Writing and publishing your very first eBook can change your life, especially if you are looking for a bit of extra income or if you are looking to take your first steps as an author. There are plenty of writers out there and plenty of would-be authors, people who have books inside them just waiting to break free, but they haven’t taken that step yet. Why not? Are you one of them?

Nonfiction eBooks are by far the easiest to start on – writing a fiction book is far more difficult – so instead of procrastinating, follow these tips for getting started on your first eBook, the first of many.

The first place, the most obvious place to start, is in coming up with an idea for your book and one of the single biggest mistakes that new writers make is in picking a topic that they think will sell without doing the research that will tell them definitively if there is or isn’t a market for it.

Tip 1 – Don’t Get Hung Up on Following the Money

You might think your idea is great and that it's going to make you money hand over fist just because the market for it is huge. For some topics, like dieting, cryptocurrency and recipe books, the market has been over-saturated and unless you have something special that no-else has written then your chances of success are slim – the only ones selling are the established authors.

Pick a topic that you are knowledgeable about and that you just know you will enjoy writing. Don’t pick a topic that bores you senseless because, believe me, it will come across in your writing. It also saves you a lot of research time and you are more likely to see it through to the finish.

Tip 2 – Think About What You Read

Do you know what your own specialist areas are? Have a look at the blogs, websites, and magazines that you read regularly; that will give you a good idea. Once your topic is decided, you need to go very deep into the resources available to you. Some articles will appear time and time again, they will just be rewritten or a slightly different take on the original and these are the ones that look at the popular topics – the idea that one article covers could be the basis for your eBook.

Tip 3: Use Your Own Newsletter, Blog or Website

If you have your own website, you write a blog, or you issue a newsletter then you are already several steps ahead of others. You have your idea, you have an audience. There are a couple of things you can do from here.

Pick several topics that you might write your book about and then run a poll among your audience to see which one is favorite.

Look through any emails or blog/social media comments you have and see what problems or questions are repeatedly arising. Could a book solve these issues?

This is a great starting point for coming up with your eBook idea so spend some time on this, get it right and the rest is plain sailing.