ebooks by fishbrain.randy@sbcglobal.net, on Flickr

So, much later than I had intended, I finished reading Pat Flynn’s eBook on creating eBooks. I learned a few things.

Here is the process that I distilled from Pat’s book:

1. Know your audience
2. Write book
3. Convert to PDF
4. Set up payment system
5. Sales page
6. Promotion

Here are my thoughts on these matters.

1. I’ve been talking with you lovely people for over two years now, so I hope I have some idea who you are. Of course, I could be completely wrong, and I hope you will tell me so if I am. Learning is my number one priority, always.

2.  I’m going to start with something really simple but I hope it will be useful to you. Not telling you yet what it is, though. Sorry!

3. Well, that’s pretty technical but not hard. I will probably follow his advice for now. I’m not quite ready to publish something on Kindle or any other proprietary format. I’m not a huge fan of reading PDFs myself (which is one reason it took me so long to read Pat’s 35 pages), but my planned first eBook is short, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

4. This will definitely be a learning experience. Pat recommends using e-junkie, but I will probably go with gumroad. I would love to hear if any of you have an opinion on this.

5. There’s another learning experience. I’ve never created such a thing in my life. I know I’ve seen many pages that I didn’t like, so it will be fun trying to make one that would appeal to people like me. Again, your opinions are more than welcome.

6. Pat devotes a large part of his book to promotion, which makes sense as you can’t sell the best book in the world if nobody knows about it. I’ll have to see what I do with that. That’s the part that makes me the most uncomfortable, of course. All the more reason to tackle the unknown!

Onward and upward! I would love to hear from you on all of the above.