Every Friday since the pandemic shut things down in March (here in the U.S.), we’ve highlighted communicators and marketers who at first were trying to figure out which part of the sky just fell on them in My Hot Mess. Then we shifted to those who are crushing the pandemic with Survive & Thrive. Now it’s time to get back to business, even if it’s not totally normal. We’re going to do that with an Ask Me Anything series—an elevation of our previous Spin Sucks Question series.
Today, a Spin Sucks Community member asks how to choose the right format for an eBook in your lead generation efforts.
Welcome back to another Ask Me Anything, which is a new series where we talk to our friends, our viewers, and our community. about what they would like to know. The whole point is to stump me. If I don’t know the answer, I will ask one of my smart friends to join me.
Let’s take a look at the mailbag.
Today’s question comes from a Spin Sucks Community member. She asks:
Let’s talk about eBooks for lead generation. There are lots of different formats for eBooks according to everything I’ve read—ePub, PDF, Mobi, and more. Once we set up the landing page and our simple form, what do we do next?
eBook Formats for Lead Generation
In the Spin Sucks Community, we recently had quite a lively conversation about lead generation and formats for your content. But, before I get to the lively part of the conversation, I will tell you this. There are certain things that you learn about people when you do lead generation exercise. Ahem.
You learn that some people like to print and have eBooks in full form. They get very, shall we say, irritated if you don’t give them an option to print it out so they can highlight and dogear and write in the margins. Then there are others who like to have a link that they can save in their inbox and easily find with a search. Others like to read in their browsers. There are others who like to send it to their Kindle or another reading app. And others like to have a PDF.
It’s not hard to do to create different formats. There are lots of resources out there that, once it’s created in a document, it will covert to every possible format available. We use Atavist, but you could also have a designer output from InDesign or you could do it from Canva, too.
Christopher S. Penn joined the lively conversation and added his two cents. He said:
I write my big stuff in Scrivener, which I then export to my target formats. Calibre is the answer if your design software doesn’t export natively, though. In you’re doing stuff in InDesigbn, export from that to ePub and convert with Calibre.
There are lots of different ways that you can do it that are pretty easy with one stroke of a finger.
The moral of the story is to do all of it because if you choose one format, you will have some very unhappy people. Trust me. I speak from experience.
That’s all I have for this week. There won’t be an AMA next week because of the holiday and, I don’t know about you, but I massively need a few days off. So we’ll be back on December 4 with a special guest who will talk about a public relations CRM.
Have a Question For Us?
If you have a question for a future AMA, you can drop it in the comments here or join us in the (free) Spin Sucks Community. Ask it there, get engaged, have some fun. We were talking about booze the other day. So, you know, lots of things happen in that community—and it’s not all serious, all of the time.
I hope to see you there.
Oh! And Happy Thanksgiving, to those of you in the U S.!
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash