Create Your E-Book Step 2: Plan

My previous article, Create Your E-Book Step 1: Plan, discussed the questions that you need to answer before you can write. Today, I'm going to tell you about four considerations to design an ebook. These address the format, structure, and audience engagement activities for your ebook. While some of these design considerations apply to other information products, I primarily discuss creating an ebook.

1. Choose the format for your content.

The first task in designing an e-book or other information product is to choose a format for your topic. Some people do this first, but your content, audience, learning and marketing objectives as well as your preferences should guide you. Consider whether you need visuals or sound. Consider where you'll distribute the content. Will you offer it on your website, on Amazon, or at the back of a meeting room?

Depending on the answers to these questions, you might choose an e-book, a video, a teleseminar, or a hardcover book or DVD.

For the purpose of this article, we'll say that you've chosen an e-book. Other media have different design requirements.

2. Set up your style sheet and template for your e-book.

To save time and frustration, set up a style sheet to reflect your your purpose, audience, and brand. A style sheet speeds all your writing tasks. You can do it yourself or have an assistant create a template for you to use.

All you have to do is click to create your headings, sub-headings, and other document elements. Once created, you can use the same style sheet and template for all your e-books. Your style sheet contains your decisions about font styles, sizes, colors, and characteristics, like indentations, bold, italics, and underline for headers, footers, title page, section headings, subheadings, picture, table, and diagram labels, and bullets.

Whether you create the template yourself or have an assistant do it, once you have a template, you can re-use it every time you write. Then, you can focus on writing your e-book. See the resources below for a simple e-book model you can use, even if you're hiring professionals to complete the design.

3. Consider cover art and professional layout.

If your business is young, you may skip this step or you can use one of the low-cost cover design sites for your website thumbnails and the first page of your e-book.

If your business is more advanced, you'll do well to hire a graphic artist to design the thumbnail book illustrations on your website as well as the cover for each of your books. You can also have a graphic designer layout your pages for each book.

Some, like SARK, add their own art to the cover and create hand-painted borders that they scan into their computer to add to their pages.

Do whatever fits your brand and your audience--once you've tested your e-book, as I describe later in Step 4.

4. Plan audience engagement.

In my last article on Step 1: Plan, I discussed writing learning objectives you want your audience to learn and apply what you write about.

Now it's time to write the questions that get your readers to think and give them activities they can apply.

Sometimes, as I do, you'll think of more later. For now, plan as much as engagement as you can, and you can come back to this as you write or when you revise.

My blog posts and e-books always have questions and/or activities for learning and application. See below for today's examples.

Questions for Learning and Application

  • What resources do you need to set up your style sheet, template, and e-book design?>
  • Which of these tasks will you do yourself, if any? What resources do you need?
  • Which of these tasks require help?
  • What are your next three steps to take?

Resources

You can subscribe to all my articles on creating e-books and other information products by clicking Subscribe below the post.

You may also wish to read my e-book, Create Your Own E-Book: A Model to see how to set up the common sections of your book that you can re-use and how to set up a simple template to get you started. Just type "Ebook Model' in the Comments section below and complete the form.

Share and Comment

If this post is useful, please share on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. >

And tell me about your project, and what questions you have about completing it.

You may wish to read other posts in this series:

6 Keys to Writing a Successful Ebook

Create Your Ebook: Step 1

Create Your Ebook: Step 2

Create Your Ebook: Step 3

Create Your Ebook: Step 4

Create Your Ebook: Step 5

Create Your Ebook: Step 6

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