361 – Create a great book in record time: Tom talks Quality Ebooks

Episode 361 – Quality Ebooks
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey, everybody it's Tom here with episode three hundred and sixty one of Screw the Commute podcast.

[00:00:29] Today, we're going to talk about how to create a quality ebook in eight hours or less. Now, it's Saturday afternoon when I'm recording this. I got up early today. The book I wrote this morning that inspired this podcast took a total of six hours and I just checked before I'm doing this recording and so far it's brought in six hundred and forty four dollars a couple hours.

[00:00:59] By the end of the weekend, it'll be several thousand dollars. Now, I can't say how many you'll sell that fast, depending on your reputation and the size of your email list, but I can tell you that it's not hard to make a quality ebook fast, and that's what this episode is all about. All right. I hope you didn't miss episode 362. That was Richard Villasana. He's with ForeverHomesforKids.org. And he's been helping children, over 10000 families. He's helped get out of the foster system and. He's made a business out of it and he does what he loves and, you know, this is the great thing. And also he's got some cool tips if you want to do charitable stuff, how to ramp it up without having to create the 501 3C yourself. That's a very cool tip that he gave you.

[00:01:56] All right. How would you like to hear your own voice here on Screw the Commute? Well, the show has helped you out at all in your business or give you any ideas to help you start a business. We want to hear about it, visit, screwthecommute.com and look for a little blue sidebar that says send a voicemail mail, click on it and talk into your phone or computer. Tell me how the shows helped you and make sure you also put your website in there. Get your get a shout out here in front of thousands of people on a future episode of Screw the Commute. While you're over there, pick up a copy of our automation ebook at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And of course, all the links and stuff that I talk about will be in our show notes and to get to the show notes for this episode. Like all the episodes, you put screwthecommute.com and then slash the episode number. This is 361. But that book is great. It really helps run my business. Lightning fast reduces my workload, all kinds of great stuff. Also pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app and we have instructions on how to use it. Does all kinds of cool things on your cell phone or tablet so you can take us with you on the road.

[00:03:13] All right. Search volume for work from home on Google is still going crazy. There's a homeschooling trend that's going crazy because of all this craziness with the pandemic that people are suffering from. Now we have a school and a mentor program, I'll tell you about the mentor program later, but our sponsor is the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia.

[00:03:38] It's a distance learning school which teaches legitimate techniques to make a great living, either working for someone else or starting your own online business or both. You can check it out at IMTCVA.org. It's the only licensed, dedicated Internet marketing school in the country, probably the world it's licensed to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia. Since it's distance learning, there's no better time on Earth to learn to work and make money from home. I mean, I've been preachiness for over 20 years, been teaching this for 22 years and been selling online for twenty six years since the commercial Internet started. So I've been preaching this. But boy, so many people have gotten hit in the face with this thing. Work from home, work from home, work from home. Well, now, even if you're still working for another company from home, you could be doing this as a side hustle until it got to the point where it wasn't worth fooling with the other company. I mean, this is all real stuff, folks. If you saw the place I live and in the lifestyle that I live because of this, I mean, you jump on it. I mean, there's so many rip offs out there pretending to be successful. I understand some of your reluctance. But look, this is the the real deal. All right? So check it out at IMTCVA.org And I'll show you a little later in my mentor program how you can get a scholarship to the school that you can either use yourself or gift to someone else.

[00:05:17] And it would be one of the best gifts you could ever give to a young person instead of getting them saddled with debt in some stupid four year college that teaches them how to protest. And then they're out working at Starbucks when they graduate. So so check that out. It'll be in the show notes too.

[00:05:35] All right, let's get to the main event, creating a quality ebook in eight hours or less. And I might add that when writing the book that inspired this podcast this morning, I took the dogs out to play fetch three times. All right. In about ten minutes each.

[00:05:52] So I had maybe about five and a half hours to create this thing. All right, now you need some prerequisites to be able to do this, you can't just be totally illiterate and have no skills whatsoever and no computer, OK, you can't do that. But most people have a computer, either a Mac or a PC is fine. And what are the things of this method is that you can record an audio file and save the file. And you don't have to have a fancy microphone, like for podcasts and stuff, just anything to get a clear, you know, even partially clear recording. Now, if you have a Mac, you already have GarageBand. See all the things I do. I like to keep your expenses almost to nothing if possible. So you have GarageBand and there's millions of tutorials on YouTube to learn how to use it. Now, if you don't have a Mac on a PC, you can get audacity, which is a totally free audio program. And again, there's enormous numbers of YouTube videos to how to use it. So you got to be able to record something. Next thing is, if you want to do a really nice e-book, you want to have an eBook cover, which is basically a graphic that looks like a book. Now, Canva.com is a free graphics program, and I got to tell you, it took me longer to go through all the book templates they have.

[00:07:25] They have templates for all kinds of stuff, advertisements, graphics, flyers, posters, everything. So it took me longer to go through the templates to see which one kind of matched my book the best than it did to make the book cover. Once I found the template. It took me, I don't know, not five minutes to make the book cover because you can just change the title they have on their sample into yours, type it in and boom, you put your name as the author and you got a book cover. So there's no excuse not to do this. I mean, I have a friend that's one of the top book cover designers in the country. I think minimum is twenty five hundred dollars and it can go up from that. So I'm trying to let you do a e-book down and dirty, but still make it high quality. So if you look if you happen to buy the book that that I wrote this morning, OK, you'll see that the cover is beautiful and I did it in five minutes. So, so was good enough, in other words, for this, this project. Now, if you don't want to do that, it's going to slow you down a little bit. You could go to fiverr.com and have someone else create the ebook cover, but you're not going to get it in the eight hour time period.

[00:08:45] OK, so you can do that, though. And you know, when I say eight hours, so what if it took two days compared to maybe you've been sitting on this and thinking about it for months or years and never did it. All right. So so, yes, you can do it in eight hours. But so what if it takes a little bit longer? Now, the next prerequisite is you start an account at a transcription service, the way that I do it in the past cost a fortune and was a delay. It cost anywhere from 30 to 60 dollars per recorded hour and it would take one to three days to get the recording back. Now, there's a I have a resource for you that's I've, of course, got an affiliate link for it, but it's so darn cheap now. You can put a recording up there and in five to ten minutes it's done and back automatically with 93 percent accuracy, which was as good as I got from sending it to the Philippines to have it done. OK, so get yourself signed up at the transcription service. Now, you should be able to type if you can't type well with the transcription, most of the stuff is going to be typed out, but you can't really go very fast if you're hunting and pecking to fix it up and make it look like a nice book.

[00:10:10] That might delay you also, there's kind of no excuse for not being able to type really well now. I mean, there's typing programs you can easily I mean, I'm screaming fast on typing, but like I said, most of the typing is done for you with this particular method because you're getting a transcription of what you recorded. And most of that the words are already there. You just have to clean it up. And I'm going to tell you another way where you could just stop right here and start making money, I'll get to that little later. Then I suggest you get a free account at Grandmotherly. You see it advertised all over the place. So I ended up getting the free account. It's wonderful. It'll find a mistake and and tell you what to do to fix it. And you didn't even have to type. You click on it and it fixes it right in front of your very eyes. So I would get a free account there. All right. So once you have these prerequisites, then you're going to end up using them for all kinds of things. So the return on your investment, if you don't know how to use canvas something is enormous. For instance, I use another free program called Ipiccy.com to make graphics or to add like text on a picture or something like that. So whenever I put out a Facebook story, I open the program, pull up my Facebook story template, put a picture on it and some text. I save it, I throw it up on Facebook stories and within five minutes people are viewing whatever I had to promote or whatever my thing was, no delays, no cost. Now, had I had to send it to one of my employees or an outside freelancer, now for the employee, it could take a few hours. Maybe they're on consultation with my mentees and they got to take care of them so they can't get to it right away. If I had to send it to a freelancer, could be a few days to get it back, say so. These are really simple skills that can save you a fortune in both time and money. All right. So there's your prerequisites. All right. Let's get into this. The first thing is to make up a title. And how to titles are the easiest to write. The easiest books, ebooks to write, because you just put your stuff in a logical order on how to do something. And people love how two titles now I'm going to give you a tip that I got years ago, and I probably say 80 percent of my titles are like this.

[00:12:50] Your main title should be like three words or less, and then you have a descriptive subtitle. So the book that inspired this podcast that I just wrote this morning was JV is the main title. I don't even write out the words joint venture. JV is the main title, the descriptive subtitle is How to Get In Front of a Million Warm Prospects in the Next 90 Days. Now, I learned this because I was doing some research before and I found that that like 80 percent of New York Times best sellers follow this specific formula for titles, three words or less in a main title doesn't even have to make sense so much. I remember I think the guy that runs Southwest Airline, his main title was nuts. All right. You know, so if you didn't know that it had to do with giving out peanuts on Southwest Airlines, you know, you'd say, what does that mean? And then he added descriptive subtitle So mine J.V., how to get in front of a million warm prospects in the next 90 days. And if you email me, I will be happy to sell you a copy so you can see that this is real. All right. So anyway, that's make up a title. Then get out, just a paper, a tablet, I don't care or, you know, you can type it into your computer if you want, just write out notes on what should go in to to this how to book, like whatever the topic is, how to play tennis, how to do whatever.

[00:14:34] I'm going to give you a great tip here. This is really another cool tip is you use the Amazon look in feature, so you type in and try to find any kind of books that are even close to what you want to write about. You click on one of the books and then Amazon has a little thing above the book cover that says, look in. Well, you click that and now you can see about 10 percent of the book, I think roughly, but you can always see the table of contents. So they've laid it out for you, the kinds of things that should be in a book like you want to write and do it for several different books and and then make your own list of chapters that's going to be in the book. Then put all the notes. And I don't really do this where I write the whole thing out. I just put bullet points of what I want to talk about for the each chapter and then I just record the thing. All right, so that's that's how you get get the thing going. And I told you about the transcription service. Check the show notes and get signed up for that, because if you have a lot of recordings already, audio or video, you can get them transferred into text.

[00:15:52] And really you could stop right there. And be done in an hour or so, and I have done that, but just make sure you don't sell a transcription and call it an e-book because transcriptions don't read like a book and you'll get bad reviews and refunds, but it's perfectly acceptable to just stop right there and sell it as a transcription. No book cover, no nothing. All right. So you're done in about an hour. All right. So don't tell me you can't do this. However, I like to push it a little further to make a really nice quality e-book out of it. And it sells for longer and sells for more money. And it looks nice and you can be proud of it and so forth. So I like to push usually deeper into a complete ebook. All right, so you upload your audio file, which you saved in GarageBand or Audacity, you upload it to the transcription service and then you forget about it. While you're waiting for the transcription, then you can make your ebook cover or order it if you're not, you know, if you if you don't want to do it yourself. But Canva is great and it has tons of templates right in it. Now, when the transcription is done, you export it, I use word, but you could just export it as a text file and paste it into any word processor that you happen to use.

[00:17:23] All right, so that's where you're at at this point. Now, I want you to grab any printed book that you have laying around. Preferably from a major publisher, but, you know, I don't want some little schlocky self published that that doesn't follow conventions and it's just pitiful, but just about any printed book will do. And then I want you to start laying out this document by making a title page and then a copyright page. So you're just looking through the printed book and duplicating pages, leaving placeholders for pages in your, let's say, word document, copyright page with disclaimer, table of contents, introduction, all your chapters, one, two, three, four or five, whatever it is, conclusion about the author, links to all your stuff that they can buy. And also as a sidebar, don't forget, a lot of books make more money with affiliate links that are in the book than they do with the book. All right. So don't be afraid to to when it makes sense to link out to affiliate products that you're selling. So you get a commission if somebody buys it or link out to other services. You have, for instance, the book that I wrote this morning. Was a perfect lead in to buying my copywriting course, which is 297 dollars.

[00:18:48] I mean, it's a damn bargain, let me tell you, because I've paid 5000 bucks just for a headline cause. All right. So so the book tells you it gives you all this great information on joint venturing. But it then it says, hey, if you really want to ramp this up, the better you are a copywriting, the more joint venture partners you'll get because your sales letter will convert better. And all your correspondence into your swipe files and sample emails that you give to the joint venture partner will all be better now, you know, with a one hour and I haven't sold any of those courses yet, but I can assure you by the end of the weekend, somebody will buy that for two hundred ninety seven dollars. So and then this book is going to last four years because it's somewhat evergreen on the things that you must know to to get someone to promote you, to get a joint venture partner, to promote you to their list of people. That's what the whole book is about. Now, when you're doing this layout of your document in word anyway, I don't know about other word processors, but you you want to separate the pages. You'll start seeing, you know, leaving a space for the table of contents. So you type in table of contents and then you hit control enter and that forces a page breaks.

[00:20:12] And now maybe then you write introduction at the top and then you hit control enter and then chapter one, you write that down on a page control enter. So that makes a page break and separates the book out. You start seeing your page count as you go, so then you plug in stuff to all the sections. Anything else you thought of that you didn't put on the record and you type it in there and guess what? You convert it to Adobe PDF either with Adobe Acrobat, which is the gold standard, but you've got to pay for it or there's tons of free PDF converters. You may even have one on your computer already. And there you have a quality ebook in less than eight hours. This is not rocket science. But I'll tell you now, I want to tell you about my mentor program. And then and then the last thing I'll tell you about is some really great benefit that you may not have thought of, of doing what I'm just telling you today. So anyway, my mentor program is the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever. And I triple dog there people all the time to bring another program and compare it to mine and see which one wins in over 20 years.

[00:21:28] Nobody's had the guts to do this, OK, because there are just so many great features of the program. It's one on one we don't lump in with. The group will take over your screen and show you where to click and what to do. You have an immersion weekend at the retreat center. We actually live in the house, this big retreat center with me for an immersion weekend. I mean, it's crazy. Nobody on earth does that. We have a TV studio as part of the estate next door where we shoot videos for you, any one of which on the open market goes for between seven hundred and fifteen hundred dollars.

[00:22:06] We've never had anybody get out of here with less than ten. And one couple came here and did fifty three. So so that's just another part of it.

[00:22:16] Then you get a scholarship to my school, which you can either use yourself for extra training if you like, real structured, you know, step one, step two, step three. The difference is with the mentor program, I'm working with you one on one and we're just boom going for what you need to do the school. You got to go in order, you know, so some people do both where we can go faster than the mentor program, but then they get some structure by going ABC during the school.

[00:22:46] But the school you can give to somebody we had one guy gifted to his daughter and she's making six thousand dollars a month as a side hustle after he blew eighty grand on her crappy education. Right. So this is just very powerful. So it's greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And give me a call. No high pressure sales here we have like I've said, we've had seventeen hundred students over the past, plus more than that now over the past twenty years. And also another thing that's super unique and why people just flocked to this program is because you don't pay what I'm worth. OK, up front, which a lot of people want you to pay 50 or 100 thousand dollars for this kind of training. So mine, you pay an entry fee and then I just get a commission on your profits. Up to a cap, so you're not stuck with me forever, so for me to get my 50000, you have to net 200000. I got to tell you, people love this because they know I'm not going to disappear on them like somebody else, that you might give a lot of money up front. So, anyway, check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. There's really no excuses, folks, when you try to tell me you can't write a book.

[00:24:09] All right, if you follow this method, you'll become a product machine, which is a term the great Dottie Walters, she was the grandmother of professional speaking, told me way back in 1991. And I listened. And it had been it's been just enormously lucrative for me. And I know it can be for you, too. But here's the other thing that I benefit that you may not have thought about. When you do this, you're creating a piece of intellectual property, which is an asset to you and your family. And it can bring in income for years. I mean, you can actually pass it on to your heirs, all right, if it's an evergreen type products. I've had some evergreen products. Evergreen means that it doesn't go obsolete, like my Internet marketing stuff goes more obsolete. But like the one I created this morning will sell for years because of the concepts that are evergreen. And but I've had products. I still have a product selling today that I created 28 years ago, even before the Internet started. So so literally jump on this and do this. You'll have some glitches here and there, but you'll be on your way to becoming a product machine and making a great security for you and your family with income where you work once and you get paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, which is my philosophy.

[00:25:38] All right, folks, I can't wait to see what you come up with and I will catch you on a next episode. See ya later.

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