eBook Answers — Day 1
Monday Morning. Let’s put a little fact behind the fluff here. Last week in the intro to eBook Answers I told you I would show you how to pick something profitable to use your knowledge on. I could write on the outline sub-heading I made for today for a month … but I won’t. Here’s the first thing you have to do, unless you have a topic clearly in mind:
Find Potential Hot Topics:
The tools I would use for this, aside from watching TV, reading the news and subscribing to blogs that interest you (you are subscribed to www.retiredpay.com, aren’t you?) would be:
- Google News Alerts: This is a great service that Google runs ’round the clock for you. Merely go to the signup page (alerts.google.com will do it) and add alerts for any items you can think of in the general area you’re interested in. In a couple hours you’ll have an email with every mention of your requested word or phrase, world-wide. In the sample you can see a portion of my Alerts … that represents 1,000 or more messages per week on the selected subject … great idea starter.
- Shortlist your eBook Topics: You’re going to think I am hung up on Google, perhaps, but hey, what works works and what is free is free. Google runs an excellent little service known as Google Notebook. You can run a button on your Google Toolbar or you can also put a little widget into your FireFox browser to bring up your Google Notebook with one click. Let’s say you see a news item in your chosen field that you need to research further. Simply drop the URL into your notebook along with any other thoughts, reminders, etc. and when it’s time to research further it’s all there in one place … no lost file folders, no missing scraps of paper … digital convenience. And take a tip from someone who has learned this the hard way a number of times … some of your items to research are of course going to be ‘turkeys”. Don’t waste further time on them once you see they are mot what you want. But do not delete them. A close relative of today’s turkey may become tomorrow’s swan … and don’t kid yourself that you might not, by chance, start off on the dame wild goose chase again in the future … if you go to put something in your book and it already there? hey, memory is the second thing to go … I forget the first. Where you should strive to be at right now is to have a short list, say 5 to 10 topics that look to be worth further research. Once again we’ll turn to Google.
- Google Trends is a fantastic tool that will not only tell you “what’s the buzz”, it will give you a very good guide to why something is hot and just how hot it is. Let’s put this into a more concrete example. Suppose you are one of my readers named Fred and you used to work in the mortgage lending industry. it’s certainly no secret that sub-prime loans, foreclosures, slowing real estate markets and some other ills related to borrowing are kind of dominating the US news these days. So Fred goes to Google Trends and types in five phrases or “keywords” he thinks might be a good subject to write about … foreclosure, sub-prime, housing market, reits (Real estate Investment Trusts) and loan defaults. Fred sets the time scale to 2007, because Google has trend info on these subjects for a few years back, and we really don’t care what was “hot” in 2005.
I’m going to wind this post up for now, I want to keep them “bite sized” and not overwhelm you with too much at a time. I think you can clearly see, though, that if you’re Fred, and your toying with the idea that perhaps a book on How To Save Your Home From Foreclosure might have a commercial potential you can clearly see that the tools to remove a significant portion of risk are readily available and useable right from your standard web browser.
You should also take to hear also why I am focusing on eBooks here rather than traditional paper books. If you start today to write a book on Foreclosure-proofing Your Home and you are a print-quality writer, and you find a publisher who works well with you, and you work many hours per day … in about 6 or 7 months, at the earliest, your book will be in the book stores. Sorry about your luck. The hot subject then will be, How I made a Million In The Foreclosure Market or Why Hillary Dominated The Primaries or How To Cope With $5 gas … but the current foreclose bubble will be long burst.
It’s all about time to market and that is what the Internet and instant, electronic delivery is all about. It’s also about selling a few hundred copies of a mini-book at $20 or $30 clear profit each rather than selling a few thousand traditional books with the author’s share being $0.25 or so. Tomorrow, how to quantify those profits.
By the way, if you are someone like Fred, we really need to talk … I’d like to ‘walk” a real person through this process.
As always, feel free to leave a comment, write me an email at: davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com, or call me on 1-719-423-8872, or chat with me on Yahoo Messenger: davestarr(at)yahoo(dot)com. I’ll be happy to hear about subjects you want me to cover, places you feel I have erred, real life experiences good and bad, or just to toss out ideas you may have. There is no charge and no catch.
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