If you’re an avid writer or blogger who has not yet thought about publishing an eBook, you’re missing an opportunity to generate a lot of new readers and some serious exposure to your work.

With devices like the iPad and Kindle being readily available and well-liked, eBooks are becoming far more popular. Add the convenience and simplicity of Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon, and there’s probably never been a better time to think about publishing an eBook. Particularly if you’re a blogger and already have a lot of content that you can draw on, you can usually come up with the basic structure of an eBook from your blog posts alone.

If you decide to try and write and publish an eBook, here are a few tips to start your project and make sure that you see it through to its completion:

1. A good cover is everything

It’s unfortunate, but a cover is probably the single most important factor in terms of the sales of your eBook. Now, whether or not readers are enthused or excited about their purchase is going to depend on your content, which is where the bulk of your effort should always be. However, you can’t ignore the importance of having a good cover, so make sure to put the work into making your cover eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing. If you do, you’ll be ahead of a high percentage of other eBook sellers who don’t put time into their cover.

2. Market research

The simplest way to research the market for your eBook is to look up eBooks on the same topic and figure out which ones are selling. Make note of the following qualities about these eBooks:

Cover -
Title -
Description -
Table of contents -

Basically, you should consider whatever information you can get without buying and reading the books. There’s a reason they’re selling, so if you can figure out why that is (at least in part), you can incorporate that into your own book’s design and writing.

3. Short-term goals

As with any project, you’re going to need to set manageable goals for yourself so that you don’t get burnt out trying to write your book. Chances are that you do a lot of writing already, so adding an eBook on top of that could be tough in terms of time management.

Setup short goals that you can keep up with on a weekly basis-just enough so that you can make sure you’re writing and getting through chapters on a consistent basis.

EBooks don’t have to be long; in fact, many of them are around 100 pages. You might find that it won’t even take you as long as you thought it would.

4. Pricing research

How much you charge for your eBook should be mostly correlated with how much of an online presence you have and how popular you are as a writer.

Most eBooks are less than $10, so take some time to figure out what eBooks of the same topic as yours that are around the same length are selling for.

Once you’ve got some numbers to work with, it would be advisable to shoot a bit lower than the average.

Here’s an experiment we carried out about ebook pricing.

5. Scheduled writing time

Once you have all this established, the most important part is to just sit down and start writing. Set some time aside for simply hammering out some paragraphs and keep pushing until you’ve got something established.

Remember that you can draw on blog posts and past articles for chapters and overall ideas; however, you’ll still need to provide a fresh take and give your readers something that isn’t just copied off of your website.

Staying Motivated

Keeping your finished product in mind will help motivate you in addition to the prospect of having a fresh stream of income with a lot of potential. Get everything set in stone before you start writing so you don’t have to think about the direction of the book or themes while you’re trying to get chapters nailed down.

If you’ve taken care of all that ahead of time, the actual writing process will be much smoother.