How to Convert your E-Book into Article Series or E-Courses
Face it. Not everyone will find a book-length public domain work very appealing. Not even if you make the most attractive e-book cover in the world and sell your product at half the usual cost. The best that you can do with that method is probably raise a few eyebrows but no more.
It has been frequently observed that most online users are browsers and scanners. That means they do not spend too much time on a particular page and usually just skip through the content until they get to the part they are looking for.
Translated even further, this means that you can probably get them to pay much closer attention to what you have to say if you state it in the clearest, briefest, and most concise manner possible.
Now, “concise” is probably the last word you are going to use to describe an e-book. That is the nature of books: they are long. So do not wonder then if some people are not willing to invest their money on something they will probably only going to skim through.
How do you solve this dilemma?
By cutting your e-book into articles to create a whole series about several portions of the same topic.
This method particularly works if your e-book is non-fiction or self-help. You can separate your e-book into segments and offer them to your readers as a series or an e-course which they can subscribe to.
Making your e-book content subscription-based might very well be the exact thing you have been looking for in order to sell your public domain works.
Below are some easy tricks to do the job:
Slice and Dice
First, review the entire book and see if you can separate them into smaller portions. Remember that the segments must be separated in such a way that their logic is not destroyed.
Self-contained segments look similar to articles you often stumble on while surfing the web. Anywhere from 400-700 words will do, but a good length for an article series or an e-course installment is generally three to five full-size pages long. This way, the article will be just long enough to contain the “meat” but short enough so as not to intimidate your readers, or worse, bore them to tears.
Cutting up an e-book will probably be easier to do if the book is already divided into chapters. That way, you only have to take it section by section and do minor revisions to keep the context of a particular segment intact.
If, however, your e-book is not already separated, then separate them according to where a particular idea or subject ends and where the next begins.
Sometimes, the chapters or sub-chapters are going to be too long or too short. If that is the case, then pull up your sleeves and get to work as some creative shuffling is required to make the whole thing work.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:21 pm
[...] This sent a shock wave through the internet community and smart marketers realized that there is only one sure way to convince the search engines that they were meant to be at the top: Quality Content. [...]