acim is short for Electronic Book—an organized set of content delivered in an electronic format. There are many different types of e-books including packaged executables, PDF, and formats for the handheld computer.
As with so many of the original e-books, your e-book doesn’t have to be about Making Money or Internet Marketing—people are interested in many other things. What makes an e-book valuable to a wide audience is that it provides information that people cannot easily find elsewhere.
Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of writing numerous printed books and working on several electronic publications. From what I’ve seen, the e-book medium supports the greatest creative flexibility. Images can come alive, you can provide interactive forms and content, the user can access remote databases, and you can support dynamic updates whenever the content changes. There are, however, several steps involved in the process to properly develop and promote an e-book to your audience.
The Process
When developing an e-book, you have to perform several important steps to create quality content. Each step allows you to fine-tune your idea and the end-product so that readers will learn from and enjoy the content you provide.
– Brainstorm an Idea
Ideas are cheap, but good ideas take time to develop. To develop a good idea, you have to jot down as many ideas as possible, then go through the list to make sure that:
* you’re interested in the idea;
* you’re knowledgeable on the topic;
* you’re hitting the greatest, potential market;
* people will purchase the information; and
* you can market to those interested.
Once you reduce the list to a few solid choices, go back through and examine the remaining topics to determine which topics you can write, by:
* determining what you know about the topic;
* performing market research to ensure that you have a market and an angle for that market; and
* performing competitive research to find your competition’s products, successes, failures, and target markets.
While fine-tuning your product, remember that people will buy the product if it:
* solves a problem;
* improves an existing product;
* hits on a hot trend;
* creates a new niche; or
* fills a current need.
– Develop an Outline
Once you come up with the idea, you’ll have to create an outline or table of contents to develop the idea. The best way I’ve found to do this is to break the idea down into blocks of contiguous information—similar to assembling a pyramid. At the top is the IDEA with each successive level providing a more detailed sequence of points that ultimately explain the top-level IDEA.