I started writing the manuscript at the end of last year, but set it aside when the Spring semester of this year turned out to be a little more than I could manage. I finished a few chapters during Spring Break, and finished it up during my summer vacation. In the end, it came out at just shy of 20,000 words – not all that long for a book, but good for the kind of audience I’m trying to reach: young, academically-inclined but probably overloaded with required reading and other work, anxious to do well but not appear to be trying too hard, someone looking for some quick advice that’s direct and to-the-point.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to be visiting some of the tasks that I performed in the writing of the book. Since the book is self-published (I figured it was too short to make it as a commercial offering, although if there’s enough of a demand I might approach publishers with a greatly expanded 2nd edition – the nice thing about writing for college students is that the market refreshes itself entirely every few years) bringing it to market involved writing it, editing it, laying it out, designing the cover, compiling the book in both an e-book format and a format that could be printed, selecting a POD publisher, and marketing it (which is where I’m at now).

At each step of the way, I’ve used a variety of different tools, including:

• Adobe Buzzword for the first draft.
• Word 2007 for editing and rough layout.
• Adobe InDesign CS2 for print/e-book layout.
• iStockPhoto for the cover image.
• e-Junkie for e-book distribution.
• Amazon’s CreateSpace for paperback production and physical distribution.

I want to write about why I chose each of these tools, how I used them, and the problems they presented (when relevant). This won’t be a formal series; instead, I’ll be writing loosely related posts on topics that arose in the writing, publishing, and marketing of the book, touching on various topics as they occur to me.

If you have any questions you’d like to see addressed, please feel free to email me or leave comments on this post – I’m sure I can’t anticipate every possible question that someone might have about this process.

I will, of course, be writing about the kinds of things I usually write about, as well. I have a bunch of tools I want to write up, and am wrapping up a series on capturing and organizing ideas that should go up in the next week or two. I’m also working on setting up a guest host for the site for a week or two while I move, probably at the beginning of next month.

(Speaking of which, a couple of people have written me about contributing a post or two; I’ve been so swamped getting this book finished, really pushing my freelance writing, starting a new semester as an instructor, preparing for the move, and doing everything else I’ve somehow taken on that I haven’t been really good about replying. If you haven’t heard back from me, drop me a line again and let’s see what we can arrange.) 

I’m also trying to think of some way of participating in National Novel Writing Month, which is in November. I’m not a novelist, or a fiction writer in any sense (someday…) but I’m a big fan of NaNoWriMo, and I’d like to come up with a way to take part in the excitement without actually writing a novel, since I don’t write novels (and have the whole “writing 50,000 words in a month” thing down pretty much pat already). If you have any ideas, shoot me a line. 

Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

Let’s say you’ve written an e-book. You upload the file to e-Junkie, write a sales page on your own site, and insert e-Junkie’s code to place a “Buy it now” button on your page. When visitors click through to buy your e-book, they’re directed to your e-Junkie shopping cart, where they can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout (or a couple of other services) and instantly get a download link.

e-Junkie will also handle physical products — it works the same way, except that when an order is placed, you get an email with the details so you can fulfill the order yourself. You can offer several variants — say, a paperback and hardcover of the same book. e-Junkie will even calculate the shipping costs and sales tax (where applicable).

What makes e-Junkie especially compelling is the ability to set up affiliate programs so that other people can promote and sell your product. You choose how much you’d like to pay per sale — say, 20% of the sale price — and e-Junkie will provide your affiliates with a tracking code they can use to send sales your way. e-Junkie doesn’t administer the affiliate program; at the end of the month, you’ll get a tally of affiliate sales and you have to pay off your affiliates (via PayPal, usually).

Of course, you can always join the affiliate program of any of your fellow e-Junkie sellers. Signing up is easy — find a product you like in their affiliates directory (under the “Affiliates” tab), and click the link at the bottom to join their affiliate program. You’ll get a choice of either a text link to customize or a “Buy Now” button you can put on your site — the idea is, you write your review, sales page, blog post, or other copy, and the author pays you for your help.

Although e-Junkie allows sellers to market a wide range of products, it seems designed with e-books and software — downloadable products — in mind. Tough luck for everyone else, but good news for writers!

Go check out e-Junkie. As far as I’ve seen, they’re the only ones offering this kind of service, and they do it very well.

This week, we’ll be looking at several plugins a writer’s site should have. Some of these are useful, even essential, for any site, such as the ones that prevent spammers from filling your comments with ads for porn and poker sites. Others are highly specialized to meet the specific needs of writers, such as one that allows you to share your writing goals and your progress towards them with your readers.

To give you a taste of what plugins can do, I thought I’d start by introducing “Javascript Pull-Quotes”, a plugin that allows you to place selected text from your post into nicely formatted pullquotes. Adding a pull-quote is easy with Javascript Pull-Quotes; all you have to do is place <span class="pullquote">around the content you want in the pullquote</span>. If you use the visual editor in WP, it’s even easier — the plugin inserts a pull-quote button into the writing toolbar — highlight the text you want as a pull-quote and hit the button.

Javascript Pull-Quotes offers several ways to customize the look and placement of your pull-quotes — you can try one of five built-in styles, or if you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add new definitions to your site’s stylesheet. You can place pull-quotes on the left or right-hand side of your text column, and you can have each subsequent pull-quote alternate sides.

1. Vision: A Resource for Writers
   PDF downloads of every issue of the online magazine for writers.Topics covered in a recent issue (January 2008) included motivation, publishing vocabulary, submission tracking software, and more.
2. Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love and Money
   This massive (209 pp) e-book by novelist Holly Lisle covers the ins and outs of writing, from creating good dialogue and fleshing out your characters to finding an agent and keeping your writing career moving.
3. 60 Effective Strategies for Selling More Books
   Best-selling author Scott Jeffrey offers some effective strategies for boosting your book’s sales and building up your reputation as a writer.
4. Plug Your Book! (sample chapters)
   Steve Weber is one of the masters of online book promotion. Here, he discusses using Internet social networking to build up word of mouth about you and your writing.
5. The Easy Way to Write Short Stories That Sell!
   A good-sized (49 pages) piece on the art and craft of short stories. Opens with several pages about getting in the right mindset to write well (e.g. time management, etc.). Email list subscription required.
6. Organized Writer 2008 Calendar
   Not an e-book per se, but a downloadable 2008 calendar with quotes, highlighted dates, and todo lists especially designed to keep writers on track.
7. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Getting Published
   A collection of articles by Writersville authors about the trials and tribulations of getting published.
8. How to Write a Great Query Letter
   No surprises here; this one’s about writing great query letters. At over 100 pages, though, you can bet it’s a great deal more detailed than the typical “research your market, hook your reader, be polite, and spellcheck” howto.
9. Book Writing for Fun and Profit
   Brian Scott walks you through the process of writing and selling a book, from picking a subject and creating a title to getting an ISBN number and selling your work as an e-book. It’s loaded with ads and the layout is a little ugly, but there’s some good information in here.
10. Unleashing the Ideavirus
    Seth Godin is one of the premiere marketing experts, and writes in a clear, engaging style. Not strictly for writers, this e-book is about spreading your ideas, and is sure to help you figure out how to market yourself and your work.

I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of content directories, especially Helium, which I think produce far more revenue for the websites than they do for writers. My own couple of submissions there have earned less than a dollar in almost a year since they’ve been posted. If I take Younce as a real master of the medium, compared to my own dilly-dallying, then the high end still isn’t all that impressive: $1000 for 90 hours of work is only $11/hour. I just wrote a post for a website that took me less than an hour to write, and for which I’ll make several times $11 — which puts my rate at about $50/hr, a good solid rate for a freelance writer.

Still, if writing isn’t your career or if you’re looking for a way to ramp up to a career-level income, maybe Younce is onto something; it’s certainly worth taking a look. If you want to check it out, download The Helium Report right away, as Younce plans to offer the e-book for sale some time after the end of the month.

Several free programs have appeared in the last couple years that take advantage of the relationship between the PDF format and printing. These programs install a virtual printer on your PC, allowing you to “print” to a PDF file instead of to a physical paper-based printer. All you have to do is select “Print”, and when the print dialog opens, select your PDF printer from the drop-down menu. A save-file box will open, allowing you to select a folder and a name for your PDF; when you hit “Save” the file will be saved as a perfectly formatted PDF file.

There are dozens of free programs to create PDFs. I recommend PDF Forge’s PDF Creator because it’s open source (meaning nobody “owns” the code and anyone can develop it further or modify it) and works well. To edit PDF files directly, you have to use commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, which costs several hundred dollars — instead, make sure you keep your source files (the original word processor file) and make any changes in them. Then, simply generate a new PDF for free.

I try to do all my web writing for the week in two blocks of uninterrupted time. That way I can relax and focus on other things the rest of the week. In WordPress, you can schedule posts days, weeks, even months and years ahead of time, and they’ll go live automatically when that time comes.

If you’re getting ready to launch a new blog, do the same thing, only more so: write a month’s worth — or more — of content to launch with. Schedule two or three posts a week as far in advance as you can. Getting a new site off the ground can be challenging, and until you settle into a routine it can be hard to know how much time it will take. If you launch your site and something important comes up, it may sit with no content for days or weeks, doing nobody any good.

Making sure the first couple of months are well-stocked can take a lot of pressure off, allowing you to focus on building relationships with other bloggers, promoting your site, and of course doing the writing that is your life’s blood. My goal before launching this site was 100 posts “in the can” — more than half a year’s worth (at 3 posts per week). Of course, I can and do slot in new material in response to anything that happens in those first several months.

Another time to pre-write a lot is before a vacation or any other long time away from your site. Get two week’s worth of posts in the can before you take a week’s vacation — one week for the week you’re gone, and one week for the week you come back. That way, there’s no pressure to take up 100% of your daily life when you return from your vacation — and if, as often happens, you come back with Hungarian Death Flu or Angolan Sneezing Sickness, you’ll have time to recover without worrying about your site.

The Writer’s Technology Companion Desk-Side Guide To… Writing Ebooks Covers the technical ins-and-outs of writing, formatting, distributing, and promoting ebooks. (12pp plus front matter)

Download [PDF: 312Kb]

I’ve also added an “Ebooks” page to the site. I have several 5-part series in the works, and aim to release at least one a month. I’ve decided that I am going to try to release each of these series as a free ebook after the posts run on the site, and the whole collection will be available from the “Ebooks” page.

I have been thinking about making these ebooks available as physical books through a print-on-demand service like CafePress. However, in order to cover the publishers’ base price, I’d have to price what are going to be really slim volumes at $5 or $6 US — way too much, especially when you add shipping, for such little books. But if I can work out a way to do that — maybe by putting together a “Writer’s Technology Companion Omnibus Edition”, I’ll add that option to the “Ebooks” page.

A note: Despite my best efforts, I managed to munge the base file for the ebook up pretty bad, so there’s a few typos I couldn’t fix (three, that I know of). Considering my own advice to proofread thoroughly, that’s pretty embarrassing — I hope you’ll forgive me my transgressions!

First of all, make sure it’s featured prominently on your site. Write a post about it, making sure to use all the important keywords you think people doing a Google search might use to find information like yours. For a while, at least, it’s a good idea to put a blurb about your e-book at the bottom of every post you write, too — make sure our existing readers know about, and keep telling them about it!

Contact anyone you have any connection with on the web and ask them to link to your e-book, too. Send them a copy and ask them to review it. If it’s for sale, offer free copies for a giveaway on somebody else’s site. If you’re using e-Junkie, set up an affiliate program and give people a piece of the action in exchange for their promotional efforts.

Insert a link to your e-book into your signature block on your email and in any forums you frequent. Add a link to your profile on any social networking sites you belong to. If you’re giving it away, add it to directories of free e-books (Google “Free e-book directory” for some ideas).

If you’re selling your e-book, make sure you add it to Amazon’s Kindle store through their Digital Text Platform. You’ll have to reformat it for the Kindle’s screen (which is black-and-white and about the size of a pocketbook page), but you’ll get your title in front of thousands of Kindle users — a number that’s hopefully going to grow a lot. You can charge whatever you want for it — the average price at the moment seems to be $9.99 US — and you get 35% of the sales revenue.

Be creative with your promotions. Make up business cards or bookmarks with the URL of your e-book’s page prominently featured, and hand them out wherever you can. Put up flyers on bookstore bulletin boards. Buy Google Adwords or advertise in literary magazines. Obviously, don’t spend a fortune — and if you’re giving it away, it’s probably a good idea not to spend anything at all — but if you think you can make it back, putting a little money into promotions isn’t a bad idea.

Well, that depends on your ultimate goal. Are you planning to give your e-book away, or do you want to sell it? Let’s look at both options separately.

Giving it away

If you’re going to give your e-book away, you could just upload it to your site, add a link to the sidebar, and be done with it. We’ll talk about promoting it in the next post, but for now, make sure it’s clearly marked (the word “FREE” in all caps, bold-faced, in giant red letters never fails to attract attention!) and why people should want to read it.

A better bet might be to give it its own page. Write up a short description, add some testimonials if you have them (and update the page if you get any), and add the page to your site’s main menu.

Or maybe you want to give it away but still get something in return. You could offer the e-book as an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, if you have one — attach the file to the automatic reply they get when they sign up. Or you could use it to drive subscriptions to your RSS feed — Remarkablogger shows you how to add a link to your e-book that only shows up in your RSS feed. Tell them they’ll get the link once they’ve subscribed.

Selling your e-book

Selling an e-book takes a little more work — it is, after all, a business endeavor — but, of course, you get paid for it. If you already have a shopping cart on your site (we’ll talk about that in a future post), you could sell it directly. That’s probably more than most writers are willing to deal with, though, so here are a couple of third-party services that can handle some or all of the details of the sale for you.

• PayPal: If you don’t mind doing the order fulfillment yourself, you could add a Paypal “Buy Now” button to your site. Every day, log in, see what new orders have been placed, and email them a copy of your e-book.
• Lulu: If you expect to sell more than a few copies a day, you’ll want order fulfillment along with payment processing. Lulu is a print-on-demand service that also offers e-books; you’ll need to create an account, upload your e-book, and charge enough to cover Lulu’s per-book fee and commission. Your buyers will receive their e-book directly from Lulu. Lulu does paper copies, too, so you can offer your work in both formats if you like.
• e-Junkie: It’s not free, but for $5 US a month, e-Junkie will host a shopping cart for you and handle the order fulfillment, providing your buyers with a download link to get the e-book from after they’ve paid. E-Junkie offers other useful services for that $5/month, including the ability to create affiliate links so other sites can sell your e-book — for a cut, of course.

I’m sure there are other services I don’t know about, but beware, too — for some reason writers have always been seen as likely targets for scams. Make sure that a) you don’t have to pay for services you don’t need (like editing or layout), b) you aren’t turning over any copyrights and you retain full ownership of your e-book, and c) you aren’t required to pay for a certain number of sales until they’re actually made. Thoroughly research any e-book publisher or distributor; Googling their name plus “scam”, “fraud”, and similar words will likely turn up what you need to know about any shady dealers.