Old School System Still Works For Organizing Ebook Material

There's an app to touch, trace, and track every part of your lives. Software probably exists to sort and organize the writing material for your ebooks as well. But since I only have a 'dumb phone', it's no surprise that this is my old school system for arranging text into an online book.

Perhaps the best way to explain the method to my un-technological madness is with an excerpt from this ebook.

This is number 2 of 3 purging tasks that I suggest to help you become more prolific:

2. I would live a technologically celibate life if I could because the frustration of dealing with it chips away at my creative energy. I’m convinced that computers are possessed and schizophrenic. Today it’s necessary to be part artist, publisher, technologist, and marketer. But if you are spending more time on digital tools than writing it’s time to re-evaluate because those moody machines should support your writing not sabotage it. Simplifying your social media and sharing sites will save your scribe’s sanity.

Technology runs on systems, linear formulas, equations, consistency, and discipline. An artist does not. When choosing each digital tool decide how you can use it from a creative point of view. Your voice on each video, audio, page design, and tweet is what keeps it fresh for you and your audience. Keep technology as a vehicle to enrich not drain your time.

As an artist you are the perfect person to turn technology upside down and create the “wow! Here I am” impression and not just “I’m here.” I’ve concluded that for a right brain soul mastery of the digital domain is never really achieved. It’s frustrating, alluring, and constantly evolving.

One of my biggest challenges with technology are all the steps it takes to accomplish the end result from signing up, selecting passwords, developing profiles, page design, updating pictures, tweets, following up through autoresponders, dealing with platform non-compatibility, and struggling to reach support.

My new resolve is if a piece of technology takes more than a few minutes and distracts me from my writing for very long I skip it, find another way, or another service to accomplish what I want. It doesn’t pay to beat your head against the wall expending energy and effort trying to do something you weren’t meant to do.

There is an online group, tribe, or culture for probably most of the hobbies, specialties, and business segments that currently exist. Instead of only signing up for the major players, such as Twitter, Linked In, and Facebook investigate some smaller sites by Googling your industry. Fewer participants can mean more targeted, easier to obtain, and closer relationships in your specific niche rather than sifting through masses of people to locate one segment of folks that you need to reach. For example, I upload recipes to cooking centered websites like http://www.bakespace.com http://www.justapinch.com and http://www.foodista.com Bakespace even has a unique application that allows me to upload and sell my cookbooks from their site. I’m able to reach out to a community of home chefs that are also interested in trying, tweaking, and tasting new recipes.

I use http://www.redbubble.com to sell photography and motivational art. Then there’s http://www.goodreads.com for writers. http://www.vimeo.com is geared more towards artists. http://youtube.com has some of everything. Whatever service your company represents there’s usually a place where like-minded people congregate.

Don’t buy into the, “ours is the best out there, nothing like it, no one can do what we can” rhetoric. Dig beyond the shiny surface and decide what is right for you. The one stop shop concept can be very appealing but be ware, if that one shop goes belly up, new owners take control, or another person is crowned CEO all of your operational technology could be at risk. Consider diversifying your digital tools. For example, house your autoresponders, audio, video, email, and media storage in different places. Ideally, you need physical storage such as, hard drives or DVD’s plus cloud storage as a backup to be completely safe. No one system is fool proof.

There's no one-size-fits-all system. Choose the path that feels right to you and that enables you to reach your objective of becoming a more productive, prolific, and profitable artist!

What system do you use to write and organize your ebooks? Do you depend on technology or, are you too a pen and paper, on the floor storyboarder?