30 Days to Create Your Therapy Ebook

Creating an ebook for your therapy practice can provide you with a number of benefits for your practice:

• Additional income generated from an intangible item (no physical costs involved – printing, shipping etc)
• Develop expertise in your area of specialty
• Develop your professional reputation in the field of your topic

The topic of your ebooks is your first major decision to make. Ideally, you will want to find a topic that both interests you as a therapist as well as provides a need that your potential readers are looking for.

If you have an email list of subscribers or social media followers, you can ask your readers what topics they would like to learn more about or what problems they are currently experiencing in their life. You may want to leave your communication format open so that respondents can feel free to write you an open response, or you may like to create a survey that is more direct and specific to some ideas you may already have in mind for your ebook.

Your survey can help you clarify the most important components of that topic that your potential reader is interested in. For example, you may already know that you want to write an ebook on anxiety, however, after feedback, you may find that your readers have identified anxiety and interactions at work as their primary concern.

If you don’t have an audience to seek opinions from, you can read online forums about your topic (Facebook groups, Reddit, etc.) where people discuss common concerns in the field of your ebook topic. Be sure to make note of responses based on the demographics of the online forums that you are reading. For example, if you wish to create an ebook for mothers experiencing anxiety, then you might benefit from visiting parent focused forums.

Ideally, you should aim to have the above research completed before starting your 30 days plan for writing your ebook. This step of gathering information can be conducted over time with the results collated into one area for analysis once you are ready to start writing your ebook.

To help you define your topic, ask yourself these questions below:

• Who is your potential reader
• Why do you want to help the reader who purchases your ebook
• What is the number one challenge your potential reader is facing about your topic
• If this one challenge is not big enough to fill a complete ebook, consider adding 2-3 more challenges that are commonly experienced by people
• If you are a member of any Facebook groups, Reddit sub-reddits, or other online message boards, review the most posted topics that relate to your topic idea.

Using online forums, social media, and talking with current clients will help you narrow down your topic. It is important to keep in mind that your ebook should:

• Fall under your expertise of knowledge
• Be what your potential readers are seeking help for
• Be presentable for an online format (and not rely on in-person teaching)
• Meet your ethical obligations as a therapist

For more reading on the process to create educational programs and content, check out your previous blog post: How Do I Create an Ecourse for my Therapy Practice

TAKE ACTION:

DAYS 1-2: CHOOSE YOUR TOPIC AND MAKE YOUR PLAN

1. Make a plan for the next 30 days. Use this example plan in this blog post as a general guide. Book 1-3 hours per session into your calendar. Allocate tasks to each day. Collect the resources, links, documents you will use to research your topic idea.

2. Review the resources, links, documents that you collected on day 1 to research your topic idea. Allow approximately 60 minutes to peruse each resource to try and determine the main ideas that you wish to include in your ebook. Use the next 60 minutes refining this list of main ideas to determine your main course idea.

Creating an ebook outline will provide you with a framework to write your content. This will help keep your ebook content focused on your topic so that your ebook delivers on the help you are aiming to provide to your readers.

Your ebook content should be simple and concise to increase the likelihood that your readers will learn something useful to implement in their lives. You do not want your reader to finish your ebook and feel more overwhelmed then they were before starting your ebook.

Below is a guideline to follow to create your ebook outline over the next few days. This guideline would be an initial plan to get you started on your creating ebook. The guideline helps you stay focused on creating succinct and relevant information in your ebook. Your guideline should be useful enough to get you started but remain flexible as you create the content. From this guideline, you can decide how to plan your time to spend on creating your ebook content.

NOTE: All of these items can be changed or refined later if your ebook changes direction. It is important to make decisions and keep momentum on creating your ebook.

TAKE ACTION:

DAYS 3-5: CREATE YOUR EBOOK OUTLINE

3. Make decisions on:

• Ebook sales platform to use (eg. Your website, Amazon, 3rd party digital delivery platforms such as ejunkie etc)
• Approximately length of the ebook
• Price of the ebook. You may want to consider discounts for early bird purchases or including the ebook as a free bonus to include in a paid ecourse or workshop you have created.
• Payment methods (credit card, PayPal etc.) This will largely depend on the platforms that you are using to sell your ebook. Create your refund policy.

4. Research topic content from sources: Facebook groups, Amazon books, courses, Google, podcasts. Brain dump all potential ideas, however, ensure they remain relevant to your main topic and goal for your readers.

5. Use the research information that you gathered on day 4 to work out your ebook outline and how you will structure your ebook content. Use a simple process of creating chapters and then headings and sub-headings in each chapter. Allocate an estimated word count against each chapter/heading/sub-heading to give yourself a writing goal for each section. An example of word count goals is below:

• Goal for total pages of ebook: 100 pages
• Approx words per page: 250
• Total words for 100 page ebook: 25,000
• Chapters outlines: 10 chapters is approx 2,500 words per chapter
• Each chapter will have 4 main points to discuss plus an intro and summary: Total 6 main sections is approx 417 words per section.

Working out this word count of 417 words per section can now serve as a writing goal each time that you sit at your computer. You can set a goal for 1,2, or 3 sections at a time.

Creating your ebook content should easily flow based on your ebook outline and timetable.

In the content creating stage you should write without editing your content. Write as much content as you can in each session and don’t worry about grammar, spelling or anything that will slow you down from creating content. Now is the time to abandon any perfectionist tendencies and aim for done over perfect.

An example of how to split your writing process is included below. The guide below is based on a 100 page ebook with a total of 25,000 words as discussed in the example above. 

TAKE ACTION:

DAYS 6-23: WRITE YOUR EBOOK CONTENT

6. Daily writing goal 1200 words
7. Daily writing goal 1400 words
8. Daily writing goal 1400 words
9. Daily writing goal 1400 words
10. Daily writing goal 1400 words
11. Daily writing goal 1400 words
12. Daily writing goal 1400 words
13. Daily writing goal 1400 words
14. Daily writing goal 1400 words
15. Daily writing goal 1400 words
16. Daily writing goal 1400 words
17. Daily writing goal 1400 words
18. Daily writing goal 1400 words
19. Daily writing goal 1400 words
20. Daily writing goal 1400 words
21. Daily writing goal 1400 words
22. Daily writing goal 1400 words
23. Daily writing goal 1400 words

Editing your ebook should focus on 3 important tasks:

• Correcting any grammar or spelling errors
• Ensuring your content flows in a natural order
• Ensuring your content achieves the overall goal that you initially set to help your reader.

If any content does not achieve your overall goal, you should remove it and use it in another ebook or course at a later date.

Think about your limits on time. Would you rather read a book that is 1000 pages long or a book that is 200 pages long and provides the same message? More is not always better.

TAKE ACTION:

DAYS 24-28: EDIT YOUR EBOOK

24. Edit ebook for content flow, goals and overall writing structure
25. Edit ebook for content flow, goals and overall writing structure
26. Edit ebook for content flow, goals and overall writing structure
27. Edit ebook spelling and grammar
28. Edit ebook spelling and grammar

Once your ebook is created and edited, you can make your ebook available to readers. There are many platforms you can choose to sell your ebook on including your website and other 3rd party platforms such as Amazon or ejunkie.

At the start, you may want to sell your ebook on your website only. This will limit your potential reader audience, however, it will also give you the opportunity to sell your ebook to a smaller audience and allow some time for feedback from your readers.

From this feedback, you may want to change a few things in your ebook before you make it available for sale on larger platforms such as Amazon. You may want to:

• increase or decrease the length of the ebook
• change the price of the ebook
• include testimonials at the front of your ebook from readers
• fix any spelling or grammatical errors you may have missed the first time
• clarify any confusing content

Selling your ebook on your website first gives you a soft launch marketing approach so that you can make improvements to your ebook before your launch on larger platforms.

TAKE ACTION:

DAYS 29-30: PUBLISH YOUR EBOOK

29. Load your ebook to your various platforms. Test purchasing an ebook if possible.
30. Problem solve any issues with publishing your ebook.

CELEBRATE – YOU’RE FINISHED!

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