’s getting to that time of the day again – time to go find some dinner. Maybe tomorrow I’ll work on analyzing exactly why I can’t do well on Twitter and then maybe…you know, fix it.
As always, any Twitter experts are welcome…no, encouraged, to leave their comments and suggestions. I enjoy tweeting a little too much to give up just yet.
It’s one of those days that tend to pop up when I’ve been doing just a little bit too much work. After a dismal August in which it seemed like the entire content writing market had completely dried up, September has been anything but. Old clients that I hadn’t heard from in a while came knocking and now I have plenty of work to get me through the month (and a bit beyond).
It’s exactly what I wanted, but to be honest, I rather liked having all that free time to tweak with some Internet Marketing ideas I had and to try some other fun stuff on the side. So, I’m trying to keep up with those plans without letting it all get the best of me.
Anyways, the goal was to get a new set of PC related PLR articles up today as well as some for Christmas and Mafia Wars. I got my topics and my research done, but time is running short and the brain is drying up. So, hopefully tomorrow or Thursday, I’ll have three brand new sets of PLR up and ready over at ArtisanPLR.
So, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this site for a while now. I even bought a new domain name (anthonychatfield.com), but I took a look back through the old web stats and it seems like it would be a bit of a waste to move everything over when I have a decent page rank and a whole lot of links (however old they may be). So, I’m going to stick with the good old goofy domain name and see what can be done with it.
Up to now, it’s been a jumble of just about everything you can imagine having to do with me. I’m going to give it a bit of a jump start in the coming weeks, mainly because I’ve been spending so much time lately working on my career and all things writing.
Hopefully I can offer some halfway decent insights about writing, freelancing, and marketing in general (at least from my semi-newbie point of view).
I have yet another new website up and running now – it’s at www.ArtisanPLR.com and it’s home to a ton of PLR articles that I’ve been working on. I’m hoping to get it a nice kick in the backside in the weeks to come, so if you know anyone that needs content for their marketing campaign (or have any PLR topic requests), let me know. It’s just getting started, but expect big things from this new venture.
