I recently realized that writing an eBook is a very funny thing. I also wrote a couple of books, I wrote more about one of them in this article. I thought I’d write another article on how I made an eBook. From brainstorming to publishing, I will explain everything here.
1. The niche
The very first thing when writing a book is to figure out what the book is going to be about. Of course, it is quite difficult to just write a book in the blind world without an idea. My idea was to write a book on Python programming for beginners. I already wrote a similar book, about the Java programming language, but the quality of the book was not the best, as I was then experimenting with how I could publish it and whether the whole thing would fall apart. The new idea was born from my previous book, and I planned to put more emphasis not only on the content, but also on the design and layout.
2. The cover
Maybe I’m doing it wrong and the raw content needs to be done first and then the cover, but I started with the cover. First of all, I started by looking for the best matching colors for the given programming language. Obviously, I would use yellow and white for the JavaScript programming language, while for Python I would use mainly blue and a little yellow. Personally, I used Canva to design the cover design and page header. With Canva it’s very easy, just click on the new design button and select the book cover (1410 x 2250 px) option from the dropdown! Here is the cover I made for my Python book:
3. The header
I also made the header with Canva, then the image of the header was placed on all pages of the book. All I had to do was to adjust the chapter titles in the headers to the image. I won’t insert a picture of the header, because it’s just like a blue circle with the section title.
4. The content
I wrote and edited my eBook in Google Docs. I chose Google Docs because it is available from the browser on almost every device, it can be translated into several languages with one click and finally it can be easily downloaded in pdf or epub format. In contrast to my old eBook, I made all the text in this book indented so that the entire text would not be bad on smaller readers. The code examples also slipped, and that’s why I decided to insert the code examples as images. I used codeimg.io personally.
In the next part…
We’ll upload our book to a marketplace and sell it! You can read the article here (soon)
Thanks for reading!
I hope you enjoyed this post, have a nice day!
