More Changes Coming to my Blog...

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day! I'm excited to announce that there will be more changes coming to my blog soon... I've already published my first guest post, and I hope to have more of those coming soon.  I've also been educating myself about WordPress - I read the e-book WordPress Revealed: How to Build a Website, Get Visitors, and Make Money (even for Beginners) by Matt Wolfe, and I'm also in the process of going through his 7 day free mini course on WordPress, so this blog may be moving to a self-hosted WordPress site soon.  In addition, I signed up with Clickbank - if you scroll to the bottom of this site, you'll see that I placed my first Clickbank ad.  I may also start writing reviews of some of the writing-related e-books I find on Clickbank.

I'll keep you all posted on these changes as they happen, and I'm hoping to start publishing more guest blog posts soon.

My Career as an E-Book Publisher - guest post by Robin Henry

Good evening everyone - for my readers in the States, I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend.  I'm very excited to bring you the first of what I hope will be many guest posts.  In this post, Robin Henry talks about how he got started as an e-book publisher.

During the nineties I worked for an Australian Government organisation as staff development and training manager for the Northern Territory (Australia) with responsibilities for training staff in six geographically dispersed offices. Each State and Territory had a separate SD&T Manager, so there were eight of us with small teams spread across Australia.

On one occasion we were all called to Head Office in Canberra to undergo "train-the-trainer" activities in relation to a new program that the organisation was introducing. Someone at Head Office had hired a consulting firm to produce the training media which consisted of 75 PowerPoint slides with text taken straight from the new program manual. Not only was the so-called training boring, but the projected slides were impossible to read and the session was a disaster. I couldn't believe that anyone pretending to know anything about training could produce such poor media, especially for the high price that had been paid to the consultant. When I inquired as to who had organised the training and how it had been contracted, I found that an administrative officer with no training background had been responsible and had issued a request for proposal which was well below a satisfactory standard.

As a result I undertook to write guidelines for others contemplating designing training programs. In my off-duty hours I wrote guidelines I called, "How to Write a Winning Training Proposal" and distributed it freely within the organisation. Soon, I had training staff from other Australian Government agencies calling me and asking for a copy.

In 1998 I decided to convert the text into an Adobe PDF file and try to sell it online. I set up a small sales page and did a little advertising and sat back and waited for the millions to roll in because I had read about the huge incomes some of the Internet gurus claimed to have made selling e-books and other digital products. I remember waiting and waiting and nothing happened. Every day I would come home from work and immediately log into my Internet to see whether I had sold any copies. Nothing. And then, one day I logged in not expecting anything and there it was, an order for a copy.

After the first sale, others began to follow and since then I have published a couple of other titles, all of which have sold reasonably well over the years. Interestingly, I still sell copies of "How to Write a Winning Training Proposal", but as I have been lax with advertising, I'm not selling as many as I once did.

What appeals to me most about e-book publication is that you put in the work once and you can sell with very small overheads forever. Also, you can place your advertisements and let everything run automatically 24/7/365.

If you'd care to see my sales site for this e-book, please go here. If you'd like a free copy of this e-publication, please email me at the email address given on my site referring to this post.

Robin is a semi-retired human resources and adult education specialist who runs a business communication consultancy from Central Australia. He also sells a range of e-books from his digital store. Also be sure to check out his blog, Working Smarter. 

Book progress for this week

Posting this early because I'll be going out of town for Memorial Day weekend tomorrow.  Started making a little progress on my book again this week - trying to expand some of my chapters by including information that I've read in e-books that cover the same subjects - for example I've got a chapter on stress reduction strategies for people who work from home that I'm adding some additional information to, and I also plan to work on adding some more information to the chapter on how to save for retirement when working from home.

I've started getting responses from people who are interested in writing guest posts for this blog too, so I hope to start publishing some of those next week.  Everyone have a great weekend!

Been doing some research on copyright..

Did a little research on copyright today.  Thought it was interesting to find out that works are protected from the moment they're created... so I actually can claim copyright on my book right now if I wanted to.  From what I read, works don't have to be registered, unless you want protection in the case of copyright infringement, so I probably will register my book once I get ready to actually publish it.  There were also some interesting FAQ's on the the site, feel free to check them out: Copyright FAQs

Another great site for writers!

Found another great site for writers called Write On Purpose - looks like it has a lot of great resources and information for writers.  Just one thing though, if you try to join for free you may get a page that says it can't find what you're looking for.  I've let the site owner know about the problem though. 

Changes coming to my blog...

Going to be making some changes to my blog in the coming weeks.  Not sure if I'll make any physical changes, such as changing the layout, etc, but one thing I'll be doing in the near future is adding guest posts to my blog.  Yesterday I signed up with MyBlogGuest, and I'll be looking there for some guest bloggers, as well as asking people that I've met since I started writing my e-book.  If you've written and published an e-book and want to share your story on my bog, please let me know!

What I accomplished on my e-book and e-book marketing progress for the week of 5/13/13 - 5/19/13

Though I didn't do much work on my actual e-book this week, I did work a bit on my e-book marketing efforts, especially where this blog is concerned... as I mentioned in a previous post, I read a great book about SEO, and learned a lot of things that I hope will help me increase exposure for this blog, and hopefully also for my e-book's product page once I put my e-book up for sale on Amazon.  Here are a few things I've done this week:

• Finally was able to get Google to index this blog - Now, if you go to Google and type in "My Journey to Become a Self-Published Author," this blog will come up. 
• Started a list of links to useful tools for writers - this isn't really related to e-book marketing, but hopefully it will help other writers who read this blog.

Looking forward to hopefully getting back to working on my actual e-book a little bit this week!