How to Choose What to Write Your Ebook About

When you’re beginning your ebook journey, it can be tough to figure out what you should make it about. That’s why I’m here. Here’s the quick answer:

You should write your ebook about whatever you are most interested in. This avoids giving up halfway through, which is one of the largest problems when writing an ebook.

Yep, it’s pretty much that simple. But in the rest of this post, I’ll guide you through the process of choosing exactly what to write about, how to assess your competition, and much more.

So let’s begin!

Like I said, just choose whatever floats your boat, right? It’s not quite that simple.

While that is a great start, it doesn’t give us a great deal of information, and it most certainly wouldn’t be optimal. What we’re looking for is the absolute best that we can get.

There are a few other factors to consider. These include:

1. Competition. This is a big one. You really need to avoid competing with established authors in competitive spaces, as it is essentially just a guaranteed loss.
2. Difficulty of creation. If you’re writing about children’s books, it will be a lot easier than writing about quantum relativity, right? However, competition and difficulty often come hand-in-hand, so you need to find a balance.
3. Your expertise. This ties in a little with the whole whatever-floats-your-boat part a bit. If you’re extremely skilled (like, world-class) at – say, – knitting, then you shouldn’t be focusing on military operations as your book’s topic. You see what I mean?
4. What you’re interested in. This is definitely, by far, the most important one. Going back to the example above, if you were very interested in the military but no longer cared about knitting, I would recommend that you actually choose the military operations topic over knitting. That’s because the knitting book will never get finished, as you will have zero motivation.

These are the most important factors. Of course, there are many more – which may be more or less important based on the focus topic.

Now let’s move on to the next part – how do we actually choose?

There’s probably a few ideas that you’ve already thought of. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to narrow those down, come up with more, and find the perfect one.

1. Come up with a ton of topics you’re interested in. Yes, right now. Go and open a notes app (or get some paper) and write down at least 15 ideas – as a very minimum.
2. Now that you have your ideas, go back through it and cross off any that you aren’t actually interested in (there’s usually a few). Now replace them as well, and repeat until you’re interested in all of them.
3. Now it gets more difficult. Order them, from 1 onwards by how interested you are in them – eg. 1 is the best and 15 (or a different number) is worst. Then, next to the score you just gave them, add another score. Make this one about how much expertise you have in them. However, do this one in increments of 0.5, starting from 1 again.
4. Give each one a combined score of the two. For example, if I had the topic of snowboarding, and I gave it a 5 for how interested I was in it and a 4.5 for how much expertise I had, it would be a combined score of 9.5. Now reorder them using the combined score (just in your head if you want), with the lowest score first.
5. Now research the competition on each of these ideas. Sometimes you can tell just from personal experience. Sometimes you have to search on Google or Amazon to see it. Either way, add another score (I know, it’s becoming too much) to each one, again with 0.5 increments. Then add it up.
6. Add a final score to each one with 0.25 increments, representing the difficulty of creation. Then tot up the final totals, and the one with the lowest score is your best option.

This isn’t a perfect system, but it is pretty good and it’s very reliable. If you think one factor is more important, add a bit to the increment of that factor, and vice-versa.

But what if you have absolutely no ideas, at all?

Well, there are two possible solutions to this. Here they are:

1. Phone a friend. Literally. And ask them for some ideas.
2. I can give you some topics which will hopefully get your brain into gear. Look below.

Here’s some topics:

1. Sports
2. Games
3. Careers
4. Financial – Business, Investing, Saving, etc.
5. Technology
6. Science
7. Hobbies
8. Puzzles
9. Fiction (Combine with one above if required)

Of course, this is not a very comprehensive list. But because of how wide the categories are, it covers most topics. Then, once you’ve got a few ideas, you can go back to what we discussed earlier and figure out the best option.

Thanks for reading this post. Here’s my blog for additional support.