You’ve been in the industry for a while and have a lot of knowledge to share with the rest.

You’ve just discovered that an eBook can be the perfect way to implement a scalable pricing strategy for your business.

But it’s not as easy as people say, right?

You need to invest some time and even money to make it happen. Do you feel a bit lost when writing your first eBook? Let’s see how we can do it!

Writing your first eBook

• It all starts with an idea

If you’re thinking about writing an eBook, it’s because you have something to write about. Otherwise, you’ll have to step back and come up with an idea.

Bear in mind that:

• You must offer something that it’s not in the market already.
• Your audience should be willing to pay for this idea, so take your time and make it a good one.
• It must be related to something that you audience cares or worries about. Analyse you audience’s pain points to come up with a good idea for your eBook.

• Brainstorm your idea

You need to develop your idea to tackle it from different perspectives.

Brainstorming is a powerful tool here that will help you develop the points that you want to tackle and organise them.

I normally use MindMeister to do so.

Take your time to brainstorm, because every idea can become a chapter of your eBook.

• Organise your ideas

Put all your thoughts in place.

Organise your ideas and your sub-ideas and draft a first index of your eBook.

Also, you should bear in mind more or less how long you want your eBook to be; otherwise it could be endless in time spent and length.

Have a number of words in mind and try to stick to it as much as you can.

• Plan a calendar

Be realistic.

How much time in your busy days are you going to spend writing your eBook? 1 or 2 hours a day?

How many words can you write in these two hours?

When is the deadline for your eBook? Are planning to get it publish for a specific date? If not, try to set a approximate day for the publishing.

That way, you’ll be writing with an objective in mind.

You can download my monthly planner by clicking this link.

You can also set deadlines for each chapter of your eBook to control your progress.

• Write, write and write

Stick to your deadlines and write. Just write.

You’ll have time to proofread it afterwards.

• Revise the content on your eBook

Obviously you have to plan some time to revise and rewrite your content.

Once you have a first draft, you’ll have a better idea of what you want to talk about, if you need to cut some parts or add extra information in certain chapters.

• Pay special attention to the cover of your eBook

Remember that people will judge your eBook by its cover. That’s one of elements that will make your eBook a success. Or not.

If you don’t design a good cover, people won’t think about buy it.

I’d recommend hiring a graphic designer.

If you prefer to do it yourself, you can use platforms such as Canva. I normally use InDesign to design eBooks covers and layouts, but you’d need some time to master this tool.

 

• Get some feedback and testimonials

You’ll need them to sell your book and it will help you improve the book before getting it published.

Send your eBook to some colleagues and ask for feedback. Ask them specific question so you can improve your book before you publish it.

 

Publish an eBook that people want to buy

• Carefully choose a publishing platform

You need to think about your audience and target those platforms where your potential readers are.

You should consider publishing your book in platforms such as Amazon, Lulu, Booktango or Smashwords. However, bear in mind that they will take a commission for every sale that you get.

Another option is to do it directly from your website through PayPal. However, PayPal will also take some commissions if you decide to transfer your money to your bank account.

 

• Make you eBook interactive

It’s the best way for getting your readers involved during the reading. Add some practical exercises or tweets that they can send to twitter by clicking a link.

This will also help spread the word through your readers’ social media networks.

 

Promotion and selling strategies

Great, your brand new eBook is published and waiting for people to click “buy”.

But how do we make them buy your book. Here you’ve got a list of selling techniques that you can implement.

• Generate expectation

Create a new mailing list and tell people that you’re writing a new eBook. You can send them exclusive content to those people to subscribe to your list, such as the index with the contents included in your book, offers, tips to discover what is it about, etc.

You should make people talk about your eBook, even though it’s not been published yet.

 

• Pre-sell it

If you need to finance your eBook before its publication, you can pre-sell it.

In order to do so, you’ll need to tell your audience, that you’re working on X eBook and that it will be launch in X month at X price, but if they buy it now they can get a X discount.

This way, you’ll start earning money that you’ll be able to invest in your eBook, and your clients will get a discount. Win-win solution.

However, you should be in mind that you’ll need to have a solid audience before doing this. People that don’t know you aren’t likely to buy a product that doesn’t even exist yet.

Trust is key if you need to implement this strategy.

 

• Where is your eBook located in your sales funnel?

In a nutshell, a sales funnel is the process of converting unqualified leads into clients.

As you can see, we can have a reasonable number of prospects at the top of the funnel, but if we don’t convert them into clients, we won’t be earning anything.

Now, in order to convert them, we need to implement a strategy. We can’t know on the door of one of our prospect and offer him a £1000 course.

We need to make them want to know more about out services, leading them to the inquiries phase, so we can finally make a first proposal.

Ok, enough waffling.

What does you eBook have to do with that?

Well, if we want to get a first sale from a new prospect, we need to offer something very valuable and not too expensive, as prospect won’t be likely to spend a reasonable amount of money in you, if he doesn’t know your products yet. And an eBook is the best product to do so.

Buying a book isn’t a lot of money, and it can add a lot of value.

However, you can’t stop there.

Let’s be reasonable here. If a prospect spend £20 in your book, and then run away, we won’t be making a lot of money, right?

However, your eBook could lead your reader to buy your final product (i.e. let’s say that you offer couching services related to the main topic of your book).

This is how we lead clients through our sales funnel.

 

• Copywriting

Of course, I can’t finish this blog post without talking about copywriting, or the art of selling through words.

We’re talking about a book. A book without words, it’s nothing, right?

Your eBook needs a landing page within your website. And this landing page needs to convert well to sell as many books as possible, right?

Then you need to write this landing page in a persuasive way.

It’s time to learn how to write a sales copy, and how to use words to sell. Don’t forget to avoid the most common copywriting mistakes to lose sales.

 

Remember that you don’t need to be a writer to write a good eBook. You need find what your clients want from you, and write about it the same way you’d talk about it to a friend. Are you ready to do so?

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