Not so fast…makes sure you take a good look at these 3 realities of book writing that blow the mind of authors who are otherwise surprised. 

1. You must spend as much (likely more) effort on marketing your book or ebook as you do writing it.  Wait a minute, don't publishers take care of marketing your book?  Not at ALL!   Even more important is to understand that the book marketing game has changed significantly.  Members of InfoMarketer'sZone are completely surprised by how they can build a huge platform using the internet in advance of their book launch by using mailing lists, blogs, social networks,  article syndication and affiliate programs — only now are book writers starting to catch on to these stealth marketing techniques because they work so well, get great results and build a foundation of followers that you can market to again and again.

2. Alternatives to traditional publishing are abundant.  Why wait months to get your book published, conform to rigourous publishing standards, take a pittance of money for each copy sold just to have the "priveledge" of having someone print your book?  Times have changed, self-publishing is not only far more profitable, but can be done extremely quickly with full control and credit

3. Moving up the value chain.  People who work through the roadmap within InfoMarketer'sZone soon see the incredible potential of moving from one-time, non-fiction books that earn them $1-$3 per copy sold toward a virtually unlimited world of information publishing where they can quickly launch a highly profitable line of information guides, ebooks, manuals, courses, subscription membership sites, teleseminars, webinars and the like.  Instead of a part-time book writing hobby they are shocked to see they can create their own $Million information publishing business and get it rolling quickly. 

Book writing and information marketing have changed…fortunately these changes favor you.  All that's required is that you take advantage of the timing to get your own information publishing project started now!

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Is it ok to outsource the writing of your ebook to a ghostwriter?

Since we have direct experience publishing top selling ebooks that I have written completely and others where I used a ghostwriter, we can confirm that either approach will work. 

There are however some factors you want to take into account when considering outsourcing the writing of your ebook or information product.

3 Tips For Getting Your Ebook Written

1. You want to control the outline. 

No matter how much of the research and/or writing you decide to outsource, you want to outline your ebook, book or info product yourself. "How To", informational ebooks (info products)  are best organized around a set of steps, tips, stages or tasks that will help your reader achieve the desired end result (lose weight, manage stress, train their dog, etc…)  After all, that's why they pull their wallet out of their pocket and send you their order – so they can accomplish something they desire faster, easier or less painfully that they otherwise would be able to do. So, you want to do your research and find out what system will help them achieve their desired outcome – that becomes your outline and you don't want to leave this to someone else because writers don't get this and yet it is so critical to the success of your ebook or info product

2. Writing is as simple as talking. 

When you write an information product, your reader is not looking for brilliant writing, they want to consume your information in a simple, effective, clear and concise way to help them achieve their desired result. Two things will kill an ebook – verbose writing or writing over the heads of your audience and wandering aimlessly around your topic instead of sticking to the outline.  Beyond that, writing is very straightforward if you keep your points clear and concise. 

3. Personalize your ebook. 

Use examples from your own research, experience or from 3rd party research (interviews, case studies) — even if you outsource the writing of your ebook, you want to bring in your own opinions, experiences, knowledge where you can…it personalizes your system and makes your ebook unique. 

Lastly – if you do decide to outsource part or all of your ebook writing, look first for a writer that has direct experience (or at least past experience writing) within your niche.  The advantage is that they can provide experience and examples that add to the value of the ebook and they will often charge much less because they need to spend less time researching and writing. 

The key to writing an ebook effectively is your outline, get that right and you will find your ebook almost writes itself. 

If you want to tap into the #1 resource for information product publishing and marketing to get help writing, selling and marketing your ebook online, then check out Information Marketer'sZone – your one stop training site for high paid information marketers.

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Guilt builds as we continue to ignore our dream in favor of "paying the bills" and getting through daily life.

Then comes the weekend…we should be working on writing our book, but alas we are headed back to work Monday morning assuring ourselves that NEXT weekend will be the weekend that we make progress.

For some, the process of writing their book takes a lifetime, others years, still others months…any way you look at it, a significant amount of time.

Yet, when we do release our first book or ebook we come to the dramatic realization that this is just the START…not the END.

If you have a life-long ambition to help other golfers perfect their game and you finally release your book, you now have the opportunity to take your passion to the next level. 

That next level is becoming a "Mndshare Expert" in your chosen field – folks, that's where the real money and rewards come in.

That's what we teach inside InfoMarketer'sZone  – 1) How to capture the majority of your market so they can find your new book and 2) How to turn your first product into a 6-figure to 7-figure information publishing Enterprise so you can continue to work at what you love. 

YOUR BOOK – THE BEGINNING!

You have the very real opportunity to channel your new "fans" who buy and read your book into high-paying customers for follow-up information like webinars, courses, seminars, membership sites, additional courses or books…that's where you can really rake it in and turn your one-time passion for writing a book into a full-time career that you love.

Here's a great example I came across today…Joe Grace carried his dream to write a book about children's confidence and bullying around for 8-years before he really put his mind to finishing the book. 

Now he is ready to market the book, but is ready to go back into a job with the thinking that this is the end of the road – he completed his dream, so now he can move on.

Sure, that certainly may the case for many people who write their own book…but for many others, the real prize is when their book paves the way to a radical career change that lets them continue to work at their passion, to write, to help people and make money doing what they love.

So, when you set out on the journey to write a book, remember the potential in front of you.  The book is JUST the beginning…

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When it comes to publishing content, the same holds true.

I was talking to a good friend, a published author now out on the speaking circuit, last evening.  When I mentioned the word publishing…he nearly grabbed me by the throat and told me…

There is no #?1%ing way I will EVER sign a contract with a traditional publisher again!

Why?

Too slow, give too little back to the author, too restrictive (timing, process, pricing, format, etc…) and financially insanity given that he gets to keep less than a couple of bucks for each of the 10's of thousands of books he sells.

So why would you self publish?

1. Near immediate.  Once your book, ebook or infoproduct is completed, it takes a few days to hit the market. In today's fast-paced world trained to want instant gratification, speed is our friend
2. More control.  You control the look-and-feel, the length, the packaging, the price, length of time on the market and overall launch
3. You have so many other options – Kindle, iBooks, Clickbank, Amazon's main directory, or simply sell it from your own website like we have done on many occasions
4. More profit – Instead of making $2 on a $20 book you can make $10 on a $12 or $15 book OR you can develop it as a workbook, manual, home study course and sell it for $47-$197 product where you keep 75%-95% of the profit.  Why give it to a publisher, they don't offer you any distribution advantage – and will be soon gone
5. You control how and when it comes to market. If you want to launch it and then pull it from the market, you have that opportunity to create buzz through scarcity
6. You get the same benefit as published authors used to get.  There is no longer a stigma associated with self-publishers.  We now live in a time of great equality across writers and experts. If your work is killer and you have done a good job of positioning it correctly – you win!
7. So many distribution paths.  You can literally play multiple distribution paths, a light version on Kindle, a full version on Clickbank with a bundled package available from your own website
8. Flexibility to run your own affiliate programs and treat partners in a way that is best for your business. If you want to sign up a top influencer, you can give him half of the profits whereas others you give 25%
9. Print or not – you make the call if you want to print off a batch for a back-of-the-room pitch at an event, you can do that
10. You control (entirely) your license rights.  If you want to license the rights to some of your content for re-publishing you can do that without breaching any terms of a traditional publishing contract.  We have done this on occasion where we license a portion of one of our books to a private group who includes this content with their training – these license deals can bring you 5-6 figures – all made possible with the flexibility and control of self-publishing

Of course, all of this must be taken seriously. 

Just because you can self-publish, take control of the process and release books, ebooks and infoproducts quickly doesn't mean that editing, proof-reading and quality aren't important.

Indeed, nothing is further from the truth. 

As the market opens up, it also becomes more competitive which means you must pay special attention to quality, your topic and positioning as well as having a product that doesn't distract people because it is poorly edited, full of spelling mistakes or badly designed.

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The question though is what should my book be about?

The tendancy is to look at writing a book as a selfish desire to share something about us with the world.

I often hear…I want to write a book about myself, where do I start? 

Take a step back and think…nobody picks up ANY book, ebook or reads content unless they feel strongly that there is something of benefit for them.

Your starting point then MUST be what can I share about my life or through research with others that will help them  in their life.

The answer to this question not only gets you thinking about the exact desire you will meet in the market, but also the target market of your focus. 

Here are some examples to get you thinking:

1. You have raised a child with a learning disability through school for the last 6-years – don't you think you have insights, experiences, tips and negative experiences you can share with others who are/will be in the same situation as you?

2. Stress used to eat away at you, but you have found a series of stress busting techniques that you can share with others to help them in their battle with stress

3. You run a profitable part-time business from home…how did you get to that stage, what failures and what successes can you share with others who want to accomplish the same goal? 

So what should your book be about? 

You get to write about your own life, but you do it with laser focus on the desires, dreams and challenges that others are having — that's the winning formula for writing yourown top selling books, ebooks or information product content.

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Creating content means:

• Writing articles
• Publishing daily blog posts
• Creating tools that can, in turn, be published by your partners/affiliates
• Social network posts
• Short, valuable reports, videos, manuals you give away as part of your opt-in, sales funnel
• Press releases and other formal press or analyst content
• Free webinars, teleseminars or courses

As part of our 6 week InfoProfits Program inside InfoMarketer'sZone, we put into action these content creation tools right in the first couple of weeks to make sure you get attention, traffic and begin the flow of eager subscribers and customers who will start your online business off with a bang. 

Content is your friend in many ways:

• Each piece of content gives you a chance to be ranked in the top 10 on the search engines meaning more people will find you in different ways
• More quality content gives you more opportunties for syndication which gives you both a wider net to catch more traffic, but also gives you solid link juice back to your website – the SERP's love that
• You build credibility and trust among your marketplace improving their tendancy to buy from you
• You build a reputation and brand that gets you more publicity through interviews, reviews, TV and press
• Your content becomes available to your partners who then cast the net even wider among their trusted audiences

But the challenge you must be wondering about is how do you consistently find ideas to write about so that you can continuously create great content?

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Read actively within your market – magazines, books, blogs, etc… and become good at paraphrasing, reviewing or having an opinion on everything you read.  You want to bring the core idea or opinion to your market
2. You want to be active in your area of expertise.  If you are writing about parenting, then make it a habit to try something new or pull a tidbit from your own experience (or someone you know) each day and use that to structure your content
3. Survey your marketplace.  We have a pipeline of surveys coming in to us each day – every new subscriber, customer, blog reader, etc… sees an invitation to express their opinion, ask a question or express an idea that goes directly into both content creation as well as product creation.  By working surveys and polls into your various websites and email campaigns you will ALWAYS have ideas for great content
4. Keyword research – although I often do not come up with content ideas based purely on keyword research I certainly do use keyword research to guide me toward the interests of my audience and learn to pull content ideas as well as match content with keywords for better search engine impact
5. Social networking – become active and learn to ask questions, be controversial and active so that you get content ideas directly from Twitter, Facebook campaigns
6. Amazon comments – this is one of my secret places I look to get excellent ideas for content.  Look up a top selling book in your market area and take a look through the reviews and comments, you will often find lots of ideas for additional content
7. Google news – another of my favorite ways to continually watch the latest mainstream news for my topic area – I can then create content that refers directly to that news, comments on it, paraphrase the idea into my own words, expand on the story or various other techniques that come directly to mind when reviewing the latest news

As you can see, there are idea triggers all around us for generating content. Next time you are stuck for content ideas on what to write about, use one or more of these techniques to quickly get out of your writing rut and be back in the content business instantly.

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• This story starts with a fiction book, but leads to a second work that is definitely non-fiction
• This example shows that ANYONE can live their dream of being a writer or information marketer
• We can all learn from writers no matter what genre

So, check out this article about a 15-year old teenage writer who came up with her first book idea at 12-years old and has since battled a debiliting medical condition and STILL has succeeded against all odds.

Her second book will be about cyber-bullying – having two kids now entering their teen years I am definitely aware of this emerging market.  Having a book written by a teen is so refreshing and differentiated from the band of psycholoists and researches that are/and will continue to swarm around this very hot topic.

This just once again proves that anyone, at any stage of life has experiences, insight, knowledge and ability to write their own book creating their very one online income stream, if that is the desire.

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Each example teaches us more about the markets, topics, people behind these products and techniques they use to market their own books in today's rapidly changing publishing world.

TODAY'S BOOK WRITING PROFILE

I love this story…a long-time teacher Diane Finkbeiner and her son, who now also teaches worked together on a book they titled "How To Break 10 Common Childhood Myths", a 190-page book they have self-published available on Amazon in printed and electronic format that is largely based on the experience they have both gained in their professions.

Diane, having the wide experience of teaching from Grade 2 through Grade 8 (and many in between) began to put 2 and 2 together when she observed similarities in negative behaviors among the very young that persisted well into the pre-teen and teen years.  Further, she observed that the behaviors were largely based on assumptions (she calls them myths) that must first be altered if there is hope of altering their behavior. 

Interestingly, her son observed the exact same things when he started teaching, first acting as a substitute teacher for some extra money, then getting his teacher's degree. 

Observations made years before became chapters in this fascinating book about parenting. 

WHAT CAN WE LEARN?

You know me, I'm all about learning and teaching how we can all be more successful with self-publishing and growing large and successful information marketing businesses — so here'swhat we can learn about today's profile:

• Diane and her son Chad are no different than the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of teachers EXCEPT they saw the value in the experience and knowledge they had and saw how that could help others improve their (or their child's) lives.  Over and over again "normal" people with seemingly average lives are turning their knowledge into amazing achievment through self-publishing books, ebooks, workshops or training programs
• They kept their information practical.  Diane and Chad did not write a theoretical book about parenting or teaching, they wrote practical tips parents and teachers can use to help change the behavior of their children in a positive, productive way.  Information that is practical is HIGHLY valuable and usable to readers – it will tyopcally outsell theoretical books by a large margin
• Self-publishing – need I say more?  Inside The Ultimate Information Entrepreenur's Success Package we share the advantages of self-publishing (financial and otherwise), in today's day and age you can control your content, package it as you like, use advanced promotion techniques and keep far more of the profit than in the past…any one of us can self-publish today inexpensively and quickly.  
• Carry on a legacy.  When you read about this family you get the sense that they have a proud history as educators, writing this book allows them to extend their legacy, touch more people and pass along their passion for decades to come
• Foundation for bigger things…it is quite clear with this family, there is an opportunity for workshops (they already do them), home study packages, seminars, even online membership sites are an option…your first information product can be your launchpad to much bigger things
• Collaborate – in this case it was a Mother and Son, in your case it may be a collaboration with a like-minded peer, your spouse, an expert that helps with credibility – the options are virtually limitless.  While there is always risk with collaboration, those risks can be managed and often the advantages outweigh the risks.  Remember, if your first product is your launchpad to bigger things, a collaboration can sometimes be the fastest way to make a big bang on your first time around. 

Most of all, you can do what Diane and Chad have done.  You can pull from your experience, knowledge and passion to put together your own book, ebook or information product and sell it offline and online…the only question is when will you release your own launchpad to the benefits information marketing can give you? 

Leave us a comment with your plans or your thoughts about this review – we love hearing from you.

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It's such a massive passion for them that it almost paralyzes them into inaction.

When we break it down into bite-sized chunks though and begin to set simple-to-follow processes for:

• Idea brainstorming
• Market research to help pick the best topic to start with
• Book outlining
• Organizing and research
• Content generation and discovery
• Formatting your book or ebook
• Pricing and alternative packaging
• Getting it up for sale online

It suddenly becomes so much simpler, less emotional and can be quite a quick process.

I came across this article earlier today about a Durham woman who has experience in her field of selling being contacted by a publisher on Twitter about potentially writing a book for them.

Sure enough, less than 6-months later she has her first book out and already has ideas for her next titles.

Sometimes it just takes a mentor and a basic plan to follow to actually get you moving and once you begin, you won't be able to stop.

We have more than 12 different books, ebooks, membership sites and courses selling online…the plan we followed is highly effective and it is something we teach within Information Product Marketer's Zone – take a look if you want to really make progress writing your book or creating an information product for sale online.

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Or maybe you have figured out how do something really cool with your new digital camera, so you share that with a fellow digital camera enthusiast.

It could have also been a client or customer of yours that you helped through a financial, legal, or personal problem…that happens often doesn't it? 

When it comes to non-fiction writing, authors and experts know that there is some nice income associated with writing this sort of information down…often known as freelance or project writing.

BUT…what if you simply wrote the answer down to some of these pressing challenges and then sold them as an ebook, book or information product yourself? 

Now you have REALLY changed the tables…for a day or two worth of work, you now have the potential to make sales to hundreds, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of others who have the same question. 

That's where the e-book and book self-publishing business becomes REALLY interesting…and that's where writing gets amazingly fun!

Check out Information Marketing Zone - watch those making FUN happen right now…oh and let me ask…isn't this something that YOU could be doing?

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