6 RULES FOR WRITING GOOD E-BOOKS

1. Good Writing is Essential for a Good E-Book

First things first, and this might seem trivial: You want an e-book that’s as good as a printed book, which means you want something that is just as well written. Before you write your e-book, study the nuts and bolts of professional writing. Read a few writers’ guides, practice your writing skills, and sign up for a writing course or two.

2. A Good Editor is Worth a Thousand Misspelled Words

A good edits job versus a bad edit job can make of break your book, whether it’s printed or in electronic format. Having no edit at all is likely to kill it completely. So hire an editor or get a friend to be your second set of eyes.

3. Don’t go overboard with the Hyperlinks

Since your book is online and not just printed, you should consider adding certain online features such as hyperlinks. However, consider this before you venture in and add a gazillion hyperlink in your document: It’s easy for people to get lost or confused if there’s too much bouncing around within a book. Jeff was reading a book online and the page he was reading was filled with underscored words, each one a hyperlink to another page in the same book. As he got to each one he wasn’t sure if he was expected to click on the hyperlink so as to understand the rest of the chapter.

“Click here or you’ll be confused” was what it seemed like, although it wasn’t clear. So he clicked the first one and ended up on another page somewhere in the book, and that page was filled with hyperlinks. Soon it felt like he was surfing the whole Internet, bouncing from page to page and getting completely lost, yet staying within the one book. It was frustrating. He eventually realized the people who made the book thought it would be nice if the every word that had any relation to another page of the book were hyperlinked to that page. But the truth is it made for a very messy, unmanageable book. So here’s the moral: Don’t go overboard on the hyperlinks. You might think you are doing your readers an extra service, but really, you aren’t.

4. Make Sure Your Book is Still Useful When Printed

Another tidbit about the online experience is this: Make sure your e-book is still useful when printed. Plan that eventually it might find its way into a printed medium, whether it’s your consumers’ own home printers or an actual print publication with a first run of 10,000 copies. If you add hyperlinks where the user is required to click, or if you refer to the hyperlink without giving the address, you could have a problem when it’s printed. Have you ever printed up a Web site? You might see something like this: Click here to send me mail. Go ahead, click it. Obviously you can’t if you’re reading this on a printed page. But the online version has my e-mail address hidden behind it. What’s my e-mail address? When the page is printed it’s gone and nowhere to be found. A better approach would be something like this: If you want to send me e-mail, my address is :info@slymediaconcepts.com .The e-mail address is clickable in the online version, and for the print folks, it’s clearly written out

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5. Don’t Just Save the Files for the Printed Version in Hypertext

The same book that had too many hyperlinks also had another problem: It was clear the publisher had simply taken the files for the printed version of the book and saved them in a hypertext format, adding a gazillion hyperlinks. Whoever did the deed overlooked a problem, however. The whole thing was arranged in order by page, with no notion of chapters. There were statements such as See the next chapter for more information all over the place. And wouldn’t you know, this time ... there was no hyperlink! So how could one get to the next chapter? There were no chapter headings, nothing, only page after page after page. In other words, there was absolutely no way to know where the next chapter was. All you could do was read on and hopes to one day see it on the side of the road.

6. Watch Your References

In an e-book, its okay for the author to refer to what someone just read in the preceding paragraph. But because of the possibility of repagination, it’s best not to refer to the next page or the preceding page. Instead, refer to section and chapter headers. It’s also unwise to refer to images by their position in the text. Don’t say, “The figure to the right shows—.” Instead number your figures and refer to them by number.