eBook and General Writing Tips Archives

A Step-By-Step Action Plan For Writing an eBook

When writing an eBook, or anything else, it helps to have an actionable checklist to keep you on track.

Recently, after finishing my eBook about how to create an eBook, I received some interesting feedback.

Let me explain. This whole process started a few months ago when I decided to write an eBook to help writers with creating an eBook. It was intended to simplify the often very complicated technical aspects of the process. What I came up with was a tool that literally removed every technical barrier to eBook creation. It was so simple that even a complete computer newbie could do it.

After the eBook was finished, I was curious if there were any other kinds of barriers people experience. So I presented that question to an internet business coaching group of which I’m a member. This was a perfect group to ask for feedback because most were interested in writing eBooks and many had already purchased my eBook.

The feedback I received was quite surprising. When I began this effort to simplify the writing of eBooks for people, I assumed that most of the barriers were technical. After all, those were the types of questions I was usually asked. Nobody ever mentioned any other barriers. Interestingly, it was not until the technical barriers were removed that the other barriers emerged.

It was kind of like peeling back the layers of an onion. Each type of barrier was like one layer of the onion. As one was peeled back, another would emerge. Each layer was independent of the others and it was very difficult to see more than one layer at a time.

In addition to the technical, these writers struggled with two other types of barriers. Emotional barriers such as self-doubt and inadequacy as a writer were one type. Another was not having a plan which caused great difficulty in knowing where to begin.

Let me tell you, after going through all this, it was no longer a mystery to me why so many people fail to realize their dreams of becoming a writer! These people have so much to offer the world. It is very unfortunate that these barriers may be responsible for us never seeing much of the work these talented writers could have produced. It’s equally unfortunate that these writers may never be fulfilled by realizing their dreams.

It seems I had stumbled upon a much bigger problem than I had originally intended to solve. So with all this in mind, I decided to add to the simplification process I had already started.

I began by writing a supplemental report that would help writers get over the emotional barriers. This report is available for free from this website. If you would like to read it, just fill in the box at the top of the right sidebar next to this article. It will be sent to your email immediately.

My next step in the solution is this article you’re reading now. In order to get started, it’s important to have a plan. That way important mental energy is not wasted on constantly trying to figure out what to do next.

So here is your actionable, step-by-step process to get your amazing eBook out to the world!

Decide What You’re Going to Write About

That statement may seem obvious, but let me explain. It is important to determine the purpose and scope of your eBook right from the start.

Without definite boundaries, your subject matter will tend to wander. It will seem to you like your eBook will never end because there will be no end to what you could add. You will also frustrate your readers as they try to follow the aimless wanderings that will naturally result.

At first, define you subject tightly. Decide on your general subject and what sub-categories you will write about. Making a list or an outline can help with this. As you write, refer back to this list. Make sure everything you write fits under the categories of the list.

Be ruthless about this. If something doesn’t fit, strike it! Even if whatever you just wrote was amazing. If you don’t want to lose it, you can always save it to a snippet file. But remove it from the current project.

Do Your Research

There are no hard and fast rules for this. The amount of research to do before you begin is a subjective thing. It depends on your writing style and your brand of barriers.

What’s important is to make sure it does not become a barrier! You need to do enough research to know your subject. It’s also good to know you’ve generally covered your bases and haven’t left out anything important.

It is not necessary to know every tiny little detail before you start.

Check Your Toolbox

Make sure you have the proper tools and they’re in good working order. This is necessary for any craftsman. If a carpenter’s tools are broken, dull, or he doesn’t have the right ones, he will not be successful. The same is true for writers.

Check your software to be sure you have all the programs you need to complete the project. Be sure your software has all the features you need. Make sure all your software works on your computer. Be sure all updates are installed on your computer. This includes hardware driver updates as well as application program updates.

It is very frustrating to begin a writing project and be constantly plagued by technical interruptions. If there are enough of them, it can completely derail your creativity. Be sure your tools are in good working order before you begin.

Remove Environmental Barriers

Just like inadequate tools, environmental barriers can stifle the creative process too. Make sure you have a quiet place to write without interruption or distraction. Turn off your email program and your telephone.

If you have children or other responsibilities, try to pick a time when you are least likely to be interrupted. If necessary, hire a babysitter and go to the library. If you have a favorite place like the beach or a park, these places can contribute greatly to a proper writing mood.

Make sure you are comfortable. Proper clothing, furniture, nutrition, hydration, and sleep will all contribute to success in this area.

Start Writing!

This is another subjective area of writing. Some writers stick closely to an outline while others just start anywhere.

The important thing is that you start! This seems to be a sticking point for lots of writers. It shouldn’t be. It doesn’t matter where you start. Just begin writing and it will become easier as you go.

Just remember that you only need to actually start once. So the sooner you do it, the sooner you can move on.

Wrap It Up

The category has a dual meaning. First, wrap it up as in finish it up. Finish writing and check your spelling and grammar. It’s a good idea to have some help with this as it’s very difficult to edit your own work. Make sure you have included everything you intended. Also make sure you didn’t include anything outside your scope.

Secondly, decide on what kind of wrapping you want. This includes things like page and page number styling as well as cover design. You can do this yourself or outsource the task.

Publish

The steps involved in publishing will depend on how you intend to distribute your eBook. Just emailing your eBook requires very different steps than hosting, distributing and selling it online. If emailing, you will mainly just need to convert your eBook to electronic format and secure it. If distributing online, you will also need to get it to your website, set up a delivery method, and decide on a way for your buyers to pay for it.

Conclusion

Naturally there will be variations on the steps I have outlined here. However, if you stick to these general guidelines your eBook journey should be fairly straightforward and painless.

I have also only included the basics of each step here. That’s because this is just supposed to be a checklist to help you get moving in the right direction. For more detailed help, be sure and pick up a copy of the free report I mentioned earlier in the article.

For complete coverage of this topic, I recommend checking out my eBook as well as picking up the free report. You can go directly to the eBook sales page by clicking here. Just a little hint though. The free report has a special eBook bonus at the end so you might want to read it first!

Was this article helpful to you? Do you have additional suggestions for our other readers? If so, please leave a comment here or on the Complicated to Simple Facebook Page. You can join us on Facebook by clicking the “like” button in the “Find us on Facebook” box in the left sidebar.

Thanks for visiting!

About Robert Seth

Robert Seth is a CPA in the Clark County, Washington area who has been serving individual and small business clients for the last 25 years. His business includes a growing number of remotely serviced customers throughout the United States. He’s also a writer and technology expert. He has a passion for improving the lives of others by helping them simplify the complicated stuff in their lives.

HELP! What Does it Mean: Fragment (Consider Revising)?

Has your word processing program ever advised you to reconsider a sentence you just wrote? Have you ever sat and puzzled over it in frustration, wondering what it was so upset about?

Maybe your sentence wasn’t really a sentence, after all. But how can you tell? What sets apart a real, honest-to-goodness sentence from a phrase or a fragment?

Well, you came to the right place for a simple, no-nonsense explanation.

Every sentence must have a subject, as well as a verb which tells what the subject is doing or being. It must express a complete thought, however brief. If you don’t have those ingredients, then you don’t have a sentence.

“Noun” is the technical term for words that name something, most often a person, a place, or a thing. For example, “woman,” “lake,” and “car” are all nouns. “Woman” is the English name for a female human, while “lake” names a medium-sized body of non-flowing water and “car” names a type of vehicle. Other, less tangible things can also be nouns, such as emotions or ideas.

Every sentence must be about something or, to put it another way, it must have a subject. That subject has to be a noun. For example, take the sentence “The ball is green.” This sentence is about a ball. “Ball” is a name (noun) for a round object. While “green” is also a name (noun), it is not what the sentence is about so it cannot function as the subject of this sentence. Of course, it certainly could form the subject of a different sentence, such as “Green is my favorite color.”

So, to have a sentence, there must be a naming word (noun) that lets the reader know what the sentence is about.

Just sticking in a noun doesn’t make a string of words into a sentence, no matter how long the string of words becomes. “Is green” doesn’t become a sentence even though it contains the noun “green,” because it doesn’t tell you what is green. Clearly, this is a fragmentary thought, and that’s why such phrases are labeled “fragments.” Nor does it help to pile on more words. “Is lovely, pale, luminescent lime green” does not magically transform this into a sentence. There is still no clue as to what it’s talking about.

I’ll throw in one other tidbit about nouns, just for free, though it has nothing to do with determining whether or not you have a complete sentence as opposed to a fragment. But I find that people frequently have trouble with this next concept.

There are common nouns and proper nouns. Common nouns are, as might be expected, ordinary naming words, usually somewhat generic. All my sentence examples above use generic, common nouns: woman, lake, car, ball, green. They can refer, at least potentially, to any woman, any lake, any car.

Proper nouns, on the other hand, are the specific names given to only one thing. Not just any woman, but one specific woman: Hilary Clinton, for example. Not just any lake, but the one named Lake Tahoe. Not just any car, but your neighbor’s new Camaro.

Notice that proper nouns always get capitalized, while common nouns do not. Usually this is fairly obvious, but once in awhile it can get tricky. For instance, “mother” is a common noun because it can potentially be naming anybody’s mom. But if you start talking about your own mom and using the word in the sense that it’s the name you call her, then the word magically transforms into the proper noun “Mother,” because now it’s the specific name of one specific person. Note that this only happens if you start using it as if it was her name. If you say, “I went to town with my mother,” you’re describing who she is (my mother) rather than naming her (Mom).

Okay, so there must be a subject in every sentence, a naming word (noun) that lets the reader know what or who the sentence is about. Let’s go on to the other essential ingredient of a sentence: the verb.

Verbs are action words or words that describe a state of being. Verbs tell what the subject is doing or being. Again, there could potentially be several verbs in a sentence, but there has to be at least one that tells about the subject.

In our sample sentence, “The ball is green,” we’ve already established that it’s talking about the ball. That’s the subject. Now, there’s no action going on in the sentence, but there’s still a verb. It’s a “state-of-being” verb, the little word “is.” What happens if we leave it out? “The ball green.” Sounds like someone who can’t speak English well, like what we imagine a caveman might say, with a few grunts thrown in for good measure.

“The pitcher threw the ball” has an action verb, “threw.” It tells what the subject (pitcher) did.

Sentences can be extremely simple, consisting of little more than a subject and a verb, and yet still convey a complete thought. “The child ran” or “Mary ducked” or “Bob typed” are all examples of complete sentences. Each is a complete (though certainly not elaborate) thought. Each contains a noun that tells who or what the sentence is talking about, and each contains a verb that tells what the subject did.

There is nothing wrong with simple sentences like these, and often they are the best sort of sentence to use when you want to express quick, forceful ideas or actions. If you use nothing else in your writing, however, it will soon become tedious. It may also make you sound like you’re about six years old.

Most people write longer sentences, and this is where they can get confused about whether they have a true sentence or only a fragment. Many times there is the belief that if you just add more words, your fragment will be transformed into a complete thought. But “fragment” doesn’t mean “too short,” at least not in this case. It means “not complete.”

Theoretically, you could write a fragment so long it took up an entire paragraph—or an entire page—without ever sticking in a subject or a verb that related to it. This is one reason I’ve used such short sentences in my examples earlier. “Mary ducked” is a complete sentence. You don’t need to be wordy to be correct. Of course, it also makes the concept of subject/verb easier to see and understand, since nearly everything else has been left out of these sentences.

Let’s finish up with a few longer examples. “As she came out the back door, Mary ducked under the washing hanging up on the clothesline to dry in the bright sun and hot desert wind.” Obviously, this paints a clearer picture of the situation than the simple sentence, “Mary ducked.” But it is not any more complete, grammatically speaking. Notice that the sentence, stripped of its descriptive verbiage, is still about Mary and what she did (duck).

“After coming home from school, ran out in the back yard and began digging frantically in the sandbox.” After reading this, you ought to get a sense that something’s missing. And what is missing is the subject. Who came home, ran outside, and dug up the sandbox? Well, we don’t know. This makes the rest of the words fairly meaningless, as we have no idea who it’s talking about.

You have to have a subject for every sentence. Just having nouns isn’t enough. In the example above, “home,” “school,” “back yard,” and “sandbox” are all nouns (names of things or places), but none of them tell who or what the sentence is about.

“His fingers pounding the keyboard, Bob madly as he tried to finish his blog.” Again, something is decidedly missing. What did Bob (the subject of this sentence) do? We have no idea (although we could probably guess from the context in this instance that he was typing). In every sentence, you must have a verb that describes what the subject did.

And please note that just having a verb, or even several, will not do the trick. In the sentence above, “pounding” and “tried” are both verbs, but neither tells specifically what Bob is doing. Your verb has to tell something about the subject’s action, feeling, or even simply its existence.

Grammar can be a complicated subject, but most of us can get by just fine in our everyday lives with only a few simple grammar rules. You don’t always have to write in complete sentences, but it’s helpful to know when you are and when you aren’t so you don’t end up with fragments by mistake. Using complete sentences will make your writing more easily understandable by your readers, and since communication is the point of writing, that’s a good thing.