How to Create an Ebook Your Audience Will Actually Want to Download

If you have a blog, run a company, or are just trying to make a name for yourself in your field, you’ll probably know that there are few tools like a book to assert your thought leadership, and gain new clients or followers.

Dubbed as “the new business card” by James Altucher in 2012, books are more powerful than ever. They carry a sense of authority, of “seriousness.” This is why so many bloggers offer them as lead magnets, or content upgrades or exit popups. People love books, and if you offer them a relevant one for free, they’ll give you their email for it.

Now, while everyone nowadays can write and publish a book, doing so still requires a lot of effort and dedication. And because so many people are doing it, you really want yours to stand out.

In this post, I’ll share three indispensable tools you’re going to need if you want to create a proper, professional-looking ebook, and a bonus one to make the process even simpler!

1. Evernote to write your book “on the go”

You’ve probably already heard of Evernote as a note-taking app, right? Well, it can be just as handy for putting your book together.

Writing non-fiction requires a lot of discipline to organize all your ideas into a solid, logical outline, and still incorporate a sense of narrative throughout the book.

But the first step is generally always to write down all your ideas. That’s what some people call a “brain dump”, you put everything that comes to mind – everything you think could go into your book – onto paper. Then, once you have all your ideas written down, you can start organizing them into sections.

That’s where the Evernote app comes in handy. You can create a note for each section, and paste the relevant ideas in it. It’ll help you visualize your whole book as you write it.

More importantly, the really cool thing about Evernote is that you can access it from any device, at any time. Say an additional idea comes to you during a commute, you can just pull out your phone and write it into the right note section.

Or say you’re on a plane, with no internet connection, you can still open Evernote and keep writing your book. Heck, it’s what I’m doing right now with this blog post, at 35,000 feet up.

Finally, contrary to Word, or Google Docs, Evernote will rarely crash on you, even with tens of thousands of words in there.

Bonus tool: Dragon

Dragon is one of the most advanced speech-recognition software out there and used by many authors I know to simply dictate their books (whether it’s into Word, Scrivener or Evernote).

So, if you’re one for speaking instead of writing, give it a try. It’ll cost you $75 for the basic version on PC (on Mac, only the $300 “professional” one is available) but might save you a lot of time.

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