Closet Confidential

Since publishing my new e-book, Creating Your Personal Life Plan, I have had several people ask how I prepared the e-book. Rather than try to answer these questions individually, I thought I would post the process here. You might want to try a product similar.

I first did this when I printed my two previous e-books, Writing a Winning Non-Fiction Book Proposal and publishing a Winning Fiction e book Proposal. I used the same basic approach here.

One key stuff to note is that I didn’t intend to create an e-book for sale. My sole purpose was to create a “premium” that I could use to build my e-mail agreement list. However, I still wished the e-book to be excellent, so that it would add value to my readers.

The format of the e-book is a very little unusual. It is landscape in orientation and resembles a “slidedeck” (or PowerPoint slideshow). I first had this idea from the ChangeThis manifestos. Other popular e-books use this format, too, including Digging into WordPress, Evernote Essentials, and Zen to Done.

Here are the seven steps I took to develop the e-book. This, of course, doesn’t include the marketing, which I may blog about at a later time if there is sufficient interest:

I wrote the holograph in iWork Pages. I combined several popular blog posts I had written on life planning. I then created transitions and filled in the slots. I ended up having to add about 25 percent new material. You can also do this in Microsoft Word. I just personally like documents better.

I hired a master editor. Once I was finished with the manuscript, I passed it along to Alice Sullivan to edit it. She used to work at Thomas Nelson. I didn’t feel that I needed a “substantive edit” (advice on the content itself); I just wanted a copy-edit (e.g., syntax, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc). She corrected several grammatical blunders and made numerous helpful guide.

I established what e-book features I wanted. I looked at several other e-books for ideas, incorporating the ones I mentioned above. I decided that I wanted one way links in the text, simple navigation to move to various parts of the book, an painless way to print the e-book, and a way to display it full screen. I also wanted to offer a version number, since I wanted to update the e-book from time to time.

I designed a template in iWork Keynote. I created a custom “slide size” of 792 pixels x 612 pixels. This prints out nicely on 8½” x 11″ paper. I then made the decision on a nautical theme. I selected a photo from iStockPhoto for the cover. I selected another photo for the background on the pages. I then determined what typefaces I planned to use. I selected Requiem Display, Myriad Pro, and Gotham. I then prepared several page styles that I could alternate to keep the building visually interesting.

I composed the pages. This is where the real work kicks in. I had to cut and paste the content in, one page at a time, designing many elements and callouts. This probably would certainly have been easier in Adobe InDesign, but I am just not as familiar with that tool. This process took me maximum of one Saturday to do. Caution: You don’t want to do this until the content is really stable. It’s a pain to go returned and change it.

I exported the completely thing to a PDF. Once I was happy with the design, I exported it as a PDF file. Well, technically, I printed it from within Keynote and chose the “Save as PDF” option in the lower left-hand corner of the Print dialog box. This introduced a really large file: over 10 megabytes! However, not to concern. I fixed this in the next step. Sort of.

Enhance with Adobe Acrobat Professional. This is also some heavy-lifting. The first thing to do is to optimize the PDF file. You do this under the Advanced | PDF Optimizer menu option. This reduced the file size from 10 MB to about 2.5 MB—definitely an betterment. Next I started adding links to the navigation elements and the in-text hyperlinks. You do this with Acrobat’s “Link Tool.” This makes it possible for users to jump reliable out to Web pages, download files, and other nifty tricks.

There are perhaps many other things I could have done. Some are still on my to-do list (e.g., create an Amazon Kindle version). Perhaps, this will give you an idea of what is available. I feel like I have just scratched the top.

If you have anything that would improve my process, I would love to hear form you. I am planning several more e-books like this.

Question: Do you need to form an e-book? If so, what are the possibilities? You can leave a comment by clicking here.

 

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