Saturday, July 19, 2008

Writing a Great E-Book, Part I

By Stephen Beck

So you've finished creating ebooks and you want to launch them to the world. Only one problem...it seems a little thin. The content is great, but you wish it had more "bulk".

Adding bulk to an ebook is a great way to increase customer satisfaction which leads to fewer refunds and higher profit margins- something people publishing ebooks have to think about. In fact, skimpy PDF ebooks are the number one reason people return information products. So how do you beef up your PDF e-books? How do you put your ebook on steroids and have it busting at the seams with value?

To start, add a table of contents (TOC). This helps your readers to find the information that they want, while adding two or three pages to the total length of your document. Not only is a TOC valuable to your readers, it's easy to create one - most word processing programs can generate one automatically.

Include a list of resources at the end of your book. As you researched your e-book, you consulted dozens of books, blogs, web sites, magazine articles, and more. By including those links, you help your readers find more information on that particular topic. Your readers will appreciate it!

For your readers, I suggest you include a list of:

- Print books on your topic;

- List of magazines on your topic

- Videos and movies on YouTube and other sources;

- Web sites;

- Blogs, Yahoo! groups, user forums, and more.

For each link, include a short description of the resource to help your readers further. Tell them what information they can find using that link, and how it can help them. This adds more value than a simple list of links, with no rhyme or reason.

In my next article, I'll offer you three winning strategies for publishing ebooks. I'll help you to add meat to your e-book, which increases sales and makes your customers happier. By adding content, you turn your simple e-book into a great value for your clients... stay tuned, and I'll show you how.

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