How to Write Your First Ebook

Gather necessary information. The clearer the information gathered about your ebook, the more likely it is to publish and promote it successfully. Write the book title, section and chapter titles, section/chapter number, total word count, and expected number of pages in a separate document. Once that’s done, you can continue with a list of descriptive phrases or “keywords” related to the book and the general thesis statement if needed.

• Contrary to what you were taught in high school, the thesis statement is not always necessary in writing. However, almost any non-fiction work will have a clear thesis when it is finished.

Think about your readers. With the current title and description, who would be interested in your book? Are they young or old? Have your own house or live in a hostel? What will their annual income fall into and are they more inclined to save or spend? Here, hiring an expert is not necessary: you simply make the best judgment you can. This information is only intended to help you promote the ebook at a later stage.

Select a publishing platform. There are different ways to publish an ebook, depending on security, royalties, and audience size. Let’s look at each case and choose the way that can help you get the most profit.

Publish as e-Readers with KDP. One of the most widely used platforms is Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). KDP allows formatting and publishing of ebooks for free on the Kindle Marketplace. Anyone who owns the popular Kindle e-reader can buy your book from this marketplace and read it on their Kindle. With a selling price ranging from VND 60,000 to VND 200,000 for each ebook copy, you will receive 70% of the sales revenue. The main disadvantage of this approach is that readers will not be able to access and read the work without Kindle, and therefore, the size of your audience will be limited.

Consider using other ebook publishing services. Services like Lulu, Booktango, and Smashwords also accept and publish manuscripts in ebook format. In general, the basic service is usually provided by these sites for free (and you shouldn’t pay to publish the ebook because it costs basically nothing) while the premium services and packages, such as such as editing and promotion, are charged. Be careful not to waste your money when using this method. Here, you will benefit from the ability to reach a wider range of potential customers than the KDP of the above services. Sometimes, the profit paid is also higher. For example, Lulu pays extremely high, up to 90%!

Identify hidden costs. Any professional ebook publishing platform (including KDP) will only use certain formats. Some services will take care of this hassle for you, for a fee, of course. It’s much cheaper to do it yourself, but to do that, you’ll have to learn the rules of the publishing service you plan to use, and then download and learn all the software programs needed for proper file conversions. If you choose to use a paid service, never pay more than a few million dong.

• Don’t work with a publishing platform that doesn’t let you set your own prices. Your profits will be negatively impacted in a variety of ways. Basically, it’s another form of charging. The experience gathered here is that the ebook brings the most profit when it is priced from 20,000 VND to 120,000 VND / one copy.

Self-publishing with specialized software. If you want to publish your ebook widely online and without using any specific pages, you can choose to use some specially designed computer software. While they vary in price and features on offer, in general, all allow for the creation of a complete ebook that is not limited in scope and sale. Note that the methods of copyright protection that you can use with these programs are often not as effective as those provided by the publishing service.

• Caliber is a newer program that is fast, powerful and easy to use. This program converts files from HTML (and only HTML) to EPUB (the standard format for ebooks) easily and for free (though donations are very welcome). Almost any word processor can save the manuscript as HTML.
• In case you want to create PDF files, a file type that can be read on nearly any computer and device, Adobe Acrobat Pro is the ideal program. Acrobat allows you to password protect PDF files when saving. However, when the password is revealed, anyone can open your book. It’s a powerful, flexible, and free program.
• As the famous free office suite, OpenOffice.org is quite similar to Microsoft Works. OpenOffice.org’s Writer program can save documents in the same PDF format as Adobe Acrobat. Although the tools (especially in adding cover pages) are not as advanced, this program can secure and encrypt your PDF documents just like Acrobat.
• There are plenty of other programs that can help you self-publish, both free and paid. If none of the above suggestions seem to work for you, rummage around and find solutions online.