Origins #100 — How to create and publish an e-book
Why and how we are approaching writing and publishing an e-book about men’s dress shirts.
In this series we are documenting the journey of building DULO, starting from Day 1. Every week we publish a new chapter that takes you behind the scenes of our process. With every article, we want to provide value to you, the reader. We share the success and failures, the opportunities and the challenges that we face while executing our vision.
If you are new, check out our previous post.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of e-books and even though we are not big on milestones, we have to casually note this being the 100th post in our Origins blog series 👏
Nearly 100 weeks of documenting how we’ve been building the business and funnily enough while writing this one, it feels both as if it has been a long long journey, as well as if we haven’t even remotely started.
So, yea, #100, yay, moving on.
As you can see from that little intro, from the beginning of our journey, one of our main marketing strategies has been to create a lot (blog, vlog, podcast) of content documenting our journey as well as entrepreneurship in general.
What we realize now, however, is that we’ve totally missed the mark on creating content around the actual product that we want to build this business around — a non-iron performance dress shirt.
It took us “only” 2 years to ask ourselves why are we not producing valuable resources for anyone interested in the dress shirt category and why are we not working towards positioning ourselves as an authority in that space.
Well… now we are.
Why are we publishing an e-book on men’s dress shirts?
A few reasons:
- To share our knowledge with others
- To help men with finding the right dress shirt for them
- To gain credibility by creating resources around our product — men’s dress shirts
- To have a piece of content that is easily shareable with people who are interested
- To start playing around with lead magnets and email funnels using the book
How are we publishing an e-book on men’s dress shirts?
There are a few steps in this process:
- Research the topic
- Write the actual copy for the book
- Create the graphics for the book
- Package the copy and the graphics together
- Publish the document as a PDF on our website
- Distribute it and let people know about it
We’ll expand with the details on these points in our next post.
The resources we will use to create an e-book on men’s dress shirts:
Tool #1: Canva
Price: FREE FOREVER plan for up to 1GB storage for photos and assets.
Helpful for: Creating a wide range of visual assets (think simplified Photoshop)
Tool URL: https://www.canva.com/
Use case: We will create all images and graphics for the book in Canva.
Tool #2: Shopify
Price: 14-day trial. Starts from $29/mo + around 3% fee on each order. (this plan will cover all your basic needs until significant growth)
Helpful for: Easily setting up a fully functional e-commerce store.
Tool URL: https://www.shopify.com/
Use case: Shopify is our e-commerce platform of choice for our store, but it also allows you to host files on their servers.
Tool #3: Google Docs
Price: Free
Helpful for: Document creation, sharing, and collaboration.
Tool URL: https://docs.google.com
Use case: We will use it to write down all the content, lay out the book, review, edit and collaborate on the copy.
This is what we have in mind for now and how we are thinking of tackling it.
In our next post, we will show you our progress and share how we approached it exactly, so stay tuned.
Better yet, sign up for our newsletter here so you will be one of the first ones to know when we publish the e-book.
