How to Write an Ebook WITHOUT Writing It

Writing doesn't come easily to many people which is why there are so many article-directories out there. The few who can write well are willing to provide content for your website so long as you give credit to the author and put a link on your site. This is a very equitable arrangement as YOU don't have to write, and THEY get links to their website. This is definitely a win-win situation.


That's ONE thing you can do with articles written by other people. Another great way to use other people's content is to put several articles together into a compendium-book. You still have to give each author FULL credit for his or her work and you still need to include links in the book to the authors' websites, but given that caveat, you can produce and ebook in one day very easily.


Firstly you need a subject matter. Once you've decided what you want the book to be about, go to article sites like Go Articles, Article City, Idea Marketers and Ezine-Articles and use their search-boxes to find articles related to your subject.


READ THEM! Yep, make sure that each article is well-written and that it does make sense. Collect enough articles for about 50 pages, which will be about 25 articles or so. Leave them EXACTLY as they are! Don't change a word, even a spelling error.


Now, write a few lines introducing your book and making it clear that it is a compendium of ideas from several different authors. Put the articles in some order, and then write an index page with the title for each article along with the author's name and ad the correct page number.


If you don't have a decent word-processing package, one of the best is OpenOffice (available at OpenOffice.org) is which is totally FREE and has very impressive functionality. OpenOffice also has several other office utilities, but the one you want right now is OpenOffice 'writer', (though you may as well download all of the other utilities as you may want them and as I said, it's FREE!).


The other great thing about this software (how much better can it get?) is that it has a built-in pdf printer, which is also one of the best pdf printers out there. It's one of the best because you can write ANY text you want and then hyperlink the text to ANY website. Many pdf printers don't let you do this.


You can use this feature to put links to YOUR websites in your introductory page. To put a hyperlink into a word, simply highlight the word (perhaps the name of a product or the name of your website), click the 'Hyperlink' icon at the top (which is a globe with two chain-links). When the hyperlink window opens, type the URL (including the http://) into the 'target' field then click 'Apply'. You can then close that window.


Make the fonts of your ebook look interesting. Don't just use the default Times New Roman. Change some font colors too, but use just two, one for text and one for the headings and sub-headings.


Now that you've compiled your book using this software, click 'File' then click 'Export As PDF'. Depending on the version of OpenOffice writer, you may have another window open-up, so if you do, just click the 'Export' button.


Save it somewhere you can find it, like your desktop, then click 'Save'.


Let the software do it's magic, and then once it's finished processing, you have a nice new ebook. You can give the book away as a bonus or you can give it to people who sign-up to your mailing list. By the way, if you aren't creating a mailing-list, you MUST do this. Go to GetResponse to get an autoresponder account set-up.