FullQuota TipSheet™ Blog

HOW TO: Create eBooks That Don’t Suck

May 18th, 2012

If you want your readers to embrace your eBooks, you have to format them like the ones sold by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Why? So they’re easy to read using Kindles, Nooks, tablets and smartphones.

How do these “commercial” eBooks differ from the ones you and your marketing department make?

Well, they’re not PDFs, for one thing. They’re sold on online stores, lend themselves to sharing on Facebook and they don’t require any of that pinching and panning to read. Basically, those books are awesome. Yours? Notsomuch.

But you can fix all that. Content Marketing Institute offered a few tips on how to give your eBooks a professional edge.

Here at FullQuota, we’ve converted eBooks into mobile-friendly formats and found that it does indeed create more exposure avenues. The most important step is to give eBooks clear, readable text with images placed in appropriate locations. Although pictures are great for content, for eBooks it’s best not to overuse them. And they should be formatted to be read and imported on just about every mobile device available.

Here’s how to convert your content to the two most popular Mobi and ePub formats, outlined in the blog post:

1. Create your file in Microsoft Word. Remember to use style sheets, don’t put in extra lines and tab instead of using spaces when indenting. Save all your graphics, charts and tables as jpeg or gif files. Don’t forget that there aren’t headers and footers in eBooks, so make sure to remove these in advance, so as not to create formatting issues.
2. Creating a linked table of contents will help your readers find their way through your content.  In Word, select Insert, then Bookmark to name the destination. Then link to it with Insert, Hyperlink. (This is a better choice than using Word’s table of contents auto-generator, which can create conversion problems.)
3. Download a copy of Calibre, a free (although donations are welcome) eBook library manager. This tool will help you convert your document to Mobi and ePub file formats.
4. When you’re done, save your Word document as a filtered HTML file. If your eBook includes images, you’ll need to combine the resultant HTML document (.htm) and image folder into a zip file before importing into Calibre.
5. Find a professional to design your book cover. It boosts sales and it’s important for branding.
6. Test your eBook on one of the free software eReaders from Amazon or B&N or use your own eReader to see how it looks. Check it for typos, layout problems, etc.
7. If you want to sell your eBook, set up a free account with Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and/or Barnes & Noble’s Pubit.

Source: Content Marketing Institute, April 2012

Posted in Management Advice  |  No Comments

Are You Creating Killer Landing Pages? [INFOGRAPHIC]

May 17th, 2012

Landing pages pack all the potential in the world — to attract attention, call to action and generate leads. Unfortunately, most fall short, losing leads and bouncing viewers.

That’s according to Pardot, which recently published [… continue reading…

Posted in Management Advice  |  No Comments

What’s Tanking Your Email Copy?

May 16th, 2012

It doesn’t matter how fancy your marketing emails look, if they lack well-written content, your subscribers will delete the messages and you will lose. End of story.

That’s according to HubSpot, which recently published a [… continue reading…

Posted in Management Advice  |  No Comments

Are You Serving Up The Right Content At The Right Time?

May 15th, 2012

To succeed, marketers must decide what content is most appropriate for each person to receive at a given time and then give it to them right when they need it.

HubSpot recently published an article [… continue reading…

Posted in Demand Generation  |  No Comments

How To Become A Twitter Phenom In Just 20 Days

May 14th, 2012

Marketers can’t just throw up a Twitter account and start only broadcasting and promoting content and expect to build an engaged following.

Like anything worth doing, building a following on the microblogging site takes time, [… continue reading…

Posted in Demand Generation  |  No Comments

Will Google, Facebook Be Dead In 5 Years?

May 14th, 2012

A growing number of voices say that search technology like Apple’s Suri is going to kill Google and we agree.

Here’s why: Semantic search — that’s a fancy term for searching using naturally spoken words [… continue reading…

Posted in Strategic Marketing  |  No Comments

What’s The No. 1 Rule For Creating Shareable Content?

May 11th, 2012

For content marketers, who pump out eBooks, lists, blogs, webinars and white papers full of all kinds of information, picking the right kind of shareable content can be a chore. Often they fail.

Here at [… continue reading…

Posted in Demand Generation  |  No Comments

Is Your Website Design Tanking Your Inbound Marketing?

May 9th, 2012

Everything content marketers do is utterly wasted unless it is mapped to a buyer persona. The same goes for website design; if you don’t pay attention to the calls-to-action, imagery, layout and navigation, your [… continue reading…

Posted in Management Advice  |  No Comments

How Can We Market To The ‘Re-Generation’?

May 8th, 2012

Thanks to the Internet, kids born after 1995 have had access to information everywhere at every time. “This is the generation of mobile technology, wireless communication and clouds of constant content.”

That’s according to Tamara [… continue reading…

Posted in Demand Generation  |  No Comments

Why Content Curators Are The New ‘Superheroes’

May 7th, 2012

Last year alone, people produced, pondered and plowed through 1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 gigabytes of data on the Internet. That’s 1.8 zettabytes, if you’d rather use the fancy name and ditch all the zeros.

According to a recent [… continue reading…

Posted in Management Advice  |  No Comments