Ebooks and guides

What an ebook or guide is

An ebook is a long-form treatment of one subject, usually twenty to sixty pages, written for somebody who wants the whole picture in one sitting rather than seven blog posts in seven places. It teaches. It covers the subject broadly, in an order that makes sense to a beginner, and it is generous enough that a reader finishes it feeling better equipped than when they started.

It is not a white paper, which takes one position and argues it with evidence. It is not a brochure with chapters. And it is not automatically a lead magnet, though most businesses assume the two words mean the same thing. An ebook is a piece of writing. What you do with it afterwards is a separate decision, and it is the decision most firms get wrong.

When you need one, and whether to gate it

A guide is worth writing when you have a subject you answer the same questions about every month, a buyer who has to understand something before they can buy, and enough working knowledge to fill more than a page. You do not need one if the useful part is four steps long. A checklist costs a fraction as much, gets used more often, and I will say so on the first call rather than stretch four steps into forty pages.

Then the gating question, which is where most firms go wrong. The default assumption is that a guide goes behind a form so the download pays for itself in email addresses. That trade is usually a bad one. A gate does not filter out the wrong readers; it filters out the mildly curious, and mild curiosity is where most recommendations start. The reader who would have mentioned your guide to a colleague, quoted a line of it in a meeting or linked to it from their own site never gets past the form. What you collect instead is a list of false addresses and people who wanted the file and nothing else.

There is an honest exception. Gate it when your market is small and identifiable, when somebody will genuinely follow up every download by name within a day or two, and when the buying decision behind it is large enough to justify that call. A firm selling to a few hundred procurement managers is in a different position from one selling to every small business in the province. If that is you, gate it, and say plainly on the form what you will do with the address.

What goes in it

• A real scope. One subject a reader could name, covered from the beginning. Not eight loosely related blog posts with a cover page glued to the front, which is what most ebooks turn out to be.
• Chapters that stand alone. Each one answers a question in full, so the guide survives being read out of order, which is how it will be read.
• Your own working knowledge. The things you know because you do the job: the mistakes you see repeatedly, the decisions that turn out to matter, the shortcuts that are safe and the ones that are not.
• Something to use. A worked example, a comparison table, a sample document, or a short checklist at the end of a chapter. Pages a reader can act on are the pages they remember.
• A short, honest closing. One page on how your firm fits, kept plainly separate from the teaching.

What you get

The guide. Twenty to sixty pages in an editable document, and as a PDF laid out to your template or plainly if you have none. Written to be read on a phone as well as printed.

The web version. The same guide broken into linked pages on your own site, with the PDF offered alongside it. This is the version people link to and quote from, and it costs almost nothing extra because the writing is already done.

The outline and the offcuts. The approved chapter plan, and the material that did not make the final cut written up as notes. Most guides yield three or four articles from the offcuts alone.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Halifax bookkeeping firm works mostly with owner-operated trades, and answers the same questions every spring about what can and cannot be claimed, what records to keep, and what happens when the paperwork is late. The owner has been answering these by email for nine years.

The guide runs to thirty-four pages, in eight chapters, each one a question she is tired of answering. It includes a one-page record-keeping checklist and a sample of a properly kept mileage log. It is published as eight linked pages on the site with a PDF beside them, no form. Two trade associations link to it, an accountant in another province sends it to her own clients with a note, and the firm's own enquiries start arriving already half-informed, which shortens every first meeting. The email list grows more slowly than a gated version would have, and the firm ends the year with more work.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the subject is, who it is for, and whether it deserves sixty pages or six. No charge, and if a shorter piece would do better I say so.
2. A fixed price in writing. Length, chapter count and whether the web version is included, agreed before anything starts.
3. Interviews. Two or three recorded conversations with whoever in your business knows the subject. This is where the material that cannot be looked up comes from.
4. The outline. One page, chapter by chapter. You approve it before drafting, because reordering an outline is cheap and reordering a finished guide is not.
5. The draft. Fifteen to twenty working days depending on length, delivered in chapters rather than all at the end, so corrections happen early.
6. Delivery. The document, the PDF, the web version built into your site, and the offcuts.

Five to seven weeks from first call to a finished guide is typical.

What it costs

Guides are not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so each is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. Length is the main driver, followed by how much of the knowledge has to be drawn out in interviews and whether you want the web version and the pages put into your site as well as the copy. The number is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The guide gets broken into a series of posts that each stand alone, it earns a place in a newsletter that goes to the list you already have, and the chapter that gets the most attention becomes a standalone page in its own right. None of that is required. The guide is a complete piece of work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.