Where to find great writers

When you hire for a writer for your ebook, what you are doing is enlisting the services of a ghostwriter. A ghostwriter is a writer who publishes under someone else’s name, with the consent of both parties.

Traditionally, ghostwriters have been and are still today hired by celebrities to write autobiographies when the celebrities are not talented writers. Ghostwriters also sometimes create works for well-known authors, such as Tom Clancy. This practice is done for business reasons, because the author’s name alone will sell the books, no matter who actually wrote them.

Ghostwriters may also write for book series’ that don’t actually have a real-person author. An example of a series written this way is the Hardy Boys series you may remember from your youth. The Hardy Boys cover author, Franklin W. Dixon, does not actually exist. Many romance novel series’ have also been created in this way, where the author name on the cover represents any number or variety of commissioned writers.

Create a great sales letter for your book

The web page for your ebook should contain a sales letter that is immediately visible. In fact, your web page really doesn’t need to contain much else, unless you choose to use additional pages for other uses.

Here are the components of a great sales letter.

1. a catchy headline.
2. a list of amazing benefits for the reader. Tell visitors what problems your ebook solves or how it will improve their lives.
3. testimonials. Quotes from people who have read the book or from people who know you and are willing to write something great about you for your site.

By and large, your ebook buyers will want to pay by credit card. After all, the benefit of ebooks is that they are terribly easy to get. Just type in your credit card number and in a few moments you’re reading through a great book!

You should also provide a mail box where visitors can send a check for your ebook, but this is only to show them that you have an address. It adds to your credibility, but don’t expect many orders, if any, through this channel. In fact, if you only provide a postal mail box address and do not provide your customers with the ability to click and pay by credit card, you can expect to lose 95 percent of your buyers.

Some ebook authors prefer the .exe file because it can provide additional flexibility, nice graphic conversion, and other features. Most .exe converters or services cost a bit, and honestly, you probably won’t need those features. First of all, most ebook readers just want to read your book and are not terribly impressed with extraneous details that would not be presented in a paper book, with the exception of hyperlinks. Secondly, .exe files are only viewable on PC’s, so right off the bat, you lose potential Mac customers.

There are two common ebook formats, EXE and PDF. These formats refer to the type of electronic file your ebook will be. One type has .exe after the filename, and the other has .pdf after the filename.

If your ghostwriter already put your ebook into one of these formats, then you are all set. If your ebook was delivered in a word processing file, then you’ll need to convert it to either EXE or PDF. You can buy software that will make an .exe file, or you can purchase or use free software to convert the text to a .pdf file.

I recommend the .pdf approach for several reasons. First, of the two options, .pdf results in a smaller file. This will allow buyers to have a faster download of your book. Secondly, .pdf files can be read easily with free software on either a PC or a Mac. Thirdly, .pdf conversion software is not terribly expensive and there are even free versions you can use.

Get ghostwriters competing for your ebook

The two large online freelancer databases where ghostwriters lurk that I mentioned above, Elance and Guru, operate in essentially the same way. Basically, you post an ad and wait for responses. You choose a writer from the list of responders, agree on a schedule and fee, and then move on and do something else until your ebook arrives to you in your email inbox.

Both sites maintain catalogs of people who provide freelance services. The Elance catalog has over 50,000 people listed. Some of the people in the catalog, or bank, provide software programming or other service. Not everyone in the bank is a ghostwriter. So when you get to the site, you’ll need to navigate to the area that applies to ebooks and ghostwriting. Although this may take you a few minutes at first, the site is easily navigable once you get your bearings. Let’s walk through Elance.

Go to www.elance.com. From the home page, scroll down to the menu along the bottom of the page, and click on “Marketplace.” From the marketplace page, look to the left hand side of the screen, and from that menu, click on “Writing & Translation.” If the site organization has changed slightly since this writing, just use common sense and navigate around until you find the ebook projects database. Basically, you are looking for the area where you can advertise that you want to outsource an ebook to a ghostwriter. Click around until you get there. To make things easier on future visits, when you find ebook outsourcing services, add that URL to your Internet browser’s favorites list.

Tip: Writers are referred to as “service providers” on Elance. This phrase is not to be confused with an Internet service provider (ISP) or the service of the Elance web site itself. On Guru, writers are referred to as “registered professionals.”

In Elance’s writing marketplace, browse through others’ ads to see how they are finding ghostwriters, and roughly what the projects are paying. With a quick browse you can see how ads are written and which ghostwriters have responded, and additional details about the advertisers and the ghostwriter responder.

You’ll want to get your sales page set up. You can hire this out – there are literally thousands of web designers out there – you’ll pay $150 for help with a page or two and up to $5,000 for a complicated set of pages with storefront and graphics.

Finding a web designer online is much of the same old same old. Do an Internet search, or ask one of your technical friends for recommendations.

Use the home-page designing software provided by your web host, or just pay the web host’s fee-based designers.

How-to manuals for any new product recently on the market. This harks back to the Dummies series but takes it one step further. Target your ebook to people who want to buy the most current commercially available item. How to use the new model John Deere tractor. You will be sure that no one else has a book like yours, and you can say so in your sales pitch.

How to survive any phase of life. People face numerous demons and battles as they live their lives. For many, when they’re in need, they’ll be reaching out for help. Support groups, private therapy, being with friends, starting over – these are all solid topics for an ebook. You could also reach out specifically to certain people needing emotional assistance. How to get through the terrible two’s. How to cope with a cancer diagnosis. Living with your own shortcomings. How to live with someone who is dying. Surviving high school. Any of these will do.

Ebooks, because of their brevity and because they are marketed primarily on the Internet can target smaller audiences. You don’t have to write a universal book like How to use a computer (which may not be interesting enough to sell anyway in this decade). Ebooks can cover more specific territory. Knowing this, you can 1) create your ebook in a specific way for a specific niche readership, and 2) create additional ebooks for different facets of the same subject, and sell each one separately!

Say you’ve decided to write an ebook on fishing. (FYI, this is one of those hobbies where enthusiasts are willing to spend money!). You could create “How to Catch Freshwater Trout,” “How to Tie Your Own Flies,” or “How to Plan a Successful Deep Sea Fishing Trip.” Almost anything related to the hobby can become a separate ebook depending on how much detail you include. Clearly, “How to put on waders,” probably wouldn’t be a great choice (though some would say it’s impossible to underestimate today’s consumer), because you would have to strain to fill up 60 to 100 pages on such a simple topic. You get the idea. The topic would need to be, in most cases, book worthy. Use good judgment.

Then, life itself requires instructions, as we know from “Life’s Little Instruction Book.” So, life also qualifies as a good how-to book topic. There are numerous subtopics, and you’ll never run out of ideas. Here are a few examples:

• “How to ensure your child gets an A+ in math”
• “How to have a successful garage sale”
• “How to organize your home office”

And while we’re on the subject of how-to books, I’d like to make one quick point. The titles of these ebooks do not need to be incredibly clever. Be sure the words “How to” are the first part of the title, and the rest should tell exactly what the ebook is about.

For example, which of these three titles would be best?

1. “How to have a successful garage sale.”

2. “One weekend away from a cleaner house”

3. “How to sell your old shoes for a profit”

Although numbers 2 and 3 are clever, a little punchy, and correspond with the ebook content, I would still recommend using title number 1. “How to have a successful garage sale” sums it up pretty well and will catch the eye of an Internet surfer who is interested in putting together a garage sale and needs a how-to manual.

Anyway, back to the point. Any phase of life, way of coping with life, or large or small thing about life can be the subject of a how-to book.

How-to’s and hot topics

There is almost no limit whatsoever on the marketability of how-to books. Everyone wants an instruction manual, advice, and encouragement that they can do anything they read a how-to book for. Anything you know how to do, anything you’ve ever wanted to learn, or anything that’s teachable at all, can become a how-to ebook.

How-to books for hobbyists are a good way to go, and this overlaps with the discussion above. A hobby how-to ebook could be anything from how to build a home from hay bales to how to play Texas Hold ‘Em to how to understand Shakespeare.

One book publisher knows how hungry we are for how-to information, and has created a whole series of “Dummies” books around the market. Further, there are other similar book series’, and all of them are doing quite well! “The Everything” series, “Idiot’s Guide” series and others are all cashing in on the how-to phenomenon.

You could cash in by creating ebooks on any or all subjects covered in any of those series’. Go to www.dummies.com, and check out their list of titles. Pick one you like, and move full speed ahead!

Remember that even though the books have “Dummies” in the title, that the books are as popular as they are because the readers are not treated like dummies at all. The authors cater to a person who wants to find out the easiest way to do something without too much tangential discussion. When you have your ebook written and when you choose a title, make sure you are appealing to a reader’s smarts! If you use words like stupid, dumb, or hopeless in the title, make sure that it is clear that the meaning would not extend to insulting the individual reader