As a professional public speaker, you get two-thirds of your income off the podium, and a lot of that income is moving to the Internet. You can, of course, sell the old physical products online, but the web offers a special opportunity for income by writing e-books. An e-book is like a paper book except that it exists only electronically.



Why would you want to create an e-book? For one thing, having a book gives you extra credibility as an expert. Moreover, you can sell an e-book for approximately the same price as a physical book, but it costs almost nothing to duplicate and to deliver. Your royalty on a $30 physical book would be about three dollars, but your income on a $30 e-book would be nearly $27. If you don't wish to sell your electronic book directly, you can make it an extra benefit for someone who buys another one of your products promptly — "act by midnight tonight and you will receive these extra amazing offers..."

When should you create an e-book? You can create one whenever you've gathered sufficient material, since the cost of creating an e-book and delivering copies is minimal. Is it worth the small effort of putting together an e-book? You should probably check to see if there is sufficient demand for the material. See how many people sign up for the tele-seminars you are offering on the same topic. You could also check what other e-books are being offered on that subject, see how well their sales are doing, and see how yours could fit into a gap in what is being offered. If your book and the others are complementary, you might be able to work out joint ventures with the other authors to cross promote each other's books.

How much trouble is it to write an e-book? Quite little, actually, for a public speaker. You're giving speeches, classes, seminars, and tele-seminars. Get a recording, hire someone to transcribe it, and edit the transcription into a book. If one speech or tele-seminar doesn't give you enough material, put together the transcripts from two or more on different aspects of the same subject.

What do you have to do to turn a transcript into an e-book? Of course you should edit it carefully. You should format it attractively. You can format it in a conventional text editor such as Microsoft Word or Open Office Write. I use Lyx, a free typesetting system.

Eighty pages should be about the minimum for a book that you are going to sell at a reasonable price — reasonable price being defined as prices high enough to attract affiliates to bring you customers. Use 6" x 9" pages, which are easier to view on a computer screen. Use line-and-a-half or double spacing. You can start subheadings on the next page — you're not wasting paper.

When you have the body of the book properly formatted, save it in Postscript form.

You can create a cover with an image editor, or you can outsource it. Save the cover in Postscript.

Load the Postscript file for the cover followed by the Postscript file for the contents into a PDF creation program. Merge the two files, set the access rights, save the file in PDF, and you have your e-book.

Since it's so simple and inexpensive to create an electronic book, there is no reason not to create several ebooks a year.