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It started with a tweet.

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Earlier this year, Amaa_Official tweeted some advice to creatives on writing an instructive ebook. Her thread broke down the stages into manageable chunks, from choosing a subject, through writing, to presentation, sale and promotion.

I’ve written books before as part of the NaNoWriMo challenge, but I had never thought of doing something like this, so I set to thinking of a subject to write about. Of all the subjects I considered, I chose photography: an interest I’d pursued for years, in which I had wide experience with cameras, shooting and printing.

On looking through my photos, especially the digital images on my computer, I decided to focus on landscape photography. I thought about subjects to cover and the images needed to illustrate them and set to work, writing the ebook on Apple’s Pages and editing the photos in Adobe Photoshop. While doing this, I uploaded old landscape images of mine on social media, with posts trailing the forthcoming ebook.

A little over 5000 words later, with each of the ten chapters illustrated and formatted, I used Canva to make a cover design, adapting a free cover, which I then reduced in size using a trial of Adobe Acrobat. Once I’d placed it on my product page in Gumroad, I linked to the sales image on my social media.

I hesitate to finish with, “and that was all it took!” The process took months: page formatting was difficult; I agonised over the cover. But on the first day I launched the book, it began to sell.

This has been an extraordinary creative venture and one I’d like to repeat: I’m currently thinking of subjects to write on. Thanks to those who have bought the book so far, Amaa_Official, AlyssaColeLit and all those who tweet advice on ebook writing and promotion. Sharing this book has been a pleasure.