Ebooks: Don’t be Scared

Ebooks scare away most writers, and not without reason. They’re a big commitment, since most ebooks are at least 20 pages long, and many are much, much longer. Don’t overlook these writing jobs, though. If you know enough about the topic (or it is common enough to be easily researched), you can easily write an ebook for a client or to sell yourself.

Think about it this way. Say someone wans to order 20 500-word articles about a specific topic and is willing to pay you $20 each. (Let’s not argue about whether or not that’s a good price right now, I’m just making a point here.)You might quickly gobble up that project fairly quickly. But, if someone asks you to write a 20-page ebook about the same topic for $400, you might shy away, even though that’s actually a better price per 500 words, in general (when you account for formating, a page is usually only about 400-450 words, in my experience).

So why is the ebook so scarey while the 20 articles are not? Well, from what I’ve found, it is hard to imagine that you know enough about a topic to write 20 pages when you aren’t seeing a list of specific sub-topics, like you would when someone requests a list of articles.

Before you say know, try to come up with a list of articles that you could write about the subject. Essentially, make an outline. If you can come up with a sub-topic for every page or two, go ahead and take the project. When you see an ebook broken down into smaller topics, it is much easier to write. If you just start writing without direction, you might fade out about half way through.

Make sure you plan tons of time for an ebook, though. When you write a series of articles about one subject, often your intro articles will be a general lead into the topic. You can’t overlap information when you’re doing an ebook.

Give it a try, though. Ebooks have made me a lot of money in the past, and although I haven’t taken an ebook project recently, I won’t hesitate to take such projects in the future. Take a smaller ebook project sometime – I bet you’ll suprise yourself with your writing abilities.

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