How to Write and Market an eBook
This post outlines how to write your first eBook quickly and easily! I wrote my first eBook and set it up in just two months. It took another month to figure out how to get it ready to sell on my website which I will explain below. Never in my life would I have thought I would be an author and selling books. Writing eBooks is a great way to make passive income! Basically, Set it and forget it (until you go back to edit and add more value to your eBook over time!)
1. Choose a Popular Topic
The best way to come up with an eBook idea is to start making a list of questions people are coming to you for. A lot of people started to come to me about Pinterest. They wanted to know how I was getting 1.2 million monthly views on my Pinterest profile and how I was able to triple my blog traffic in just a few short months. Hence, I wrote the eBook ‘Pin it to Win it.’ This eBook shows step by step how to grow and automate your Pinterest account for business growth and website traffic!
2. Start Collecting Emails
Before you have even started writing your eBook, it is a great idea to see if anyone wants to buy the topic you are writing about. I suggest doing this two ways. Setting up a pre-order woo-commerce plugin and also by collecting emails on a landing page. You will need an email service provider to collect emails. I recommend Flodesk. Use my affiliate link to get 50% off your subscription for life, only $19 for unlimited subscribers and emails. I personally use Flodesk to set up super easy pop-ups and landing pages to gauge interest. After seeing how many people sign up, you will be able to gauge how you should price your eBook and you’ll have to motivation to write it!
For my first eBook launch, I gathered about 700 sign ups! I was ecstatic to see how many people were interested in learning about how to grow your business with Pinterest! Imagine how many sales I would have missed out on if I had skipped this step because I thought it was too soon.
Writing and creating my first eBook took about two months longer than I had expected. Hence, I would suggest not putting a launch date on your first release until you figure out your work pace. It took me about 3 months to get everything set up and launched. Taking a course where they provide video tutorials could totally cut that time down. It took me about a month to realize all of the steps involved. I did not think setting up woo commerce, a sales page, and email series for the launch would be so involved but it was and took me about a month to complete properly.
3. Purchase an eBook Template on Creative Market
I purchased my template for my eBook off of Creative Market. I purchased a template that works with Canva which is the free graphic design software website that I used to fill in the template. Creative Market is an amazing resource that takes all the design struggles out of creating your digital products.
4. Start Writing!
Fill in the Title Page
Creating this page was the most fun for me. Once I filled this out, I started sharing it out to everyone to start hype around my book!
Write the Table of Contents
After creating the perfect title page by uploading images and changing the colors on my template, I decided to move on to writing my table of contents. First, I started to make it look pretty with images, changing the font, and graphic colors to get me motivated. I outlined 15 chapters and wrote descriptions for each of them. This is another great time to start sharing with everyone what your book will be about since you have all the details! You can now start to create your sales pages also since you have this information.
Organize the Pages
From the eBook template that you purchased, you should have a lot of different pages to choose from. Titles pages, about me page, chapter title pages, graphics pages, and more. I suggest pushing all of these pages to the bottom and make copies of them as you pull them into your book. This will help you get focused instead of worrying about having to fill out random pages that are scattered between chapters.
Set up the first page for all of the chapters
I suggest putting “key takeaways and concepts” on this first page of each chapter. This will help push you in the right direction when you may feel unorganized or overwhelmed. This step will help you organize your book and make it easy to fill in the chapters one by one if you outline it this way! This is my creative process on how to write an instructional and educational eBook, but I’d love to hear your creative writing process in the comments below if you have other tips.
As mentioned above, It’s great to outline the chapter on the first page with the high-level topic you’re going to cover. I do this in a bullet list and it helps me figure out what pages should come after the next.
Fill in the Chapters
Now that you have your chapters laid out, it’s time to start filling them in! If you organized your empty template pages as I suggested (pushed to the back pages) then you can now go grab whichever page you think you will need as your second and third pages, and so on, for your chapters.
5. Get Ready to Sell Your eBook!
Set up a Product Shop Page
This is an example of my sales product page:
Pin it to Win it Product Shop Page
Set up a Sales Landing Page
If you are tech-savvy and have the time you can create your own sales pages. However, I purchased some sales pages in order to be able to quickly fill them out and get them up! You should make multiple landing pages and test them out to see which one converts the best. I also suggest configuring your Google Analytics to show you reports on e-commerce.
Pin it to Win it Sales Landing Page
Set up a Shopping Plugin
I personally use woo-commerce but Shopify is also a good plugin!
Set up a PayPal account!
I set up PayPal because it integrates well with woo-commerce. You can also use stripe or a few other service providers for accepting payments. I then linked my PayPal to a bank account.
For a business bank account, you are going to have to set up an LLC (or some sort of business structure, however you want to incorporate). Then you will need to get an EIN and Certificate as well as Articles to show most banks in order to open up a business account. This could be its own blog post so I’m not going to get into that here, but you should check with your local government on how to set up an LLC!
6. Market your eBook Launch
A few ideas to market your book and grow your email list before your launch include :
- Set up an affiliate program. Ask affiliates to create blog posts (or send them a copy of a blog post to share out as a guest post!).
- Talk about it on all of your social media channels.
- Run ads for your eBook on Facebook Ads, and Google Ads.
- Use Pinterest. I have a whole course on how to use Pinterest to market and grow your business called ‘Pin it to Win it’.
7. Launch!!
Send out an email to everyone who has signed up. The email will include a link to your actual sales page where they can purchase and sales landing page if people would like to read a little bit more before making a decision to buy.
8. Continue to Market your eBook
After your launch, you should continue to market even stronger. I suggest creating a marketing campaign with the paid email marketing service provider Flodesk. Use my link to get 50% off of your subscription for life, it only costs $19 a month for unlimited subscriptions and emails! I use this service to capture emails on a landing page or popup and attach it to an email series. In this email series, you can teach people more about your product and send out coupons. I suggest sending out an email to your buyers to gather any feedback from the product as well. You can do this before your launch as well, but it took me a while to write my email series so you can also do it a little bit after your actual launch. I do not suggest waiting too long though because they say 80% of sales convert on the 14th email!
Have you written an eBook before or thought about writing one?
Debbi says
Hi Kit! What a great, insightful article. It’s very useful particularly now, when we all are looking for more productive ways to use our time effectively in quarantine.
It can be daunting, but as you mention, the main element is STARTING – the rest flows from there. Thanks again!
Susie Longmire says
These are great tips to set up an Ebook, thank you!
Kreativ dekor says
Thank you so much for these really helpful tips. I just love to learn new tips & strategies to help products succeed. I hope we can get more new tips and tricks from your blogs. Thanks in advance!
Kali SEgieda says
Great tips! I use ConvertKit and also love it!
Bryan Burrell says
I loved the content provided here
Ewa Okulate says
Thanks for these really helpful tips! As a marketing student, I love learning new tips and strategies to help products succeed.
Maria says
Loved this–super helpful. I’m hoping to launch an ebook sometime later this year. I’m not sure yet what it will be but this is very helpful and practical advice. Thanks!
Froilin abella says
Wow! I really love this post! This was well thought out and very helpful. I shall start implementing this with my upcoming ebook that I look and plan to accomplish before the year ends.
Lauren Kimler says
These are great tips! I’m looking into publishing my writing and appreciate any help.
Mamoon says
Just when I was looking to write my own eBook.
Thanks
Simone says
Thank you for sharing your tips on how to write and market an ebook. I’m thinking about writing ebooks or guides myself but I didn’t really have a clue where to start. This is helping me a lot!
xoxo Simone | https://beautymone.com
Jeff IAN says
Great Article. I was able to get a few tips on writing an ebook . Many thanks. Jeff Ian.