Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

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)

• Muscle Building
• Solar Panels
• Wind Power
• Acne Care
• Vegan Foods
• College Guides
• Skin Care
• Weddings
• Dog Care
• Golf
• Learning Languages
• Stress Management
• Anxiety
• Anti-Aging
• Weight Loss
• Divorce
• Time Management
• Quitting Smoking
• Yoga
• Satellite TV
• Vacation Homes
• Getting Employment
• Insurance
• Massage
• Dating
• Small Business Building
• Gardening
• Organic Cooking
• MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs)
• Self Coaching
• Making Money from Home
• Home Décor
• Pregnancy
• Home Security
• Stopping Identity Theft
• Car Repair
• Yoga
• Real Estate
• Cruises

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:

• EzineArticles.com – A huge article directory filled with topics and content that you can start brainstorming with.
• Amazon.com – The world’s largest online store. Use Amazon to see what people are buying and what you might be able to help them with.
• WordTracker.com – A paid keyword research tool that helps you look up related topics to your niche. Make sure to sign up for the free trial first.
• Google Keywords Tool – Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool. This is completely free but doesn’t offer quite as much info as the paid ones. It can be very helpful for basic research though.
• SpyFu.com – Provides details about current ads for a given keyword. Lets you see how competitive your niche might be with costs per click, recent data, and more.
• Quantcast.com – Demographic information for specific websites and keywords. See who is interested in which topics and how many of them are out there.
• PayDotCom.com – Information publishing and payment service like Clickbank. Look through their marketplace for ideas.
• Clickbank.com – As mentioned above, a great tool to help research what is hot right now and what topics you can get in on or find new angles to work with.

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.

Writing Guides ebook writing, how to write, make money online, writing a book, writing courses, writing for money

One of the number one things I get asked by people wondering how I got involved in the copywriting field is what I studied in College to get here. To be fair, I’ll admit up front that I was a Creative Writing Major with a focus in fiction and exposition. I wrote a lot and I have a degree to back it all up. It doesn’t really support my argument that you don’t need any formal training to do what I’m doing, but let’s just forget for a moment that degree and take a closer look at the things you really need to be effective as a copywriter. These are only a few of the things that go into writing. I have a few more that I’ll add in future posts. 

A Keen Eye for Language

While I won’t say that you need any kind of formal training to be a writer online, I will say that you need a keen eye for what makes language work and how an English sentence is formed. If you don’t read very often, haven’t written anything since high school and often have a hard time writing the memos on your checks, this job might be a bit hard for you.

But, even then don’t let it get you down. To develop a keen eye for the language, you need only to spend a bit of time understanding how sentences work, how words flow together and what is attractive to the human eye. It might not seem like it, but words are just as visually pleasing as a picture of the sunset or the vase your nephew made for you.

One of the number one things I tell people to do when they start writing for the first time is to read their first couple of articles out loud. This was an exercise I learned in Middle School and it quickly taught me to listen for things as I write. If you practice enough, you don’t have to read outloud anymore and your brain will start recognizing patterns that are effective without having to hear them. We’ll go into a bit more detail on how online copy needs to be structured for the Internet reader later, but things like cadence, white space, sentence length, word choice, and use of punctuation are all vital aspects of the flow of language that you’ll need to master.

Typing Skills

This is just plain simple and is something that anyone can improve upon very quickly. But, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to type quickly. Not only must you type quickly, you must type accurately, and consistently. In any given day, I might type between 8,000 and 15,000 words. That amount of text will take me between two and a half and six hours of hard typing. It might seem like a lot, but you’ll build up to it over time. When I first started, I might be lucky to write up 4,000 words in a day and 1,500 words an hour.

Not only do your fingers learn to start keeping pace, your brain will start learning how to develop thoughts and put them into position as you write. I’ll discuss this more later but it all comes down to practice, practice, practice. Most of what you learn and become better at in this job is intangible. But, trust me when I say that if you practice you will get better.

Ability to Focus and Self Motivate

If you want to work at home and write for a living, you need to be able to focus on what you are doing and above and beyond anything else, you need to be able to self motivate yourself. You cannot be effective at writing for a living if you spend your time watching the Simpsons or walking your dog, or doing chores around the house during your allotted work hours.

It’s hard to hear that because half of the allure of working at home is having the freedom to take breaks, adjust your schedule and move around at will rather than being stuck in an office for 8 hours a day every day. But, especially when you get started, you need to be able to maintain a steady schedule. The easier you make it for yourself to slack off, the harder it will be to get up to a point where you’re doing a job and not trying out a new hobby.

For the first six months I always recommend setting aside incrementally larger amounts of time every day. This is vital because if you start out trying to work 8 hours a day, you’ll burn out quickly, especially when learning. However, if you start out with 2 or 3 hours a day in the first week and build up to 8 hours a day by the fifth or sixth week, your mind and your body will be working full time before you know it.

Ultimately, this is the kind of job that you can do for 4-5 hours a day, 4-5 days a week and make $40,000 a year doing, but it is going to take anywhere up to a year to get to that point. It takes time to get higher paying jobs; it takes time to build up your stamina in typing (and thinking that much) and it takes time to build up your resolve enough to spend that much time working in your own home every day. 

Freelancing freelance writing, make money online, writing for money

Every now and then someone asks me where I find my work. I usually tell them “Elance” even though I actually get about 75% of my own work from repeat clients at this point. But my partner gets most of his work through Elance and if I’m out of work for any reason I start bidding too. 

So, what is it about Elance that makes me willing to pay $40 a month and almost 10% in project transaction fees (that’s more than sales tax almost everywhere)? It’s a necessatiy. No matter how you look at it, if you’re a freelance writer who makes their money on the Internet, you need this website to survive. You might go three or four weeks without using it at a time, but when you need it, you really need it. 

The nature of writing freelance (or programming, designing, or translating for Elance’s many other users) is that you never know for sure that the next month is going to bring in enough work to pay your bills. You could line up more work for the next six weeks than you’ve ever seen in your life and you could still end up broke a month or two later. It’s just how the job works – you never really get to relax. So, having a profile on a website where you’re trusted, respected, and have plenty of experience is an absolute must. Think of it like your safety net – you hope you never need it, but you damn well better make sure it’s there.

And while there are other websites out there that offer services very similar to what Elance provides, none of them do it quite so well. In any given week, the Writing and Translation section alone will have more than 8,000 unique jobs. That’s a huge volume of content. If you have a good profile and bid realistically, you can usually expect to land around 15% of your bids – you’re going to get work. If you just sit back and wait for repeat clients, craigslist ads, and poorly posted projects to get back to you from the other websites, you might be so lucky to get enough work to pay your bills.

It’s expensive, it’s a bit confusing (they redesign that site every other month it seems) and it can be incredibly frustrating to outlast the underbids from overseas or the project listers who think Elance is a place to get where they can get $1 articles, but the site will keep you afloat when you need it. If nothing else, it’s just nice to have a security blanket of sorts to keep you semi-comfortable with your work because there’s nothing more frustrating than constantly having to worry if you’ll be able to pay your bills or not.

Freelance Sites elance, freelance career, freelance writing, online writing sources, writing for money

I have wanted to be a writer for a while now. Not “since I was a little kid” while, but a good long time nonetheless. Of course, when I had these visions of literary wonder, I was going to be sitting around a massive house with a few hundred words a day to write for a major magazine, newspaper, or novel. Of course, it’s not the same thing as what I’m actually doing – that is being a pen for hire, the guy who does all the dirty work for websites across the globe. 

I’m not complaining about my job of course – being a freelance writer is probably the best job I’ve ever had or will ever have and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. That said, there ends up being a huge difference between writing because you love it and writing because you have to do it to pay your rent and keep the Simpsons DVDs up to date. 

When I wrote in college, I wrote because I loved it. That’s about all you get out of it when you’re paying thousands of dollars for someone to “teach” you how to produce a short story. Right now, I write because it pays the bills – all sorts of bills by the way; more than I ever thought would be possible. This isn’t a new realization by any means. I have seen the effects of work in action many times before. When I was a kid, there was nothing I wanted more than to ride the lawnmower around the yard – I’ll bet you can guess how that turned out. 

And in the last two years or so, I’ve had plenty of jobs that I thought would be a lot of fun, but the longer I worked on them, the less fun they became. Writing guides for video games? That should be awesome right? Turns out that when you start looking at everything in a game as a sequence in a technical manual, it’s pretty dull. Eating out and writing reviews? Well, it could be fun if A) the food was good everytime or B) you didn’t have to think of new and exciting ways to describe the word “spicy”. 

Again, I’m not complaining. My job is great and if you’re getting into freelance writing, I can guarantee that you’ll be happy with your new lifestyle. But, if you’re getting into it for the love of writing, you’re going to be pretty crestfallen pretty quickly. 

My advice – get a really relaxing, mindless hobby. It helps to balance out how much you use your brain when writing all day and allows you to clear the slate so you can work on private projects – things like short stories or that great american novel. I like to read cheesy fantasy novels and play guitar hero. My brain gets to shut down for an hour or two and I don’t feel like writing more is only another chore when it is really something I dream about doing most every day. 

You’re going to have enough trouble already separating your personal life from your work if you start working freelance – create barriers and good ways to wind down and you can avoid feeling like the writing you do for the love of writing is the same as all that other stuff you scribble out to pay your gas bill.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, make money online, writing career, writing for money

I get a lot of questions about what exactly I “do” for a living. The truth is that when someone asks me that question there are a lot of possible answers. I could simply say “I’m a writer” or I could elaborate and explain that I own a freelance copy writing business or that I do articles for the web. Any way you look at it, there isn’t really an all inclusive answer. If I said “freelance writer” people would ask me what kind of freelance writing I do. They would say, “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and of course the immediate answer is no. I write articles for digital products and rework website content for Canadian businesses. If someone had actually read something I had written by chance, I’d probably have more questions for them than they’d have for me.

The other day for example, I was talking to one of my girlfriend’s cousins and she asked me if I was writing anythign interesting. As often happens, I was thrown off by the question. I don’t really think of my work in terms of “interesting” or not. It’s not that it is never interesting. It’s just that most of the time that’s not the important part – the important part is that it will convert to a higher pay:work ratio than the last project. I know it sounds crass, but most freelancers work like this. Even the hoighty toighty magazine and newspaper writers that write for the “love of it” are really just thinking of how much they can get done in a short amount of time and pay their bills. It’s the biggest irony of trying to make money with any form of artistic endeavor (and I know I’m stretching the definition of artistic when I use it to talk about my freelance projects), but it’s the real truth. 

I have a partner in all this jumbled writing stuff that does a much better job of describing what he does than I do. He can tell a funny story about it or describe something ridiculously mundane in a humorous way and make people interested. I can’t even get myself interested half the time. Of course, I am by no means complaining. I love my job. I work the projects I choose, the hours I choose and can take off whenever I feel like it. I work on my couch, watching baseball or at a coffee shop while listening to Radiohead. I get more freedom working alone than I could ever have dreamed of anywhere else, but I do loathe those conversations – what do I do? I write stuff…let’s keep it at that.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, writing for money

It has been a long couple of months – for a variety of reasons. First, I was offered a job that would have taken me to San Diego for a fairly good opportunity – a steady paycheck, sunny weather, and a nice area to call my home. But, things started to change almost immediately after I accepted the job offer. The work was pouring in, the emails were piling up, and I got well behind.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m having the most lucrative year of my life and the freelance work is taking off – of course I had no choice but to retroactively turn down the job offer. This means a few different things. First, I’m not buried up to my eyeballs in work. Second, I can actually relax a bit and enjoy what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last few weeks. Finally, I can start throwing my energy into wholeheartedly expanding Seattle Freelance and making it into something special.

With a second writer on hand now who can both keep up with me and complete all of the projects I bring in with relative ease, this is an even more realistic goal – the one I was striving for months ago when I first launched Seattle Freelance. It will be an interesting few weeks as I start building upon my current successes and start looking for opportunities and methods to expand. The growth potential is huge, my ideas are literally overflowing from the files in which I keep them, and I now have the freedom – both financially and temporally – to see them all out. It is an interesting experience, and a fitting homage to the one year anniversary of quitting my last hourly job … hopefully for good.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance career, freelance writing, make money online, writing for money, writing from home