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Knowing how to write an ebook that customers will wish to purchase involves using the age old marketing maxim of finding out what they want, then giving them what they want. This applies just as much for authoring ebooks as it does to the traditional book publishing industry.

Fledgling ebook business entrepreneurs that are writing ebooks should therefore take the same approach as corporate publishers in deciding how to write an ebook. This article will detail how to research what your readers want and how this can inform how to produce your ebook.

There are only a lucky few writers who can safely saw they know exactly what their customer wants. Most writers can benefit for a little research to establish the core themes that their readers will hopefully be interested in. Luckily Google have a research tool that can help.

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is able to collate information from Google’s indexes of the vast array of websites on the internet (find it by running a web search for the tool name). The tool allows you to enter either (a) words or phrases or (b) a website URL, and returns results of key words that users search for relating to this phrase/website.

The power of this for an ebook author is that you may enter a phrase relating to the ebook you wish to write (e.g. digital photography) and discover the array of phrases that web users search for relating to this term. In doing so, you could discover niche areas (e.g. wildlife digital photography) which could then form the core theme of your ebook.

If your book is going to target a specific group of people (for example, amateur photographers) then you could use the tool to enter a website URL for a web forum. Doing this provides a profile of the forum showing key terms that are regularly used. For example, the term ‘photography lighting’ might appear popular in the tool results, so if this is something which you feel that you are an authority on then it would make an ideal ebook concept.

Spend some time researching the phrases and websites of subject area you wish to cover and build up a short list of words/phrases that appear popular. Choose one phrase (or two maximum) that you believe you could happily write a good ebook about. This keyword dictates two elements of your ebook. The first obvious point is that the phrase has got to become the main theme of your ebook. You can introduce related themes but avoid at all costs using unrelated areas (this will irritate readers causing possible refund requests and discourage loyalty sales on future books).

The single key phrase should also be used in the main title of your ebook. Doing so helps your chances of the book being targeted by your readership based on their search terms, which are after all an insight into their needs. You can use variations of the phrase in the title and reorder the word so that the title reads well.

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Writing Ebooks, and books in general, is something that doesn’t come easily to everybody. The truth of the matter is that authoring requires hard graft to put in enough hours each day to build up the word count. Keeping the head down working on chapters does have the potential for losing sight of the eBooks’ core goal.

Therefore, treat writing ebooks with the same approach you would create a physical project (e.g. building a wooden chair). With this approach first brainstorm as many ideas as you can, focus in on ideas that interest you and prototype them. Prototyping ebook ideas can be as simple as white-boarding as many ideas as you can, delving deeper into the ones that interest you and coming up with a story line or chapter guide for your book.

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.

Define the books goal/objective.

Set the goal or goals for your book. Don’t try to muddy the waters with a multitude of goals. Think of any of your favourite books and they probably have a small amount of objectives and one central goal.

List off all the jobs you will need to do to complete the book.

This can be as simple as taking your rough listing of chapters, add any formatting/presentation that will be required and not forgetting research that you (or others) will need to do. You’ll have your own list of add-on tasks specific to your eBooks subject. Give each task a rough level of effort (e.g. 2 days to complete chapter 1).

Underline tasks that are dependent on third-party involvement and start contacting and planning their work.

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.

Add in contingency for things that may go wrong.

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.

By this stage you now have a list of all the work to be done. You could use project management software to plan this out and establish the duration of all your work. Alternately, use a whiteboard with the days of the week and add post-it notes for each action to be completed. Or just keep it simple by adding the actions to your diary along with any planned holidays you wish to take (so you know to work around them).

Work through the daily tasks noting any overs.

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.

A milestone report is intended ‘for your eyes-only’. It is a motivational technique to show you how much progress you have made. When looking at the work ahead focus on the upcoming milestones. Consider it like climbing a mountain and aim for the next base camp. Focusing on the summit from the foothills is too daunting.

Keep going until all tasks are complete. Congratulate yourself and run a review of your plan.

Congratulations! You hit each milestone and got the book finished. 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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Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an area of technological advancement that authors within the eBook business should pay close attention to over the coming years as these innovations are striving to safeguard their written work.

DRM relates to protecting creative output in digital media formats (CDs, DVDs, eBooks, etc.). DRM technology attempts to stop your written eBook being resold or duplicated without your permission. The music industry was slow to react in protecting their music in digital formats, meaning tunes were widely available on the net without the music publishers profiting.

In the case of the eBook business, rights management was built in from the early days of computer engineering as eBooks are a product of the computing industry, rather than having started out of the regular hard-copy book publishing industry. This key differentiator means eBooks have used technological innovation from an early stage to protect the text and content of eBooks.

In the early days, Adobe championed the PDF file format. Their software can constrict what PDF readers are permitted to do with a protected file. In particular, a PDF can disallow copying of the eBook text (a simple copy and paste of text to another document) and also stop the user from printing hard copies of the PDF file. This is DRM technology in action.

Most PDF file creators/readers/add-ons now provide this functionality. Some prime examples are the Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader. The Microsoft reader goes one step further by ID stamping PDFs with the purchaser’s details in order to discourage sharing the PDF with others.

In new and recent developments in DRM, players like the Kindle Reader can send notifications back to their home servers if eBooks are being illegally read or shared. At that point the vendor can then choose how to deal with the file sharer (possibly through litigation). Could they remove the PDF? Yes, apparently this is already possible, as detailed in a recent case when Amazon remotely removed PDFs from customers’ Kindle Readers (http://mashable.com/2009/07/17/amazon-kindle-1984/). This does open up a potential can of worms regarding the privacy rights of device owners so expect to start seeing Terms Of Conditions for digital readers containing statements about remote access permissions of vendor.

In parallel with the hardware producers firming up the DRM security, software publishers are also including functionality into their PDF publishing tools to include the ability to disable an eBook remotely if a customer uses fraudulent credit card details or is seeking a refund (two traditional means of obtaining PDFs at no cost). For most authors writing eBooks, protecting their PDFs through simple configuration of PDF creation software is an ideal solution.

These improvements in the eBook business may be arriving too late for the existing files available online (these do have copyright protection on their content; Just no technological way to safeguard them). Over the coming years, developments in copy protection via hardware and software solutions should make it even more convenient for eBook authors to get writing eBooks and securely selling them online.

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With the increasing popularity of bespoke applications online for computers/phones/etc., there has been a stream of different ways to distribute your software to the masses. Here is a quick guide to the two main options out there along with the pros and cons of each. Understanding the two business models has implications regarding security, control, and cost that either will or will not suit each individual software publisher.

Third Party Vendors/Distributors

This is the most widespread and familiar approach to most people as the prime example in today’s marketplace is Apple’s app store. It is also the model used for distributing other free/open software, shareware and other commercial digital products for PCs and Macs.

In this business model, the creator of the software uploads their software to the distributor’s site for them to take control of promotion and sales of the product in return for a commission on each sale. Most iPhone application developers like this approach as they can leverage the Apple brand and sales pipeline. Developers of other software (e.g. for PCs/Macs/etc.) may wish to be less dependent on a single distributor and seek out multiple sales channels to spread the sales potential and reduce the risk of a single distributor failing to market/sell their product adequately.

The distributor also handles the shopping cart and payment processing which is one less headache for the software publisher. But the cost to the software publisher is that they have little control of their product’s marketing on the distributor’s website.

When customers purchase the software, the download link security is managed by the distributor. This entails controlling if the hyper-link for the software has a time limit or if there is a limit on the number of download attempts that can be made.

Given that you have no access to the purchaser’s details; you cannot build up a membership listing of purchasers. As a result, you miss out on potential loyalty purchases. This could affect you if you intend publishing several software applications and therefore benefit from a listing of loyal customers.

Sales/Download Management & Distribution Tools

This involves installing a sales and download management application to your server to handle the shopping cart process, download link security, passwords and mailing list capture. There are many open source and commercial available on the web.

The benefits to the software owner of this model is the chance to capture customer mailing list data combined with taking control of the marketing of their product online.

The cost of such an approach includes the ticket price on the sales software (though free open source versions are available, and widely used), the commission to the payment processor and the human resource cost of installing and administering the sales software.

To conclude

If you are developing applications for which you wish to tie in with the network effects of a large corporation (e.g. developing iPhone Apps) then leverage the third party vendor. You could try going it alone but you will be competing against the advertising and marketing strength of a huge organization.

If you sell software online and want to keep control of the product’s marketing and customer base data then setting up your own sales management and distribution solution will give you the control you seek.

If you only have one software application to sell, don’t wish to capture purchasers in a mailing list and want zero involvement in the set-up, marketing and sales of your software then using one of the many online vendors would be the option for you.

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