Fill In The Blanks
Once you have a good outline, you'll know what
topics you need to research more and can spend a little time doing just that. You should become familiar with
quick ways to research any topic so that it can speed up the writing process. If you're a walking library of
information on your topic, you won't have to spend much time researching anything. However, for those that want
to spend a bit more time getting into their subject more, there are a few options before they set pen to
paper.
GOOGLE IT
Use keywords that define your niche topic for
each chapter to Google new information across the Internet. Almost everyone is familiar with Google's search
engine. You can even use the advanced search to limit yourself to recent postings on the Web too to make your
information more current. Just be sure not to plagiarize information and to use it solely for research purposes.
Be careful about the information on Google, as sources may not be accurate, so it does take some good ability to
discern good and bad information via the references offered in each article. Even Wikipedia, a great source for
research, is not 100% accurate, since it is updated by everyday people who can and do make mistakes. Consider
the source when doing research. This way, you'll be more accurate if you use any facts or figures that are
quoted within an article by checking the source too.
ASK AN EXPERT
A great way to put together some valuable
information for your readers that you don't know without necessarily doing heavy-duty research is to ask an
expert to contribute to your ebook. Of course, there has to be something in it for him/her, but you can do an
entire ebook with chapters devoted to him/her discussing a particular topic of interest to your readers. If you
promise to let him/her link to his/her products and services within the ebook, and you have a wide enough
audience who will be offered the ebook for free, it can be a win-win for everyone. Write it up in an interview
format that’s very easy to read and nicely segmented. In some cases, the ebook might be a promotional item to
help you prod a person into buying something else that you and/or your expert sponsors, so it's not going to be
sold, but is going to be given away instead. With so much exposure available to experts trying to sell their
products, it will be something that will interest them to help you with it because it will help them sell their
products to a new audience.
How To Format Everything
Quickly
If you're using Word, you can format your
headings and subheadings so that they can be used easily at the end of the creation of your ebook to generate a
table of contents (TOC). Depending on the word processing package you are using, there will be different menus
that allow you to format the headings. If you start with the idea that your chapter and section headings are
going to make up the table of contents, you will know ahead of time to format them as you go along. For now,
let's just quickly go over how it's done in Microsoft Word, as this is the most popular word processing program
out there.
HEADING STYLES
You will have the option to format text that you
highlight in different styles. You can do this from the menu or from the Style box on the formatting tool bar if
it's showing. Heading 1 is the style that is used for major chapter headings, while Heading 2 is used for
subheadings. To apply a Heading 1 Style, you can do one of the following after selecting the
text:
1. Click the Style box and choose Heading 1 as your style to apply.
2. Using the menu, you might try using the Format menu, and under Styles, you will be able to
click Apply.
3. Use Ctrl-Shift-S for Word versions earlier than 2007 to get to the Format toolbar where you
can apply it with the Style box.
Whatever way your word processing program does
this, it's still the same in most word processing programs. In OpenOffice, you will even have Chapter Headings
that you can use, which are much larger and which appear like the page headings in this
report.
TO INSERT THE TOC
Once you have a few heading styles applied, try
to see how they look in a shortened TOC. In a new page near the top of your ebook, before your headings and
subheadings, you will place your cursor to insert your TOC. This is done by choosing the Insert command on the
main menu of Word. In earlier versions of Word, the submenu you want is “Index and Tables” or “Reference/Index
and Tables.” Click OK, and it will take your headings, add the page numbers, and put in a TOC for you. If you
want to change the look of the TOC, choose to modify it within this command, not from within the
ebook.
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