The 10 Day Ebook promises to get your ebook from idea to published and earning money in 10 days.
Is that possible?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes. With the proviso that you shouldn’t be a perfectionist and that you don’t let yourself suffer from too much analysis.
I’ve read quite a few different products similar to the 10 Day Ebook that claim to be able to get your ebook written and published in record time but this is the first one I’ve felt confident enough to actually review.
You’ve probably come across this kind of promise before – computing books that promise you’ll learn scary things like PHP in 24 hours or language books that claim you’ll speak French in a week. In most cases the reality is “dream on”. So it’s refreshing to read something that is actually realistic.
Let’s see what you need to do:
10 Day Ebook steps
Day 1 is research. The book goes into depth about what to look for in terms of number of internet searches, how much competition you should have and more. The recommended tools for checking into this are all free and most are ones I’ve used for research in the past, although a couple of the methods were new to me. Ideally you should research several topics rather than dive straight in with the first idea that takes your fancy. If that’s the case with you, there’s an excellent way to “tie break” between them. All in all, depending on how much keyword research you’ve done before, you should be able to complete day 1 in an hour or two.
Day 2 is where your book starts to take shape. Most authors dread staring at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen and this outlining technique will get over that completely. The outline is key to getting your ebook written fast and involves splitting your prospective ebook first into chapters and then smaller chunks and then even smaller chunks. Depending on how creative you’ve feeling, the outline process will take a few hours but I found my mind was already starting to write an ebook inside my head as I did this part of the process.
Day 3 is set to be a long day. You’ll actually be writing the first draft of your ebook today. Estimated time for this is around 7 hours if you’re aiming for a typical 50 page ebook. The good news is that this won’t be a marathon session typing away until your fingers wear away. Instead you’ll be doing the writing in short bursts so that you’ll always be enthusiastic. If you’re the kind of person who finds days like Sundays boring, aim to make your day 3 a Sunday and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised how far you get. Alternatively you could split day 3 into a few smaller sessions. Or you could “cheat” and use a program such as Dragon Naturally Speaking to type your book for you – this isn’t suggested in the book and personally I find programs like Dragon hold me back but a lot of people swear by them. If you don’t like typing it’s a great way to go. And if you’ve got a Windows Vista or Windows 7, you don’t even need to splash out on Dragon – there’s speech recognition software built in.
Day 4 is editing your book. Nick Daws has an interesting take on this and if you like everything to be 100% perfect you’ll almost certainly disagree. But remember that almost nothing is perfect and you can always go back and re-edit later when you’ve got some sales – this could even be a selling point by offering “free upgrades”. The method outlined is one I’ve not come across before but works well and means that you shouldn’t spend more than a few hours editing and polishing your ebook ready for sale.
Day 5 is easy. If you go about it the way that the book suggests, it will take you less than an hour to turn your book into one that’s ready to publish in PDF format (pretty much industry standard for any report on the web). Or you could download a copy of Open Office and use the “print to PDF” option to create your ebook in about the time it takes to read this paragraph. That’s how I do it for any ebooks I create and it works great with hyperlinks that work fine first time.
Day 6 goes through where to publish your ebook, including full instructions for the preferred method if you’re going to publish in electronic form only. Allow about an hour at most to complete day 6.
Day 7 is all about creating your sales letter. This is another part that a lot of people (myself included) dread. Nick Daws has a solid, six step approach that will help you get over any fear you may have of writing a sales letter. He also points you in the direction of some good sales pages that you can model – remember to only do this with your wallet safely locked in another room and your Paypal password blanked from your mind! You’re only using these as models, not as things to buy. So long as you’re not a perfectionist, day 7 should take no more than a few hours.
Day 8 involves setting your sales page up. There are quite a few different options here. Another way, not suggested by Nick, would be Word’s option of “Save as web page”. Web purists will probably hate me for even suggesting that but it works. Even better would be to use a WordPress blog and the free sales theme available from WordPress Sales Letter Theme. I’m getting lazier nowadays with my web design and to my mind, WordPress is the easiest way to publish content and themes like that take all the hassle of setting up professional looking sales pages. Day 8 also covers registering your domain name and getting hosting. Nick suggests getting your domain name and hosting from the same supplier but I don’t agree with that. Personally, nowadays, I get near enough all my names from Namecheap and my hosting from Hostgator. Your choice and not a showstopper but those are who I’d go with. There’s also some testing needed on day 8 so depending on how confident you are with the technical stuff, allow anything from 1 to 4 hours to get this sorted. Or find a local web savvy teenager to help you with this stage.
Day 9 is when the fun starts: promoting your brand new ebook. The book covers the two main ways of launching your new ebook and pushes one of those as better for most people, especially if it’s your first project. Sensible advice and if you follow all of it you’ll be set for a good amount of traffic coming to your site. How much time you should devote for promotion is a bit like asking how long is a piece of string but I’d allow several hours at least for this part. The good news is that the more time you spend here, the more sales you’re likely to make.
Day 10 covers getting other people to sell your ebook for you. These are usually called affiliates. The book covers what to pay affiliates (although Nick’s suggested percentage is on the low side to my mind), how to attract them in the first place, getting joint venture partners and several other ways to get your new ebook up and selling. A bit like day 9, the more time you spend on this the higher your rewards are likely to be.
Overall verdict
The 10 day ebook is a comprehensive guide to writing, compiling and selling an ebook. It also comes with a brave guarantee: so long as you follow through on the process shown, the publishers guarantee that you’ll make at least $1,000 a month from your first ebook. Of course this means that you have to get off your backside and actually do something but that’s the same as anything in life. What it does mean is that there’s no real downside so long as you actually go through with things: if following the course doesn’t get you an ebook that earns real money, you get a refund.
10 days is perfectly achievable. Most of those days aren’t full, 8 hour, working days. And if it took you a bit longer you should still be able to get your new ebook written and promoted within a handful of weeks, even if you only spend a couple of hours a day at it. Once it’s written and promoted, it has the potential to earn money with next to no effort for months and years which has got to be good.
Just wanted to thank you for a very thoughtful and constructive review of The 10-Day E-Book. The feedback based on your own experiences is very helpful to me, and I will certainly take this on board when the time comes for the course to be updated.
In The 10-Day E-Book I tried to provide a realistic, step-by-step blueprint anyone could follow to create an e-book of their own, even if they had little previous experience of online writing and publishing.
Inevitably that meant suggesting certain specific courses of action rather than listing all of the possible options in every case. However, I would certainly expect many readers, perhaps most, to depart slightly from some of my recommendations, based on their own inclinations and experience.
Anyway, thanks very much again for a helpful and constructive review, which I will certainly be referring back to in the future.
Wow it sounds really promising. For those of use would’ve had difficulties in publishing the e-book way may be the best route to go.
The 10 steps sound easy enough to follow and would make for a good way to put a book on Kindle. Thanks!