Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips
As we approach the official unveiling of Windows 8 next month publishers around the world will already be planning their new Windows 8 titles. Also though there will be individuals who might want to write a Windows 8 book themselves and wondering how to go about it. Around this time three years ago I was beginning to think about my “Windows 7 Power Users Guide“. I’d released a Vista Power Users Guide that had been extremely well received and had tens of thousands of downloads. The Vista guide was just 68 pages and I knew that I had to do much better with Windows 7, but never having written a book before it was tough to know where to start.
Planning is everything. If you have a good plan of how your book is going to look and feel, and critically, what the content is going to be, then the process of actually writing it becomes easy. I chose to expand on a theme I started with the Vista guide, naming the chapters after things people would want to do with their computers, and putting them in a logical order so that people could work through the book as they became more proficient. Starting, installing, exploring, working, searching, connecting, securing, configuring, playing, communicating, guaranteeing, maintaining, diagnosing, tweaking, upgrading and finishing.
This format would, I believed, help people to find the information they needed quickly and easily as building indexes on your own can be problematic at times, more on why this is in a bit. This format helped dictate for me where everything should be in the book. The Connecting chapter for instance would include everything about networks, wi-fi, Homegroup and devices. I could then split Windows 7 down into it’s component features and parts and know exactly what should go where in the book.
The next challenge was to decide on a layout and format for the book. It was important for me that the book was as easy to follow as possible. Self-publishing and especially publishing as an eBook allows you to use full-colour effectively as you don’t have the price constraints that the major publishers have. Windows 7 Step by Step for instance is only a two-colour book and Windows 7 for Dummies is single colour. Having the book available in full colour also helps add significantly to it’s appeal.
But what about the actual layout of the book? This is a trickier one as you absolutely have to get this right. I figured that many people would be printing out pages from the eBook so decided on a standard A4 format. Page layouts and designs had to be mocked up where I could test what would work and what wouldn’t.
I wanted Quick Tips and as many as possible. I figured that most people wouldn’t want to read things in too much depth and so I added quick tips on every possible page. Step by Step guides would also be vital but I wanted to make them better in my book than they would be in other Windows 7 books. I decided therefore not to make the step by step guides about the text instructions, but rather to focus on screenshots. To this end I devised a graphics icon system I could use to make the Step by Step guides really bright, engaging and easy to follow.
From this point onwards with the content and layout sorted all I needed to decide was what software I would use to create the book. Ordinarily you might have thought I’d have chosen Word, which I’d used to write the Vista Power Users Guide. However I wanted a layout that was so graphical that Word simply wasn’t powerful enough. This pushed me on to Microsoft Publisher instead which could do everything I wanted graphically but brought other limitations with it. For instance, I would not be able to create an index in the software or even do a proper word count. The lack of an index is a big trade off as it can make things harder to find. I could only hope at this point that my chapter structure would offset some of these difficulties, so I changed my format slightly to give each chapter it’s own table of contents.
The final thing to consider is the language you use in such a book. If you want to write one yourself try to avoid the use of jargon, or at least properly explain what the terminology all means. Try to keep the language simple too. Don’t use words over three syllables if you can help it to make the content as accessible as possible to the widest audience. The rule here is never to make any assumptions about your audience about what level of English (or another langauge) they can understand and how technically literate they might be.
It’s definitely a complex process writing your own Windows book, and it’s not just the content which took me three months to write part-time. My 170 page book is now free and has had hundreds of thousands of downloads as well as some great reviews. It’s truly a labour of love but if you want to write your own eBook then I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Finally there are some touches I added including clear icons for any feature in Windows related to accessability, icons to signify what features are available in which edition of Windows and (in the image below) large clear icons to signify the need to do a right mouse click. Try also to avoid the use of small fonts and text. This is where your readers will really appreciate the attention to detail you can put into a book.
You don’t need to set out to write something as ambitious as I did. I primarily did this because I needed to be able to prove to publishers that I could write a full book and have it prove successful, job’s done on that score as I was signed by Microsoft Press last year. You might just want to write a short eBook on perhaps Windows 8 for tablets, or a Windows 8 Quick Start Guide for computer newbies. If you want to, definitely give it a go but plan, plan, plan in advance to make sure you get the content and layout just right. I spent about a month in planning before I wrote a word, and it’s time very well spent.
You can download my Windows 7 Power Users Guide HERE. If you want to write your own guides to Windows be sure to let us know and might add them to our downloads section.
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