4 Surprising Lessons From Writing My Last 3 Ebooks

The more you write the more you learn. The more you act the more productive you feel. The more books you publish the more confident you become.

In the last few months I've written and published two cookbooks and one more non-fiction business book. Here are 4 lessons I uncovered along the way that I pass on to help all of you who are also trying to navigate your way through the chaotic world of writing, self publishing, and marketing:

1. Branding - It's challenging to represent, market, and communicate multiple brands within one company.

One of the ways I'm accomplishing this is to take advantage of the real estate within the pages of my ebooks. I have the main logo, as illustrated above, after the covers in all of my books. Then in my business books I place the Queensvoice character with a tagline, "Another QueensVoice Original Book To Help Artisticpreneurs Excel," to show brand consistency.

My cookbooks are a fun series called, Labor Of Love, Laughter, And Liqueur, sharing creative cooking and cocktail recipes with different alcohols. TipsyCulinaryQueen takes center stage at the beginning of each book after the cover, followed by the volume number and series name.

If you have multiple services and more than one brand to showcase in your business figure out how you can tie it all together with one logo, yet capture each division and display it in a form that delivers your marketing message in a consistent way.

2. Adding photographs - What is a cookbook without mouthwatering photos? I looked at quite a few on Amazon and didn't see many pictures being utilized inside the pages.

It's very simple to do just by clicking on the insert picture button in Word and choosing the appropriate file from your computer. Make sure you center the picture on the page so it displays properly in the ereader.

The only challenge I've run into with photographs is that Barnes And Noble has a 20MB limit on their books. So you may have to size down your pictures for their site.

We're advised to utilize images on our blog posts so why not in your ebooks too? What images would help you tell your story in a more vivid way?

3. Page Breaks - May sound incredibly silly but I've realized how much doing a hard page break helps establish a rigid format so that as you add pages, insert photos, and make changes, everything stays in place. Before I understood this concept, each time I edited a page all the text would shift and the font changed sporadically. This one technique makes life at the keyboard so much easier.

4. Active Table Of Contents - This was a stumbling block for me. The first few books I wrote had static TOCs because all of the instructions I read or listened to seemed so complicated. Once I asked Google for help I found a website specializing in using Word for business that outlined a very easy technique. I explain a very simple 3 step process for creating an active table of contents here.

Every piece you write provides fresh wisdom for you and your audience. Which skills do you need to perfect to help you become more prolific, productive, and profitable? Each published book is a win in the fight against procrastination.

How can you make each artistic endeavor a novel approach to communicating your message with the world?