Creating Your First eBook

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So you’ve decided to take your first steps in creating your first ebook! It may seem like a very daunting task, but it needn’t be. When you first start off a big project, it always often seems like an impossible one to accomplish, however it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Below I’ve listed the 9 basic steps you can use to make this a very manageable task.

First things first, you should get back to the basics. Only, I repeat, only do one step at a time. Don’t kid yourself, set realistic goals. Goals you don’t reach only demotivate you making the task seem even more impossible. Just make sure you take your time and do it right, and break your ebook into a number of smaller manageable tasks.

1 - You need to make a list of everything that you may and want to cover in your ebook. Do not leave anything out in this step, as it will only cause your mind to drift when you are busy on the other steps. In this list even include things that you aren’t 100% sure about yet, you can always cross them off later, once your mind has had time to grapple with them.

2 – Once you are happy with your list, organise it into an outline. This will be your first draft outline for your ebook, so make sure that is organised in the same manner you want it to appear in your ebook. This should roughly take about an hour.

3 – Research your topic completely, make sure that you have not left anything out before you even contemplate starting your first sentence. Make sure you take lots of notes and write down in your own words, so that you can fully understand what you are researching giving your writing much greater depth.

4 – Create a table of contents for your ebook. A good table of contents flows in a logical order, and is easy to read.

5 – Now we start getting to the writing part. I want you to write out each chapter of your ebook, starting at chapter 1. Once you have completed this you will now have very manageable approach to writing your ebook. You can now concentrate on one chapter at a time, and rest assured that your mind will not wonder considering you completed the above steps correctly.

6 – Start writing each chapter, depending on the length of your ebook. Set yourself deadlines, be it a chapter a day, or even a week, and try and stick to them. Judging by the amount of chapters you have left to write will give you a good indication of when you most likely will be completed with your ebook.

7 – One of the most important parts is proof reading. A lot of people make the mistake of not even doing a once over. If like me, you absolutely hate proof reading. Get a friend of family member to go over your work, or even hire someone to do it for you. Grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes will only doom your ebook to the recycle bin no matter how good the content is.

8 – Formatting, a very simple method to make sure that your ebook looks professional is to make sure that your formatting is consistent. I cannot stress this enough.

9 – Your last step left is to convert your ebook to pdf (there are many tools available to do this)

And voila, your brand new ebook which seemed like an impossibly daunting task at the beginning!