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Writing can generally be a fluid creative process but it is easy for this process to spiral off track and out of control. It is fine to allow creative license but this should be contained within the overall process and overall goal of the eBook you are writing.

Therefore, treat writing ebooks with the same approach you would create a physical project (e.g. building a wooden chair). With this approach first brainstorm as many ideas as you can, focus in on ideas that interest you and prototype them. Prototyping ebook ideas can be as simple as white-boarding as many ideas as you can, delving deeper into the ones that interest you and coming up with a story line or chapter guide for your book.

After prototyping your eBook ideas you are ready to start into the execution phase of producing and writing your eBook. The stages mentioned below are formed in such a way that the overall goal of your eBook filters down into each activity.

Establish the goal of your eBook.

Set the goal or goals for your book. Don’t try to muddy the waters with a multitude of goals. Think of any of your favourite books and they probably have a small amount of objectives and one central goal.

Specify all the tasks involved in writing the book.

This can be as simple as taking your rough listing of chapters, add any formatting/presentation that will be required and not forgetting research that you (or others) will need to do. You’ll have your own list of add-on tasks specific to your eBooks subject. Give each task a rough level of effort (e.g. 2 days to complete chapter 1).

Highlight those jobs that require external help; source and schedule their time early on.

Will you use an assistant to run some research? Maybe you will outsource to a designer the books page formatting/icons? Planning to interview experts in the field? Plan ahead and contact these people to front load this work if possible.

Add in contingency for things that may go wrong.

You’ll know better than I what percentage you should give here. Once you write a couple of books you’ll have a better gauge of how many days you run over (or under). Adding 10% to 20% is being prudent.

By this stage you now have a list of all the work to be done. You could use project management software to plan this out and establish the duration of all your work. Alternately, use a whiteboard with the days of the week and add post-it notes for each action to be completed. Or just keep it simple by adding the actions to your diary along with any planned holidays you wish to take (so you know to work around them).

Work the plan.

As the saying goes “create a plan, and then work the plan”. As you start implementing your planned tasks you can tick them off of your list as completed. Keep track of tasks running over. Use your contingency/margin of error for these. This should not suppress the creative writing process. Instead, this is focusing your mind on the value of your time.

Set yourself milestones and track them in a report.

Any project plan should have natural minor and major milestones. These can be chapters/sections/paragraphs. Work each day with a goal of the next milestone to keep motivation levels up. It is easier to think of only have 1,000 words to an end of chapter milestone, rather than the ominous prospect of 20,000 words to the end of the book. Track these milestones in a simple report/document.

Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Last thing to do is a post-mortem.

Congratulations on getting to the end. One last thing to do is a post-mortem on your plan to highlight delays, unforeseen task/issues, inaccuracies in defined level of effort and how much contingency was used. These can feed into plans for future books and help you grow your fledgling eBook business to greater heights.

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