How To Make Money - Write an eBook

Have you been racking your brain, trying to determine how to make money. If so, I have an idea for you. Sell what is in your head. By this I mean, write an eBook and sell it on the Internet.

 

Creative writing can be such a difficult activity to estimate. Some would say that plan creativity, and time restricting creative writing, goes against its principals. Strict planning of other artistic and creative processes (films, music, etc) does occur and helps focus the participants in on the value of their time.

 

One approach to take is to treat your writing like creating a physical product such as a plane. Thinking like this involves prototyping in the early stages to create an abundance of ideas and fleshing out those ideas that interest you into prototypes. eBooks are no different. Prototyping eBook ideas can be done using whiteboards, mind-maps or story boards (to define the arc of a story line or simply the chapters you intend writing).

 

Prototyping leads into the execution phase - writing ebooks. It is this phase that can benefit from planning to ensure your book adheres to the goals and ideas that you wish to put across.

 

Establish the goal of your eBook.

 

Writing eBooks that put across a well defined goal will always prove better than a book that appears to be a mish-mash of posts/articles from your website. Set the goal(s) and stick to them.

 

Specify all the tasks involved in writing the book.

 

 

You could start with defining each of the chapters (finishing a chapter can be a good milestone). Add tasks for designing the book, proof-reading, research, etc. You'll know best what tasks authoring a book will involve. Define a level of effort for each job, preferably in man-days or half-day units.

 

 

Analyze the list for external dependencies (third parties) and arrange this work early on.

 

Will you use an assistant to run some research? Maybe you will outsource to a designer the books page formatting/icons? Planning to interview experts in the field? Plan ahead and contact these people to front load this work if possible.

 

Sum up the level of effort and add in contingency time.

 

You'll know better than I what percentage you should give here. Once you write a couple of books you'll have a better gauge of how many days you run over (or under). Adding 10% to 20% is being prudent.

 

So by this point, you have all the tasks and some idea of how long they will take. Next you wish to schedule these out in your diary, wall calendar, spread sheet or project plan (e.g. using MS Project). What method you use is up to you. The very action of planning what work gets done, on which days, lets you visualize the volume of work and how each day's work incrementally progresses the books completion.

 

Work the plan.

 

As the saying goes "create a plan, and then work the plan". As you start implementing your planned tasks you can tick them off of your list as completed. Keep track of tasks running over. Use your contingency/margin of error for these. This should not suppress the creative writing process. Instead, this is focusing your mind on the value of your time.

 

Report milestones.

 

Any project plan should have natural minor and major milestones. These can be chapters/sections/paragraphs. Work each day with a goal of the next milestone to keep motivation levels up. It is easier to think of only have 1,000 words to an end of chapter milestone, rather than the ominous prospect of 20,000 words to the end of the book. Track these milestones in a simple report/document.

 

Sprint to each milestone with the final milestone being the book written, proof-read and designed. Don't forget to do a final review of your project plan.

 

Congratulations! You hit each milestone and got the book finished. Now you have to take action and figure out how to make money by selling your masterpiece. Also, before rushing off to start your next project, take a time-out to review how the plan went. Were the original estimates correct? What unforeseen issues arose? What could you do better next time? Write up a one pager of things that went well, and not-so-well, as a reference for future writing projects.

 

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