Webinar Review - How to write an e-book in an hour

Last week I watched a webinar hosted by Daniel Hall featuring Robert Plank. Robert is an online entrepreneur and prolific e-book author. Robert covered three different content creation strategies in the webinar. The most interesting one, in my opinion, was how to write an e-book in an hour.

Choose a topic

The strategy is fairly simple. The first step is to determine a topic for your book.

7 questions as chapters

The second step is to develop seven questions that address various perspectives of your topic. For example, if your topic was "Creating and using a blog," the seven questions might be:

1. What is a blog?
2. How do I set up a blog?
3. Where do I get content for my blog?
4. How can I share my blog with others?
5. Which platform is best for my blog?
6. How can I use my blog to support my business?
7. How can I optimize my blog for search engines?

Why/What/How/What-if questions

For each question, ask four more questions:

1. Why is this important?
2. What are we going to do?
3. How do we do it?
4. What-if I do this ... what's the next step?

For example, using one of the seven questions above, the questions might look like:

1. Where can I get content for my blog?

• Why is it important to keep developing content?
• What are some tools to create content?
• How do I create posts?
• What-if I create content, what are different ways I can utilize it?

Record audio and transcribe

The process, according to Robert, is to record yourself speaking on each of the Why/What/How/What-if questions for two minutes. Seven topics/chapters times four sub-questions times two minutes per questions results in about an hour of recorded audio.

Once you've completed recording the audio, send it to a transcription service such as oDesk.com to convert the audio into a printed document.

Publish as an e-book

There are several resources to format the text as an e-book and publish on Amazon, Lulu, Nook, Google, and other online bookstores. I will discuss this process in a later post.