Create Your Kindle Manuscript in an Hour or Less

1. Class Introduction to Creating Your Kindle Manuscript: Hello and welcome to create your Kindle manuscript in an hour or less. I'm Vora Lansky and I look forward to sharing this exciting workshop with you. Becoming a published author is one of the most special things in the world. However, when it comes to writing and publishing a book, it can take months, or even years, to create a traditional book. Creating a Kindle book is easier because it doesn't have to be 50,000 words or more. It can be short, it can be 5,000 words. There's lots of flexibility with publishing the Kindle. In this workshop, I'm going to teach you how to speak your book, so you'll be able to create it in an hour or less. So let's dive in. 2. Discover How to Speak Your Book: Publishing a book can open many doors of opportunity for you, yet it can be a daunting task. Oftentimes people think their book needs to include their life's work. That type of book could take years to write. With a Kindle book, you have flexibility to publish books that are much shorter in length than print books. While you could publish your life's work to kindle one chapter or one section at a time. You can also publish shorter works on specific niche topics, thus positioning you for your areas of expertise. This is where the doors of opportunity can open. The focus of today's workshop is on how to create content for Kindle based on audio or video recording transcripts. This method can yield you the content for your Kindle book in an hour or less. Once you've recorded your content, you can have the recording transcribed to yield the foundation for your manuscript. In a moment, I'll share some strategies that walk you through the process of how to accomplish this by publishing Kindle books based on transcripts of you sharing your wisdom and experience. You have the opportunity to shine the light on your expertise and demonstrate that you know your topic. Even when you go to your local networking events. Having an online book, a Kindle book, you are published author, and you get your own page on Amazon. You could create business cards or bookmarks about your book and use those to hand out at networking events. Thus, positioning you for your knowledge. Positioning you as the go to person in your field. This can also open up doors of opportunity to become a guest speaker on podcast. When people see that you have a published book, that you have a platform that you know your topic, you become a desired guest to be featured on podcast. And that can get you a lot of exposure and open up even more doors of opportunity for you. This provides you with a platform where you can gently market your product, program or services. Because in a Kindle book you can include a marketing page, you can include an opt in gift page. You can include links to your products and services. You can even include affiliate links to products that you promote related to your topic. However, word of caution, you cannot post affiliate links to products that are sold on Amazon. That is a big no and can cause a lot of problems. You never want to use your Amazon affiliate link in any of your books, but it does become a mini marketing machine for you. The thing to be aware of though is you don't want to pack your book with all kinds of links going places because people will feel like you're giving them a sales pitch. You want to be strategic about that. You can do this by adding a marketing page to your book. You can add it to the front of the book or to the back of your book. You can also include a page that offers an opt in gift to encourage people to subscribe to your email list. For example, you can offer worksheets that are a companion to your book, or a checklist, or a resource list. Things that people will want that will enhance what's going on in your book. You don't know unless they've told you who has purchased your books on Amazon. You don't get their names and e mail addresses. However, when you have an opt in gift and people give you their e mail address in exchange for the gift you're offering, You can then build an ongoing relationship with your readers. And this can be really powerful, a lot of fun, and quite worthwhile, both to you and to your readers. Here are some examples of transcript based Kindle books. You can get a sense of what I'm talking about. You can transcribe a workshop recording. You can transcribe an interview recording. You can transcribe podcast episodes, recordings of you answering questions. That's my favorite strategy and the one we're going to focus on most today. You can transcribe a recording of you sharing tips on your topic much more, give thought if ideas have come to mind, or as you go along, you get ideas for the type of book you could talk about the type of content, you could talk about the type of interview you might want to conduct. Jot it down on a piece of paper so that you can keep a running list of your ideas. When publishing a transcript basedbook to Kindle, you want to make it clear on your cover and in your books description that it is a transcript based book. You can do that subtly, but that way by letting your readers know they won't be surprised. I'll talk more about that here. The spoken word is different from the written word when you read your transcripts. It's not going to read the same way it would if you had sat down and written from scratch. Editing a transcript takes much less time when you edit it as a transcript rather than transforming it into something that reads more like you have written it from scratch. If you want to take that approach, then don't record your book. You can write it out from scratch, but when you're offering a transcript, as you edit it, you'll see what I mean. It sounds like you're talking, and if people know that it makes an enjoyable read, but trying to transform that text can be a daunting task. And our goal here is to help you be able to easily and quickly create your manuscript for your Kindle book. You just want to make it clear to your readers and they'll be fine because they'll know what to expect. For example, on the cover, you could say from the popular interview series, you could have that as a line of text at the top or the bottom of your Kindle cover. You can also include this information in the books description. For example, welcome to conversations about marketing interview series. Read along as our guest experts provide you with time tested strategies to help you expand your reach and grow your business. It makes it very clear and people are excited to dive in and they know what to expect. 3. Examples of Transcript Based Books: What I'd like to do now is show you examples of transcript based Kindle books. These are two books that I published from a workshop. I recorded the workshop, they were 30-60 minutes each, and then I had the recording transcribed, I edited the recording, and I published it to Kindle. Publishing lectures or workshops, is a powerful way to create content for Kindle. You can also transcribe interviews, either individual interviews. This is an example book that I published where I interviewed Donna. This is part of a tele summit series that I hosted. I also created a combination, You'll see on the right hand side, Donna's in that collection, but it's also more of the speakers who spoke on that topic. That's more of a combination book. You can publish both. You could publish individual interviews and you can publish collections of interviews on related topics. You can also transcribe your podcast interviews. Just let your guests know that you'll be doing that and get their permission ahead of time. You can conduct standalone interviews and tell a summit host could transcribe and publish the speaker sessions to Kindle. Most speakers would be quite excited by this opportunity because they will then be featured in a book that is on Amazon. You're creating this win win win scenario, a win for you, because you're creating content to provide to your audience a win for your speaker because they'll be gaining more exposure and a win for your audience because they're interested in the topic. Speaking of podcasts, one of my colleagues, Daniel Hall, is a big fan of transcribing his podcast interviews. The last I checked he had 99 published on Amazon. So each interview he transcribes, he has affiliate links going to whatever programs or products his guests are promoting. Again, they're not going to links on Amazon, they're going places off of Amazon to these people's website, for example. Then he has this featured book of interest to his audience. He gains exposure and the speakers gain exposure. I don't know if you notice it, but I am one of his guest. You'll see on the right hand side that is the interview that I did with Daniel. We're talking about the book cover. Can you see how it's very clear on this book cover that it is from a podcast And people will know what to expect in the description. He'll go into it further. That's an example of being able to transcribe a podcast, Whether you're the sole speaker on the podcast or whether you're interviewing guest on the podcast. Podcast content makes great content. Kindle book and one of the fastest, and one of my favorite ways to create content for Kindle is to record you answering questions on your topic. Let's dive deeper into this area. This type of book shines the light on your expertise and positions you as an authority in your field. This information can be highly useful to your ideal audience and can help them to overcome challenges they face. You're going to be helping people in the process by being the one that helps them with these challenges. You may be the one that they go to to learn more from. Now, while there's a process to create this content, it's actually easier than you may realize. For example, if someone were to ask you to make a list of the top questions your ideal audience would love to have the answers to. My guess is that you could easily compose that list of questions in a few short minutes. Tada, that is the essence of your Kindle book. So let's peel the onion even further, and let me walk you through this process. 4. Formula for Top Tips Kindle Books: Here's the formula for creating a top tips list. Make a list of common questions that you receive or a list of questions you can answer that can equip or educate people who are interested in your topic. Don't prejudge or limit yourself. Just get the ideas onto paper, just right, right, right. You can always cross things out, but just get the ideas out on paper. Brainstorm and list as many as you can think of. Then once you have all your ideas written down, go through the list. Cross off ones that you don't want to speak on and choose the top questions that you'll answer. Grab a fresh piece of paper and copy over those questions in prioritized order. You know which one you'll answer first, which one you'll answer second, and so on. And then choose the number of questions that you'll include. Include that number strategically, it doesn't have to be ten. You might want to have favorite five or top ten tips or seven savvy secrets. You decide the number. Once you've made your list, you go through choose the questions you'll answer and jot them onto a fresh page in prioritized order. Next, it's time to add your answers. Now you could write or type your answers out, and if that speaks to you, go for it to sit and write. If you find that you're getting caught up and it's taking you a long time and you're procrastinating and you're thinking you'll come back later. I'm going to encourage you to consider another option, or to consider another option from the get go, and that is to speak your book. What you want to do is make it easier on yourself and record your answers. Turn on an audio or video recorder that will allow you to create a file that you can save to your computer. Then what you want to do is read the questions one at a time, state the question out loud, and then answer it in as much detail as possible. You don't want quick short answers. You want as much detail as possible. And you want to do this for each question on your list. And the reason you want to answer your questions in as much detail as possible, keeping your focus on each specific question is you're going to generate some incredible content. You may use it all in your book. You may copy and paste some of it to use as a blog post. You may delete some of the content, but you're capturing it, recording it, and then transcribing it, which I'll get into it a little bit. Now as you're going along, as you're recording, if you stumble or if you get tongue tied, take a deep breath and keep going. This is your transcript, No one's going to hear it necessarily, though you could use it as an audio post in the future if you wanted to. However, for this recording, the primary purpose is to create content that you can have transcribed for your Kindle book. Just keep the train moving forward. Let's summarize the process of going from idea to transcript. You want to compose your list of questions. Turn on your recorder. Read aloud one question at a time. Answer each question in as much detail as possible. As I mentioned, you can always delete or edit content, but by answering each specific question in as much detail as possible, you'll have rich content to draw from, do this for each question, and then transcribe your recording. The service I used to transcribe is at Temi.com at the time of this recording. It is $0.25 per audio minute. If you try to transcribe it yourself, that is a daunting process and can take you up to four times longer than the recording. So if you have an hour long recording, it could take you 4 hours to transcribe or you could pay $0.25 per audio minute and they'll have it to you within a few minutes. And it's really, really accurate. You will want to go through and edit your document because you might be saying um, or certain words that you repeat a lot. You'll want to edit those, you'll want to check for typos, But for the most part, you're going to have a document that is clean and ready for you to start to manipulate and format into your manuscript. 5. Steps to Take Once You Have Your Manuscript: Once you have your transcript, you'll want to format it and prepare it to publish to Kindle. What I'd like to do now is share some tips for editing your manuscript. You want to create a table of contents. You don't include that in the manuscript that you upload to Kindle. What you're going to do is format the titles of each section. If you're answering questions, the question could be the title and you're going to format that, and I'll show you how in just a moment. Then Kindle is going to draw from that formatted, what they call heading one formatted title. And they're going to create a table of contents for you, which gives your book a professional look and makes it easy for people to access the content. Here's what you do. You go through your transcript and you want to create a page break for each question or tip. Then you want to add the question or create a title for the top of each page. And you want to use the heading One Formatting in Microsoft Word. I'm going to show you a picture in just a moment so you know where to find that. But you notice I say Microsoft Word Temi will give you a Word document. That's the format you'll want to have your manuscript in, so that you can take the next steps towards getting published when you are in Microsoft Word, at the top of the page, this is what you'll see. It may vary depending on your version of Microsoft Word. But you're on the home tab in Microsoft Word. And do you see at the far right where it says heading one? What you want to do is highlight the line of text, the title that you want to have heading one formatting, and those words are what will show up in the table of contents. You can edit it, highlight it, and then click heading one on the left hand side. That's plain text. That would be the text that you see throughout your Kindle book. I highlight that. I click on heading one and then it pulls up the heading one formatting. You can change the color, the size, the font. You can adjust it by right clicking on that heading one section and setting it up the way that you want it so that all of your titles look the same. That is really important because this is going to help to separate your book. Make it easier for readers to find content and give your book that professional look. Well, there you have it. You have your kind manuscript. This is the most important piece of the puzzle and the one that usually causes people to put off publishing their book. You're now ready to put the pieces in place so you can publish your book to Kindle in this workshop where we have limited time. I'm not going to be able to walk you through each and every step, but I have for you here some stepping stones that will help you with the process so that you can take your manuscript and get published to Kindle. What you want to do is head over to Canva or to Amazon KDP to create your Kindle cover. The Kindle cover is just the front cover, so you want to create the cover for your Kindle book and then what you want to do is install the Kindle Create software to your computer. It's a free software program from Amazon. You can Google it, download it to your computer once it's installed and once your manuscript is completely edited and ready for preparing to publish, you would import that to Kindle Create, which is a magic software that can beautifully format your Kindle book and prepare it for publication. Once you've done that, you would save your document and then head over to Amazon, KDP, and publish your book. It's so exciting and I would love to hear about your Kindle book as you publish it. So what thoughts and ideas come up for you when you think about creating content for your Kindle book? I have a special gift for you that will help you with this process. It's a collection of worksheets based on the exercises that I walked you through today. The Create Content for Kindle Action Guide. This collection of take action worksheets will provide you with exercises to help you create the foundation for your Kindle book. You'll learn how to pick the perfect topic that meets at the intersection of what you know and what your audience is seeking solutions to. Go ahead and jot down this URL. Share your brilliance.com forward slash kind gift. And you'll be able to request your gift and you'll have it in your hands. You can print it out and start to create the content for your Kindle book. I also have some action steps for you that will help you take action on what you learned today. Head over to download the action guide. Gift schedule time in your calendar to create your top tips list. Record your answers or tips via audio or video. Because you can upload either to Temi.com to have transcribed and then upload the recording to Temi.com Format the document as we discussed. You'll then have in your hands the manuscript for your book. Head on over and get your gift. I hope this training was inspiring and that you realize that your dream of becoming a published author or publishing your next book is closer than you may have realized. Take action to boost your visibility and credibility with a published Kindle book. I'm cheering you on and I wish you much success on this exciting journey.