Ebook Writing: How to Write an Ebook

September 4th, 2024

Written content is a powerful tool for engaging your audience, from short call-to-action social media posts to blog posts designed to inform and entertain your customers. Ebooks can be an effective tool when you need to provide a well-researched, in-depth breakdown of a subject.

When written properly, ebooks are evergreen marketing assets that bring qualified leads into your business and give them the desired information they need to pull the final trigger on a purchase. By learning the formula for ebook writing, you can increase your conversions, strengthen your sales funnel, and position your company as a true authority in your field.

What Is An Ebook?

Shorthand for “electronic book,” an ebook is a digital version of long-form content that people can view on their phones, computers, or tablets.

Although ebooks can include traditional fiction and nonfiction books, modern ebooks often refer to marketing content. This content includes multi-page pamphlets, brochures, white papers, and guides. Interested customers can download a digital version of an ebook to learn more about a company, product, or topic of interest.

Ebooks are often considered premium content. Premium content tends to be longer, factual papers that take more effort to digest than the average blog post. It’s usually gated behind paid subscriptions or landing pages that require you to enter your email address and other information.

Publishing an ebook with helpful information can give potential customers a compelling reason to join your email list, make an account on your site, or sign up for your services.

What Are The Benefits of Creating EBooks?

So why are ebooks such important marketing assets? It all comes down to the value they provide to readers. By publishing ebooks, your brand is investing in a long-form content strategy with several key advantages:

Convenience and accessibility: Anyone can download an ebook instantly by simply entering some basic information.
Affordability: Ebooks are reusable marketing assets. You can use one ebook to generate leads for a significant amount of time, all while making just a small investment into the content creation process.
Ability to qualify leads: By gathering information on your ebook landing page or request forms, you can instantly qualify leads and determine how to move them through your sales funnel.
Searchability: You can use keywords and popular search terms in your ebook to help your brand rank on popular search engines.
Differentiation: The long-form setup of ebooks makes them ideal for distinguishing your brand from competitors while offering an in-depth explanation of your key value proposition.
Adaptability: You can break up ebooks into smaller segments or sections, cascading the information into smaller pieces of content for blog posts and social media. They’re great assets for repurposing strategies.
Trustworthiness: Ebooks are meant to be well-researched, high-value pieces of content, so they can help establish your brand’s expertise and showcase your value as thought leaders in your industry.

Use Cases for EBooks

Someone who downloads an ebook is not looking for entertainment or general information. These readers are beyond the awareness stage of content marketing. They are in a research or consideration stage and are searching for answers to specific needs or issues.

Because ebooks can explore specific topics in-depth, they are the ideal format for answering these questions.

Ebooks are the perfect format to use when your audience already has surface-level information on your products and services but needs something more in-depth to make a buying decision.

Key applications include:

Case Studies: You can use the ebook format to highlight how your company helped another client achieve their goals.
Whitepapers: Whitepapers discuss trending topics and provide direct solutions to those issues.
Product Primers: Break down the details of a new product launch or upgrades to give your customers an inside look into your product development.
How-To Guides: Ebooks can provide functional insight into complex tasks to establish your brand’s expertise.
Industry Reports: Showcase your research or compile insights from other brands by creating fact-driven industry reports.

How To Create An Ebook

Because ebooks are more complex than casual blog posts, they require extensive planning, research, and refinement. Investing in the writing process will ensure you can use your ebook long-term to generate leads and engage your audience. Below are specific tips for how to create an ebook.

Gather Competitive Intelligence

Your industry peers and rivals, top influencers, and industry publications can be tremendous sources of insight into understanding the wants and needs of your customers.

Monitoring your competitors can help you identify topics and trends resonating in your field. This gives you fresh data about what problems your customers want to solve.

Try using keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to learn what information your customers are searching for. This data will help you get a leg up on competitors.

You can also set Google Alerts to follow your industry and competition, giving you a bird’s eye on what types of content they’re promoting. Then, you can offer a more in-depth breakdown of in-demand topics.

Define Your Audience

Ebooks target informed customers who are almost ready to make a buying decision, so it’s important to speak directly to the buyer persona you want to target. Who are you writing for, what is their decision-making ability, and where are they in the buying journey?

Today’s consumer places tremendous value on feeling that a brand understands their unique needs. Successfully addressing these needs head-on will be an important factor in their buying decision. Focus on targeting your brand’s key buyer personas, using their interests and expectations as a guide for the content in each ebook.

Choose Your Ebook Topics

Based on your audience’s interests and market research, brainstorm topics that could make compelling ebooks. Remember that ebooks are premium content and should offer insights that aren’t readily available in ungated articles and blog posts.

Think about the problems that your products and services solve, then highlight those issues in your content. Talk to your peers in other departments, such as sales, product development, or customer service, to list the biggest takeaways you want the reader to gain.

At this point, you’ll have a long list of potential topics to cover. As you launch your ebook strategy, choose topics with the highest search interest or that relate most directly to your brand.

For example, start with a general how-to primer that focuses on how to use your products to solve a problem. Once you launch this first ebook, you can branch off into niche industry reports and trending topics.

Choose A Working Title

Once you’ve decided on a topic, work your audience or persona into the title. For example, if your brand markets online training programs for employees of large corporations and your target persona is HR directors, you can choose a working title like “The HR Guide to Implementing an Online Employee Training Program.”

This title identifies who the audience is and breaks down what readers can expect from the ebook download. You need to revisit this title at the revision stage, as your title is your first and best chance at enticing your audience to give you their email in exchange for the download. Your final title needs to capture attention by highlighting a relevant benefit.

You can also add a subtitle that clarifies or expands on what the ebook will cover. In this instance, you might highlight the key benefits of online employee training with a subtitle like, ‘Boost Employee Productivity and Morale by Giving Employees the Added Skills They Need to Succeed’.

Create an Outline

Because ebooks are long-form content, it’s important to have a cohesive outline to guide your content and ensure that every part of the ebook contributes to your central topic.

As you write, it can be easy to get off-track and start focusing on tangents that don’t add value to the content. With an outline, you can create a clear vision of how the content will flow, with each section building upon the previous one.

Break up your topic into bite-sized chunks, then organize them based on how they relate to one another. You can then use the outline to inform your research process, organize your sources and citations, or find the best place to feature infographics, images, and illustrations.

Research

Customers turn to ebooks to learn more about a topic from an authoritative source. This makes research essential. You want your ebook to be so well-researched that people are willing to sign up for your email list or purchase a subscription to access the content.

Support your main point with industry surveys, predicted trends, helpful facts, and interesting insights. Adding quotes from experts can also support the value of your writing and strengthen your position as a thought leader in your industry.

However, it’s easy to get caught up in research, so use your outline as a guide as you gather facts, figures, and citations. You want to avoid wandering to the outfield and keep research focused on the subject matter.

Write

Using your outline and research, start drafting your content. Instead of mulling over each sentence expecting perfection, let the writing flow so you can build out your ebook. Remember that you can go back and edit in the next stage.

As you write, consider how you present the information to your readers. You want to break down complex topics in a way your audience can understand and relate to while still appearing confident and authoritative.

Avoid industry jargon, and use direct, straightforward sentences to communicate with your audience effectively.

For each section, introduce the overall topic, provide explanatory context, and then share a key takeaway to help transition the reader into the next section. Subheadings, bullet points, and lists can be especially helpful in fleshing out your content in a way that’s easy to read and digest.

Revise and Edit

Look at your finished first draft and see if there are any major gaps in your content. Do you need to add any extra context? Do certain parts of the ebook go off track?

Revise your draft by adjusting your message until you feel you’ve effectively achieved your goal. Then, go line by line and edit your content to ensure you’re using appropriate grammar, punctuation, and style conventions.

Follow consistent brand guidelines to ensure that each ebook you publish has a consistent editorial style that strengthens your brand image.

Design

One of the key benefits of ebooks is their visual appeal—they aren’t just words on a page. Designing your ebook to be stimulating and appealing is essential if you want your reader to stick with the content and act upon your call to action.

It needs an eye-catching cover, a logical table of contents layout, and an interior that is broken up by illustrations, graphs, infographics, and/or photos and call-outs. In addition, the ebook should be easily read on tablets and smartphones.

Choose A Format

Many ebooks are distributed as PDFs. While this is an acceptable, easy-to-format method, there is a downside. PDFs are not optimized for mobile use and cannot be interactive.

Consider interactive formats, long-form webpages, and other options that may improve search engine performance.

Proofread Your Content

Once the final draft of the ebook is approved and formatted, conduct one last read-through to catch any errors in your writing or layout. Some of the most common things to look for are extra spaces between words, typos, odd line breaks, or unaligned graphics.

It’s always a good idea for this last proofing to be done by someone other than the writer, editor, and designer, as they can provide a fresh set of eyes. You can also try proofing techniques, such as reading each line backward for a more detail-oriented, step-by-step approach.

Publish Your Ebook

Typically, you’ll want to set up a gated landing page that can house your ebook. You’ll use this page to offer the ebook in exchange for the prospect’s contact information, allowing you to build your mailing list and generate leads.

On your ebook request form, you can ask for specific information, such as what field the prospect is in, their job title, and why they’re requesting the ebook.

Promote and Distribute Your Final Product

With your ebook landing page live, it’s time to promote it. You can use several avenues to generate interest, including creating smaller blog posts promoting your ebook.

Other methods include linking the ebook to different products or using SEO content to help your landing page appear in search results. Try redirecting customers from your main page with eye-catching buttons and CTAs that drive them toward your ebook landing page.

Create Custom EBooks With ContentWriters

An ebook is not only a helpful resource that you can use to educate your customers and anyone interested in your industry. It is an effective tool for promoting your brand’s vision, processes, and products to potential clients.

By investing time, expertise, and care into your ebook development, you can position your brand as a legitimate industry resource, building trust in your products and creating a strong affinity with your customers.

At ContentWriters, we understand that customers who download ebooks are at a critical stage in their buying journey. A well-written ebook can be the difference between securing a long-time customer and losing them to a competitor.

Our expert writers leverage advanced research, writing, and editing skills to provide you with a brand-aligned final product that you can use as a lead-generation tool. Reach out to our team to start generating your custom ebook strategy today.

An earlier version of this post was published in May 2021 by Deborah K.

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