Wow, what a crazy week - real life work can drag you away from everything and it was only in the last couple of days I could get down to work on my Ebook again. Progress is patchy; 4 sections (of 20) are complete, and I have over 5,000 words, most of them spread across ~10 sections in total.
Slightly discouraging is that the "complete" sections are coming in under word count - so 20,000 words might be a big target to meet.
How NOT to write an Ad
But enough progress; this blog post is for discussing the topic!
Picking an ebook topic was surprisingly hard, not for a lack of things to write about, but because I had so many ideas. In the end I decided to go for the low hanging fruit - a topic which I know plenty about and can give simple, practical advice.
Really I want to write a programming book. But that is hard, time consuming and often has a limited audience. So "popular" theme it is.
The first iteration of this project was aimed at writing copy. i.e. practical advice on writing for your product. It's somewhere I think a lot of companies are weak, leaving it till the last minute, or improperly testing their prose. In the long term writing that book is still the plan, because the market is so huge!
However, for a first attempt it was a little heavyweight. So I cast around for a lighter alternative in the same theme.
The concept for "How Not to write an Ad" came off my bookshelf. I've long had a book called "How not to write a novel", which takes an amusing tour through some of the worst mistakes of the aspiring author. I've always liked that format as it is gentle in exposing your flaws, it's hard to be mad at something so humorous.
A little research showed that there was a massive amount of source material; a.k.a crappy adverts. So I plunged in by listing twenty topics (you'll have to wait till later to see them...) that seemed to cover the most common culprits and then split them up into three "chapters".
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