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3 Tips To Using Your Content To Create Your eBook

If you’ve spent any time hanging around me, in person or online, you’ll know that one of the ways I help people create their books is by taking the “stuff” they already have and using it to create a book.

This stuff can be:

  • Blog posts or articles
  • Training courses
  • Audios
  • Videos
  • .pdf worksheets, freebies, or handouts

Seems simple, right? You put your content to work for you – no more lazing around.

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But there’s more to it than just collecting the blog posts you already have, slapping a cover on it, and calling it an eBook! (Or putting it together for a printed format.)

Amazon (Kindle) has this little-known rule that says that the majority of your book needs to NOT be available elsewhere on the web. And if it IS available… they will find it and potentially take down your eBook.

While this seems harsh – it is YOUR content, after all – it’s actually a really good thing for a couple of reasons.


Your readers won’t get mad at you OR Amazon for making them pay for something they could have gotten for free!
Sure, they might have had to piece together all the articles across your blog but still! It’s nice knowing that this material IS only available in the book. This keeps everybody happy knowing that the best stuff is in the book – it’s like an exclusive club of information that only THEY can access since they bought the book. And everybody loves being part of the “in club!”

That rather threatening email from Amazon is in your best interests – what if somebody copied your material out onto the World Wide Web?
Imagine you’re sitting at your computer, working on your next launch or delivering services to your clients and you get an email that says you need to PROVE that the content is yours. And after a bit of digging you realize that somebody has taken YOUR content and is publishing it as their own. Yuck!

A good #eBook is more than just a collection of #blog articles. 3 steps to creating a #book. Click To Tweet
A good rule of thumb is to make sure that at least 65% (or more!) of your content is ONLY available in the eBook. Blog posts are a GREAT foundation but they can’t be the whole book.

Some options are:

  1. Create 65% or more brand-new content. The blog articles are the skeleton, the new stuff, the flesh.
  2. Truncate the blog posts and say “For the rest of this article, here’s the book” and then link to the Amazon page.
  3. Completely remove the blog posts – just make sure there’s no way the Amazon spider can get to them!

If you’re wondering how you can easily use your existing content and create a book, I’d love to chat with you!

Kim Galloway
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