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!
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.
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.
What’s It All About Alfie? or Why Bother With Good Writing?
No pop metaphysical descriptions here on the life of a rake, my son is too young to really appreciate the humour and pathos in Alfie but he put me on the spot during half-term with some rebellious comments on homework.
"Why do I have to write good stuff anyway Dad?"
At the time I was busy with the hectic shuffling that ocurrs around dinner time so my initial response was along the lines of "Because I'm your Dad and I say so, now just get it done!"
During dinner, we talked about this a little more not least as #1 heir was in something of a strop over why he had to do some homework when his younger sister did not.
As I'm increasingly learning, the questions I get from my offspring are rarely less than thought provoking. I can picture my nan in heaven looking down with a knowing smirk on her face and thinking how poetic justice is particularly after all the grief I gave her when I was a sprog.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a Bugger for the Bottle….and Brainstorming
"Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle and could drink you under the table."
Monty Python
Brainstorming new ideas for scribbling is a key part of the composition process. In a practical sense, brainstorming is essential when you have a commission to produce 40 articles on the same topic and by the time you've gotten to the 10th you'll be scraping the barrel for off the top of your head approaches.
Now personally, if I drink I know perfectly well that there is an answer lying at the bottom of the bottle, it's just I've always been too drunk to read it and certainly never rememebered anything the morning after.
Aristotle, if Monty Python are correct, certainly was able to read the answer because he came up with an excellent summary for brainstorming that is as relevant today as it was a couple of thousand years ago when he wrote about Rhetoric.
Braoadly he came up with five main ideas to use:
- Definition
- Comparison and Contrast
- Relationship
- Testimony
- Circumstance
I'm going to cover definition here in this posting but we'll come to the others in future postings.
Definition
For a definition you can simply reach for a decent dictionary but there are other ways you can approach determining a definition by asking questions about what something is and how it interacts.
For instance:
A Personal eBook Project
I've written several eBooks of varying length and varying topics. They can be brilliant excursions into a topic that holds you or they can be a complete pain in the B-hind. They also don't tend to pay so well in my opinion but as a relative novice to the market, I haven't gotten enough eBooks under my belt to command the rises in fee that my shorter works seem to be getting...or maybe that's just a confidence thing with me.
I'm scoping out a project which is a personal one, indeed a deeply personal matter which I sincerely believe needs to be told.
The medium I have chosen to put this story together with is an eBook.
eBooks are cheap to produce and to prepare and this probably accounts for the huge number of works that are produced. As a ghost writer of some of these dubious works, I've been paid anything between $150 to $1,000 for works ranging in size from 10,000 to 25,000 words. Given that an advertisement in a local paper can cost a business anything from £30 for a small inch by inch box on tomorrows fish and chip wrapper and in this light, paying £100 is chicken feed for something someone can put their own name on and claim as their own.
Monday, Monday !
Well here we are again - Mondays are great as far as I'm concerned as yet another week beckons and though it's half-term the sprogs are pitch and putting with mum. It may be a damp day outside but the dogs are walked and I've already chucked 7,000 words into the PC and having my post-fresh air cup of Earl Grey. No fags though as I quite 6 weeks ago - "Yay!" for me.
I have been appointed as editor of a military website operating out of San Diego, California. The subject matter is slightly more interesting to me as I'm a former soldier, but what I'm finding more interesting than any of the content is the variation in presentation and writing style and the visible effects that is happening on the traffic both to and within the site.
Clive has posted up on some of the issue surrounding writing for the web and I'm going to add my opinion on this too. Supaproofread has a link to an article by Jakob Nielsen which you really should read as it contains some extremely good advice, and the most important point to grasp is that web surfers rarely read what you write, rather they scan it in a matter of seconds before moving on...unless you grab and hold their attention.