The August Ebook Confusion

 

For the free ebook I was going to release this month, it was supposed to be a novelette. (I had prepared a list of the books when I decided to do this challenge. I have another list I am in the process of refiguring for next year’s ebooks as well.) Unfortunately, I no longer had a fiction editor on board for this project – or any editor, really. So, as August drew near, I was on the hunt for a new editor.

 

Fortunately, I did find a new editor, and she has agreed to edit my other novelettes as well. (Yay!)

 

Still, I was without an ebook for this month! Or, so I thought.

 

In order to find a book to release, I perused my collection of titles I have already finished writing. Unfortunately, none of them appealed at this point in time. They just didn’t seem like a good fit for a “summer” release.

 

Then I pulled up my list of free ebooks for 2023. I selected one which I felt readers of my newsletter would benefit from.

 

The problem is that I had not anticipated the issue of this ebook’s topic! Specifically, that it was too broad of a topic.

 

When I got started working on this ebook, I discovered that there was way too many different kinds of material out there associated with this topic. It was like a little bit of everything for different kinds of audiences.

 

This wasn’t going to work. Was this ebook for parents? Entrepreneurs? Small business owners? At-home moms? Writers? Booklovers? WHAT??

 

While most nonfiction books try to cater to a brad audience, a nonfiction book that promises “everything for everyone” is a little confusion. Who, exactly, is everyone? Who, exactly, would enjoy this book or benefit from reading this book?

 

With nonfiction, you pick up a type of book you want to read with the expectation that it will meet your needs or satisfy your curiosity about a topic. If this ebook was going to have a ton of material for parents, business owners, students and kids being homeschooled, how was that going to help someone reading it who wasn’t in that group?

 

No, it wasn’t going to work. I just had to narrow the book’s topic down.

 

In order to do this, I had to ask myself a few questions:

 

1. Who is my audience?

2. What would they like to read?

3. What kind of benefits do I want them to gain from this particular ebook?

 

The answers to these questions helped me to figure out exactly how to tailor this ebook to the specific audience it is meant for – namely, writers.

 

With this in mind, I changed what type of material the free ebook will contain, as well as giving it a more focused and specific title. This way, anybody who sees that ebook as a free download would know exactly what to expect from it when they start reading it.

 

After I accomplished this goal, I got to work gathering material according to what should go into this ebook. As for the material I had gathered for the original ebook, I don’t know what I will do with it at this point. Maybe I will give it a revamp as well and save it for a summer ebook for next year.

 

For now, though, I have been busy gathering material for this new ebook, and that job has been a lot easier now that I know what kind of material I need to find for it.