How to Write Your First Ebook

So, you’re thinking about writing an ebook? Great job, you’ve come to the right place! In this post I’m going to walk you through how to write an ebook from start to finish. So let’s stop waiting and get going!

Here’s a quick answer for those of you that only want a quick overview of how to do it:

To write an ebook, you need to structure your story, then write the chapters, one by one. Edit your book and you are mostly done. You should market it to achieve success, but it is not strictly necessary.

Of course, that really isn’t the end of the story, but it is important (in my experience). Just get straight to writing, even if you don’t have the best idea of what it will look like. Just starting is the thing that holds most of the population back.

For this post, we will be mainly focusing on fiction books, but most of the ideas here can apply to non-fiction, or anything in-between. Many parts of the ebook creation process, such as editing and publishing are the same regardless of the type of book, so if you are trying to make a non-fiction book, this will still be useful to you.

Before we start, though, why? What’s the actual point of putting in a ton of effort to write an ebook? Well, the short answer is: money. For most people, it’s a good way of making cash that comes with the added benefit of getting your points and ideas across to other people.

Some ebooks can make millions for the authors, so for a few people it becomes their primary income source. And while this can happen, it isn’t common. Click here for an in-depth guide of just how much ebooks can actually make.

For some people, they just want to publish an ebook because it looks good when applying to a job. For some, it can just be to show the world their ideas. But for most, and most certainly me, it mostly just comes down to the cash.

But what is the benefit over traditional publishing? Well, traditional publishing is slow, and can occasionally take years to get a book from submission to the shelves. It also has many more people involved, which makes the whole thing more difficult and complex. But it also, again, ultimately is down to the money. Traditionally published authors typically get around 15% royalties on their book’s sales, whereas traditionally published authors usually get about 70%, with some making 100% of sales’ revenue.

Ebooks are also a faster-growing market than normal books, because of their comparatively low price. This means that ebooks are often a better choice in the long-run as well.

For some it is definitely better to traditionally publish, usually because they are bad at the other aspects of publishing, but for most self-publishing is the better idea.

You should write about what you know the most about. At the beginning of my journey, this was chess, so I wrote two books on guides to chess for beginners. They ended up selling thousands of copies in their first week each, so they both ended up being pretty successful for a first try (you can learn something from that).

For example, I started this blog because I knew quite a lot about making money, as a child (because I am a kid). This is actually one of my first posts, so I do not know how this will pan out long term, but I’m feeling hopeful.

For you, this could be a hobby, something related to your profession, or just something that you have been interested in for a while. It could also be something that you learnt a lot about at some point in the past. So, for instance, if you did Maths A-Level but haven’t touched mathematics since, you should brush up a bit and now you have an ebook idea!

The point is, you need to know enough about the topic to create an entire book by yourself. So that usually narrows it down quite a lot. If you still have a few different ideas, then pick the one that you like the most, because you don’t want to be two months in and realise that you actually don’t like writing about the topic. Believe me, I’ve done that before (and it makes it very difficult to finish the whole thing).

Another thing you should try to focus on when choosing your niche and book idea is to try and find under-served categories. This is particularly important for non-fiction books, as they can offer better replacements, so it is closer to perfect competition.

To find an under-served and less competitive category, there are three main methods. Here they are:

1. Simply searching on Amazon. If you cannot find a very similar book to your idea, then there is probably a small amount of competition. This may indicate that your idea could end up with more customers.
2. Third-party tools. Keyword research tools can be used (despite not being their primary purpose) to find good niches for an ebook.
3. Google. Google can be surprisingly useful. This is not only because of how it works similarly to Amazon, but it also gives you even more ebooks and websites. They also give you information that could be useful to know, such as how many blog posts there are on your niche. After all, who will buy an ebook if there’s free info available online?

Now you have your niche, let’s move on to the next step.

I would personally recommend using Word, but almost anything is fine, as long as it is up-to-date and compatible with your ideal self-publishing service. For instance, if you are trying to publish on Amazon (by the way, here’s a guide on where to publish your ebook), then you should be using something that can export in PDF, ePUB or DOC (though ideally PDF, as KDP understands it best).

Even using Microsoft Notepad is usually okay (though I wouldn’t recommend it)! Canva is a good option, but if you are using a lot of images and text, it can get a little laggy. A PDF editor is usually a good option, but I recommend Word because it is easy to convert to a PDF, easy to use, not laggy (just try to get it to lag on a modern computer, I dare you), and has a ton of useful features.

The takeaway here is that you can use whatever you prefer using. After all, you shouldn’t be using a program that you hate to write your beloved ebook.

Making your story feel good is probably the most important thing to a reader. So you’ve now got tonnes of pressure to nail your storyline now, but just how do we go about doing that?

You’ve probably heard of the story mountain, right? Yeah, it’s usually not that helpful. You can try it if you like, but don’t stress over it. Just go with the flow and create the best story you can. Add a few highs and lows and it’s probably fine. Read through it a few time to make sure it makes sense, and try to make sure that it would be satisfying by the end to read.

Now you’ve got a basic plan. Here’s how to improve it. Go up to the most honest friend you know (yes, now!) and ask them to read it through. Once they’re done, ask them to tell you how to make it better. Chances are, you’ve missed something that could really benefit your story. Fix it, and then go back to them again, and repeat it.

After an hour or so, you’ll have a very annoyed friend, but a good plan for your ebook (make them a good hot drink as a token of your gratitude). Try and check with a few other people and get their advice as well, as having a multitude of people to check it can be incredibly valuable.

If you mess up this step, then the ebook will never get self-published. That’s because you will lose hope in it as you won’t be happy with it. Make sure you absolutely nail this first and then focus on other stuff.

This is also the best opportunity you have to structure and organise your ebook. You should create your chapter layout and a table of contents (better to do this early, take my word for it). The way that you can make a table of contents in Word is by using the “Heading” option on the home section. Then you go to “Table of Contents” and it will do it automatically. I know that wasn’t the best explanation, but it’s easy to search online.

Format your ebook as well with page numbers, as it can be annoying if you forget about this (Amazon KDP don’t allow books without page numbers). Add a copyright page if you feel like it.

But now you’ve got to write the actual book, which is probably the most time-consuming part, so let’s jump into that.

Yep, this is the big part. Writing the whole ebook. My advice is to take it one chapter at a time, especially if your chapters are long. Just sit down one day in the evening with a laptop and write one chapter. It sounds easy, but I can assure you that it takes a while.

For now, don’t worry about spelling mistakes, making it sound perfect or anything else. Just focus on getting everything out of your head onto the document. Right now, you need to make sure that you get everything in your story onto paper, because then you actually have something to work with.

Try to minimize distractions while you are writing. Put on some of your favourite music and just bang out the whole thing. Don’t worry if you go back on yourself a lot, adding in extra chapters or changing things. That’s good! It means that you care about it enough to want to make it seem great in the first draft.

Usually it can take many hours in total to finish. For some longer books, it can even take multiple days total, but those are outliers. Expect your book to take you about 24 hours if you did it straight with no breaks.

Your first draft does really not need to be all that good. It can have a ton of typos, missing words, a jumbled storyline, as long as you can understand it all. Try to make it at least 40,000 words for now if you are writing fiction, but 20,000 is probably okay if you are doing non-fiction. Ideally a finished book would exceed 80,000 words, but it isn’t always possible.

The next step, after you’ve finished all of the writing is to go back through and fix all those mistakes. Fix the typos, add in the missing words and add in extra paragraphs to make it better. You could even add in entire new chapters if it fits. Try to make your document longer, ideally about 50,000 words as a minimum.

Repeat this process a bit and eventually you’ll have an ebook. It may be a good ebook – probably not, but that’s where the next step comes in.

You need to edit your book. I created a blog post just to help with this, but here’s a quick overview.

1. Paste a chapter into Hemingway Editor. It will tell you how and where to improve your book to make it more readable. It won’t help with making things easier to understand (like your storyline), so you have to do that yourself – that’s called doing “deep edits”. But it will make it easy to read and look nice to read through.
2. Do some deeper edits. Like I said above, Hemingway Editor cannot do this, but ChatGPT can help you with these.
3. Add some other elements, such as photos to your ebook document. This makes it look nicer and you can emphasise your points better by using icons.

Editing is incredibly important. Don’t scrimp on this step, because otherwise your readers won’t understand you and you’ll get some negative reviews. Negative reviews are about the one thing that can really mess up your success, so you want to minimize them.

You should also try to add a little more content to your ebook during this phase. Try to meet the 80,000 words goal, but if you fall a little short, it probably won’t make a huge difference.

Wait, wait, wait! There’s still more you need to do (of course)! You need to make a good ebook cover, which will probably take an hour (or you can hire a freelancer), create a formatted description (here’s a tool for that), and also decide where to publish your book.

For where to publish it, I recommend either Amazon KDP or on your own website. KDP offers good royalties and a massive audience, but your own website is even better. Your own website can offer you essentially limitless customers if you have some decent marketing skills, and you get to keep every single penny (except for taxes, of course).

For creating an ebook cover, I would recommend using Canva or PowerPoint (yes, you read that right – PowerPoint!), because of its library of resources and easy use. PowerPoint is usually more familiar to people, but you will probably need to download many more things from the internet. Try to use bold text that stands out, and make your cover colourful.

And creating a description really shouldn’t take very much time at all. You need to present your ebook in the best possible light, but it is only a few paragraphs. You need to edit this a lot to get it perfect, because it is usually the thing that decides if a customer will buy or not.

Well, yes and no. If you just wanted to get your ebook out there for friends and family, then you are done, yes! But if you’re like me, and are trying to make some serious money from your ebook, then no, you’re only half done. You’ve got to do marketing now.

There’s plenty of ways you can do marketing for your ebook, and out of all the options it can seem difficult and overwhelming. But lucky for you, I created a helpful guide for marketing. It explains all the options, gives you some advice and some insider tips and tricks (plus some things to avoid).

But once you’re happy with your sales, then yes, you are done (or you could just write another one, like I did!).

Thanks for reading this post and good luck!