Got a mention on another blog!

One of my posts got a mention on another blog...check it out: http://paper.li/GoodBooksBlog1/1337016289

E-Book Progress for the week of 4/22/13 to 4/28/13

Here's what I accomplished this week on my e-book:

• Decided to try something different and rather than writing a full-length book about working from home, first I'm going to try to write a short Kindle Single about my experiences with the work from home companies I've worked for, and I'll also talk about a few of the lessons I've learned over the past few years.  I hope to use this Kindle Single as a way to build buzz for when the actual book comes out.  One thing I'm finding out as I do research on writing Kindle Singles, however, is that whatever I publish in my Kindle Single can't be published in other Kindle books, so I'm undecided as to whether I want to limit my Kindle Single to information about my first ten years of working from home, or include information about some of the lessons I've learned, and just not include those lessons in my other Kindle book - any thoughts/suggestions you all have would be appreciated! 

Trying something different....

Thinking of trying something different.  Been reading the e-book How to Publish and Sell Your Article on the Kindle, and I think rather than publish my e-book right away, I'm going to try writing an article about the companies I've worked for in my first 10 years of working at home, publishing that first and seeing how it does. I'm still going to publish my e-book, but after reading this I thought publishing a shorter article first might be a better way to go. Will have to see if I can write an article that's long enough to be published on the Kindle first though - this e-book recommends an article of at least 3,000 words.  Will be sure to keep everyone updated as usual!

Found another great resource for E-Book writers...

Found out about the Kindle Chronicles website today while reading a book about writing Kindle Singles.  Looks like there is a podcast too, will be checking that later on.

My e-book progress for the week of 4/15/13 - 4/21/13

Here's what I accomplished this week:

• Found a great website for marketing e-books - actually posted about this already and put their badge on the site.
• Emailed a few people that have written e-books about working from home to ask them for advice on marketing.
• Joined the Transformational Author Tribe - not sure if it will help but it was a free sign-up, so I figured why not?  You can find out more about it here.
• Started getting some responses from the work from home colleagues I'd emailed with questions I wanted them to answer about their work from home experiences, and started fiinding ways to work them into the book.
• Used the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find keyword phrases to use in my e-book.
• Went through and made some more notes on the e-book, and started finding some ways to change some things.  

Had to share this...

Had to share this... This is a screenshot I took of the stats page for this blog.  It shows me how many people have visited and what countries their from, as well as what websites they're using.  I know it's rather small, but that's as large as I could make it.  Still, thought it was pretty neat to see where everyone lives that visits this blog.

Keep visiting and be sure to tell you friends about me!

Excellent Reads for Those Who Want to Write An E-book

I realize that many of you are reading this blog because you're either writing or want to write an e-book, so I thought I'd share some information with you on the e-books I've read on this subject that have been invaluable to me.

How to Publish a Best-Seller on Amazon.com - This was the first book I read about publishing on Amazon.com.  This book doesn't focus as much on th writing process as it does on the actual process of preparing your book to be published on Amazon.com.  Nicholas Black discusses KDP, which is Amazon's self-publishing platform, preparing your document for Kindle, the importance of keywords, how to promote your book on different websites, such as Facebook, Twitter,  and the different free e-book listing sites that are available.  It was in this book that I also learned about Calibre, a free software program that I highly recommend every e-book author download, because you can load your e-book (or a draft of your e-book) into it and it will give you an idea of what your e-book will look like when it's uploaded to Amazon's site.  In another post, I'll explain how to load your e-book into Calibre and convert it so you can see what it will look like as an e-book. 

How to Write a Book This Weekend, Even If You Flunked English Like I Did - In this book, self-help guru Vic Johnson goes through the process of how to write an ebook in one weekend - he claims he's used this actual process to write many of his books.  I personally like to take my time when it comes to writing, but he does provide some excellent advice which I know will come in useful as I write my ebook.  Some of the topics he covers are how to prepare to write an ebook, how to pick a niche and topic, and how to choose a working title, among other things. 

The Kindle Writing Bible: How to Write a Best-Selling Non-Fiction Book From Start To Finish - This book covers a lot of the same topics as "How to Write a Book This Weekend," however Tom Corson-Knowles also provides some additional ideas.  He also provides links to other resources, such as motivational videos, information on the Facebook group he's created, as well as additional information on writing and publishing e-books. 

Self-Editing and Evaluation Checklist - This very short e-book provides information on things to check for when editing a manuscript, whether it's a print book or an e-book.  It's an excellent reference, and only costs 99 cents to download, so I highly recommend it for anyone who writes for a living. 

These are the e-books that have been helpful to me as I write my first e-book, however there are many others out there - if you've read an e-book on this subject that you've found helpful, I'd love to hear about it!

Found an excellent website for authors!

I just found an excellent website for authors who publish ebooks on Amazon.  It's called The Author Marketing Club, and it has some great tools to help authors promote their books.  These tools include a forum where authors can share advice and tips, marketing tutorials, links to book creation and marketing resources, a link that shows you ways to get your ebook featured on the Author Marketing Club website, and they also provide links to sites where you can submit your ebook when you're doing a free promotion. I'm looking forward to using this website's tools, and hope you'll check them out.

Book progress for the week of 4/8/13 - 4/14/13

Made a lot of progress on my e-book this week! Here's a summary of what I accomplished:

• I added another chapter on health insurance options for people who work from home.
• I created a Hootsuite account so I can easily post these blog posts to all my social networking sites at once.
• Joined a Google+ community for ebook writers.
• Created a Google+ page for my ebook and linked it to Hootsuite.
• Rearranged a few things on my blog
• Sent a message to a few of my work at home contacts asking them for information that I can include in the e-book - specifically, asking them to answer some questions about different topics I cover in the book. 
• Signed up for the Transformational Author Experience - a series of teleclasses that's going to be taking place at the end of May.  Already have three audios to listen to, hope I'm not disappointed! 
• Read yet another book about publishing e-books, called "How to Write a Book This Weekend, Even if You Flunked English Like I Did," - got some great ideas from it. 
• Replaced some of the pictures I put at the beginning of my chapters with quotes that are relevant to the subject of the chapter - uploaded the new draft to a facebook group that I belong to, hope they give me some feedback!

This coming week I hope to get some feedback as well as some more information from the people I emailed. 

Added another paragraph to my Introduction

Added another paragraph to my introduction today - wasn't sure if I'd mentioned that the information in the chapters of my book is taken from blog posts I'd written for wahadventures.com, so I added the following paragraph to my introduction:

The information provided in the chapters in this book all comes from blog posts I’ve written as a contributing writer for the very popular work at home blog Work at Home Adventures.  Why am I writing an e-book with the same information that’s already available online?  Well, when I went back and re-read these posts, I realized that there was a lot more information that I could add to a lot of these posts, and I also wanted to write a book that was different from a lot of the work from home books that are available, most of which tell you about companies you can apply with, or different ways to work from home, but don’t tell you about the other things you need to know.

 

 

I think that clears things up. Hope to publish another update next week.