A lot of bloggers claim you can write an e-book, get a cover, get it edited and formatted, and get it online for sale in thirty days or less.
Absolute rubbish!
Many of these books are several things but not proper books. Many are not properly written. Some are blog posts thrown together in book form. Many are rarely edited properly. Many rarely have a properly made cover. Although having said that I’m all for a cover made via a professional website for e-books.
The only ways any of this will happen is if you get someone to do it all for free or you have big money to pay someone to do it all and most of us don’t have money to throw around.
They are thrown together so fast that they aren’t really informative. I’ve checked many books on Amazon and many are less than 40 pages. Many are over 100 or even 200 pages. I expect them to be more informative. I expect them to have taken longer than 30 days and I know they would have because of experience.
My experience in writing a non-fiction book is it took at least 6 months. For a start, I took a few old blog posts that I had written about self-publishing, threw them into a word doc, decided on how many sections I was going to do, how many sections within those sections I would write about and then got to writing.
I rearranged those blog posts and ripped them to shreds. Re-writing them, pulling them apart, and updating them with current information. I added to the book as I went along, especially the part about getting your EIN and tax returns, plus sending off paperwork and making sure everyone got what they needed.
I started that book in September and had written the basic full outlay in one month, but to produce what I published it took a good six months. That’s why books should take longer than thirty days, because with non-fiction it’s constantly changing and in need of updating which I was doing (Facebook information) until the very day of publishing.
You need editing, you need a cover. You need formats for Smashwords and Kindle. And CreateSpace requires its own formatting and cover if you want to turn it into a paperback.
Throwing together a book made of blog posts is not only a cheap way of trying to make money and claiming to be an author, (I personally don’t believe you can call yourself an author if you only throw together blog posts into produced e-books), but actually taking the time to research, write from experience and get others opinions will take time, and if you want to write a good book that’s informative and well planned out then don’t fall into the trap that all of those producing e-books tell you.
It takes longer than 30 days to write and publish a well-planned and informative non-fiction e-book. And it definitely takes longer than 30 days to write and publish a novel.
