Outlining Your E-book

Take the chapter titles, headlines, sub-headers and questions you discovered in the research step you just performed. You should be able to find 20 to 30 really good, interesting, engaging subjects in that information. These are going to be the sections of your book.

Write them down, giving each a more enticing, engaging spin. For instance, perhaps a chapter title in a highly rated, best-selling e-book on Amazon was “Weight Loss through Better Nutrition”. A catchier way to say the same thing would be “How to Eat Your Way Back into Your Bikini Body”, or “Eating Your Way to a Slim and Sexy Waistline “.

Take the 20 or 30 subject titles you come up with, and list them in the most logical order. This is the outline for your e-book. Add an introduction and a conclusion, and you have the framework for your e-book staring you in the face. If you did the research for your book in the way we suggested earlier, using this outlining process should not take more than 15 to 30 minutes.

outlining-and-writing-your-e-bookWriting Your eBook

There are 2 ways you can handle this step. You can write your e-book yourself. You can also hire someone else to do it. For anywhere from $150 to $500, you can outsource the actual writing, and get it done by a talented freelancer at the following websites.

  • Fiverr
  • UpWork
  • Freelancer.com
  • People Per Hour
  • Hire The World

Those are a few of the top freelancing hot-spots where you can get every aspect of e-book creation taking care of for you, from writing to editing, formatting and publishing, and e-book cover creation. You can expect completion as soon as 24 hours, and up to 7 days.

If You Handle the Writing Yourself

Look at your outline. This is the basics of your e-book. Don’t think about the difficult process of writing your entire book. Focus on writing one chapter each day or week. You may have a lot of time available, or very near no free time each week.

How much writing you get done is up to you.

However, it is highly recommended that you finish at least one of your outline sections each week. More is better. If you came up with 20 chapter titles in the previous exercise, and you can handle 5 of those outline sections each week, your e-book will be complete in one month! Figure out just when you want to be finished with your e-book, and then you will know how many chapters you need to write each day or week to make that happen.

The Power of the Dragon

Nuance Communications makes a piece of software called Dragon Naturally Speaking. It allows you to dictate to your computer, and is 95% accurate out of the box. If you are a slow keyboarder or typist, this resource can speed up your writing ability by 50% to 100%, or even more. You simply talk, and Dragon turns your speech into text. This allows you to focus on what you are thinking and saying, rather than physically having to type.

 Steal Every Snippet of Time Available

JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book 10 and 15 minutes at a time. She wrote on buses and subway trains, at cafés on a lunch break, and whenever she could “steal” even a few minutes of time. By doing this, she ended up writing several hours each day, even though she never would have been able to write that long in one session. If this strategy worked for the best-selling author of all time, it can work for you too.

Keep a Voice Recorder Handy

Digital voice recorders are a writer’s best friend. Whenever you come up with an idea to write about, speak it into your recorder. There are versions that are about one half the size of a typical cell phone that record several hours of speech. If you don’t have the resources or opportunity to physically write or type, this is a great way to record your thoughts when they come to you, anytime of the night or day.

digital-voice-recorders

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