Over the years I’ve watched one or two tutorials from Lynda.com, Tutsplus, and more recently Udemy. These are tutorials that are designed to be easy to watch and understand. As opposed to say, CreativeLIVE where the normal workshop is three days long and each day is around 8 hours of video.
Ebook Publishing Fundamentals is a great course from lynda.com. Jason Matthews covers how to format your book in Microsoft Word, how to upload to Amazon and other booksellers, and suggestions on how to promote your book once it’s up and running. Like all such courses the videos are short and the topics are broad, but I felt like I got a lot out of it.
I’ve been writing for a long time and finally have a couple of books that I think someone besides me might like to read. I took one of my manuscripts and followed along with Jason as he did things like adding a Table of Contents and putting page breaks here and there and using Find and Replace to tidy up his document. He also covers the Author page and talks about ebook Covers. It is kind of exciting watching your work change from a manuscript into something that looks like a book.
I’ve found too many tutorials that suffer from the How To Draw school of teaching, where the first panel shows three blocks and two panels later they show the Mona Lisa. I’ve found most courses on selling T-shirts to follow the Underwear Gnome model, first we steal underwear, then something happens, then we make profit. But since Jason isn’t telling how to get rich selling ebooks, just how to get them successfully listed, you can actually do what he shows you how to do.
My book still needs a little bit of work, but watching Ebook Publishing Fundamentals has me one step closer to publication, and every step helps.
