365 Things I Learned the Hard Way (So You Don't Have To) (The Digital Writer, Jonathan Wondrusch)
A free ebook on the writing business by a writer. Quick! What's he trying to sell me? Actually, he isn't selling me one thing -- he's selling me on a lifestyle, a workstyle, a way to make it all click, if that's what I want. And that should be what I want.
The Digital Writer puts together and presents information in a usable way, heavy on the discipline, easy on the hard sell. He recommends ways to establish your presence, your brand, online in social media, and the ways to monetize it. Because if you aren't monetizing, then what are you doing? He also tells you when to pay for others to do the work for you -- specifically, hiring an editor and paying for good cover design.
A good chunk of the book is dedicated to writing copy, which is a promising field to get into that pays well when jobs are available, as well as making ebooks starting with information that's readily available by consolidated so that the reader doesn't have to research it, and search engine optimization, because you want users to find you when you know that they aren't going to look at that second page on Google.
Ebooks, by the way, are a great source of steady income once you build a following. There's a good discussion on pricing, which has recently changed as Amazon has changed its terms.
The final part of the book is a Q & A from letters he received on his Digital Writer blog. They get a little repetitive with the rest of the book and with other questions, but it's definitely worth skimming. One thing that impressed me was that he recommends two great books to learn how to write copy -- and they aren't his. They're the ones that he learned from and he recommends them. You have to admire that. If nothing else, it definitely improves his brand.
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