Ever dream of being an author? You can be, get paid and advertise
Your business.
Think about it. Your name on a book that people will read and go back to over and over again. A book they paid good money for.
It happens
every day. Someone writes a book and makes $100,000. The reason is simple: Information sells. Next to food and sex, it's the most in demand item of the 21st century.
No matter what industry you are in, you have special knowledge others can benefit from and you can sell that information at a price that will people will pay. And make yourself an expert on the topic as well as make a little money to go with it.
It doesn't have to be huge. The book I mean. It can be a few measly pages. Some books are just a dozen pages - or less. It can be an electronic book or a print book people hold in their hands. Either way, people will pay you good money to gain access to your special knowledge. Or you can give it away for free and still get paid.
Here's what you do:
1) First, learn to use a word processing program. Microsoft Word isn't the best one but it's the most popular one and will work well for anything you want to produce. Alternatives include WordPerfect and MacWrite, for the MacIntosh. AbiWord is a free word processor you can download from
abisource.com.
It really doesn't matter which word processor you use. You can write a book in Notepad. But you have to put your words down on something.
2) The second thing you need to do is keep a hard copy. No matter how good your word processor is, something can always happen that will cause you to lose your information. Print it and put it in a notebook somewhere. Even if you never look at it again, you'll have it in hard copy just in case.
3) Get organized. Write an outline. You don't have to stick to it religiously, but you should know what you are going to say. An outline will at least give you a good idea of where you are going and that's half the battle.
4) Next, write down everything you know about your topic. Try to stick to the outline you wrote. You don't have to write in the order of the outline but keep your topics that are related to each other together. You can always go back and reorganize later.
5) After you have everything on paper that you know about your specialized topic, go back and see if anything is misplaced. Did you put information about socket wrenches in a section on types of drywall? Make sure you categorize your information accurately. Your reader will be confused otherwise.
6) After you've made sure all the information is in the correct drawer, go through and write a rough draft. If you did steps 1-5 well this should not be difficult. Now you are organizing the information within their categories, trying to make your prose readable and understandable. Don't worry about spelling and grammar. Just write to be understood - for yourself, at least.
7) Did you write your draft from beginning to end? Good. Now let it sit a couple of days and look at it again with fresh eyes. Does it make sense? Rewrite any passages that don't. Have someone else read it to see if they can understand it. Get someone who doesn't know anything about your topic and who will be brutally honest with you. Ask them to read it to see if they can understand it.
8) Now, you want to go back and write the manuscript again. This time, try to write it so that anyone - even a third grader - can understand.
9) Finally, polish your work. Correct spelling and grammar. If you need to, consult a dictionary and refer to "The Elements of Style" by Willian Strunk and E.B. White. It's the definitive source on how to write with style.
Now that you've written a good book - it can be 10 pages or 250 pages - look around for a publisher. If your book is nonfiction you can send a book proposal to an agent or editor and hope they will publish it. This can be a long process and it could be awhile before you get published, but it does carry some prestige when you do.
Another way you can go is to publish the book yourself. A program called Clickbook will organize your book into pages for you. You can print from most word processing programs two pages per one sheet of 8 1/2 X 11. Get a graphic artist to do a cover design for you and print it on cover stock. This way you can publish your own book very low cost.
A third option is to publish your book electronically. Adobe Acrobat is the best e-book publisher but it's expensive. Why spend all that money when you can get cheaper programs that will convert your document to a .pdf file so that anyone with Adobe Reader can read it easily.
You can market your book over the Internet easily and inexpensively. If you have a web site you can sell your book there or give it away for free. Be sure that you.company logo, address and other contact information is on it and easy to find. Many people are raking in thousands of dollars giving away free e-books online. Why not you?
