Ask IH: How did you write an ebook?

I've written a few - tech and non-tech - and published a few more.

What has helped me so far (non-fiction):

1. Know the purpose of your book. Is it for money or for building authority or selling other services? This also defines if selling on Amazon or your own side
2. Know your audience. Know, at best an exact single person, for whom you are writing the book
3. Cover only one topic and help your audience to overcome an obstacle.
4. Outline your book first and then write
5. Write often; Better write often small chunks then a big work blocks
6. Make the scope small - the smaller the scope of your book, the higher the chance you will finish it.
7. Only published books get feedback and only with feedback you become better
8. Don't write any tools - I developed my own eBook writing and publishing tool (Moopato eBook Writer - https://moopato.com ) before I ever wrote a single book. To be honest, I wrote the first book as a result of having the software, so I ate my own dog food to verify the tools helps. Don't do that, save the time and use an existing one.
9. KISS, keep it simple. Don't overthink and over complicate it. Write, publish, get feedback. Accept there will be errors in your first rounds
10. Hire a Proofreader - Found mine on Upwork and she was great
    , I also use Grammarly before it is going to her). At least customers on Amazon complain about too many mistakes.
11. Be prepared for bad reviews or refunds. It will happen, it will mess up your day, yet you have to accept it. Was hard :-)
12. State the obvious, multiple times - It surprised me, that people "ignored" common sense things or even ignored whole sections where the information was they were looking for, like a link to the GitHub source code.

In the beginning, I've found the books of Steve Scott helpful, he covers audience & topic finding and also outlining and such. For outlining the video of Pat Flynn was great too (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWoYHAwzcpY ).

The main obstacle was to not think like traditional books. Especially for me in the dev space. Most traditionally published books are bloated because the publisher wants it for the pricing. Big books -> higher price. For the author, it's often a chance to put his name on something in public. So, they are written as they are now and not good for learning.
The other big obstacle was to stay on focus. It is tempting to include a few things here and there and at the end, you stray away too much. Staying focused helps you and the reader.

The main takeaways for me are, that even a self-published book opens doors (like jobs, selling services) and people, in general, see you differently, once they know you wrote a book and it is for sale on Amazon (even they might never read it). The other is, be sure what your purpose of the book is. If you want to make money, I'd go either with publishing it solely on your site with those 29+ price points or aim at mass-market things on Amazon and co. Two totally different ways, with different customer types and expectations. If its purpose is the door opener, I'd publish on Amazon and any money it makes is a bonus. You could even set the price point low and use it as a lead gen.

I would look at how Pieter Levels did it, I think he crowdsourced part of the writing of his book which is a super interesting to approach things and have a product / market fit (since it is not only your ideas going into the book!)

I have made thousand of $$ selling my ebook so far... My way of doing it is to establish my authority first and get fans, then sell my ebook to my fans...

Hi,
If you want to publish epubs, you can get started on https://leanpub.com

If you want to write a technical / documentation ebook you can use https://gitbook.com
If you want to create marketing ebooks (like this https://bit.ly/2HERaDv) , Hubspot has many good templates to get you started (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/free-ebook-templates)

A few years ago, I used to run a product that was WYSIWYG ebook creator,(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm-2mwBbYaY ). it is not active anymore.

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