(The Walking The Talk series was created to show an ebook launch from idea to salesletter to marketing.)
With the outline filling out nicely, it’s just about time for me to start writing the actual ebook.
But I have one last step to perform before going into blast off mode. I have to get all of my research material into an organized work pile.
Perhaps some of you prefer to have all of your research material in print format. I don’t.
After hours I like to bring the laptop in the bed with me. So there’s me… my 4-year old… some dolls… the laptop… comforters… pillows… you get the message.
The last thing I want to do is bring a folder full of paperwork to my nightly slumber party.
So now that I’ve collected links for the material I’m going to use, I’ll take a day to go through it, and organize it with Diigo.
Diigo is a social annotation tool that allows you to collect and compile web pages.
So let’s say you’ve found a paragraph of information on a web page that spans a total of 10 pages. You can use Diigo to highlight and/or sticky note that paragraph.
Then you tag that page with a specific keyword, write a comment of what you wanted to gather from that page, and Diigo saves it.
It’s far more research-friendly than regular bookmarking.
This screenshot shows a list of some of my collected links in Diigo.
The blue title is the title of the web page. By default Diigo uses the sites title. But you can change it before saving the link.
The black text shows my comments. With the outline completed, I use the comments section to remind myself where I want the information to go in the ebook.
For example, with Bad Smell in House - Fishy!!!!, I’ve made the comment: “REASON for smelly house.”
If you look at my outline, you’ll see that in the Introduction I’ll have The Top 10 Causes of Smelly Houses. This link will help me in that department.
Quite a few of my DBO readers say they prefer to let ghostwriters handle the actual ebook.
But I think if more people got into the habit of organizing their material in an efficient manner, they would be able to sit down and find the writing process easier.
So give Diigo a try. It’s free, and quite easy to use.
Until we meet again,
Alexis Dawes
January 9th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I LOVE Diigo for this reason — the first time you mentioned it, I decided to give it a try. I make sure to keep my comments private though ;P
January 11th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Hi Alexis, I love following your progress since I’m a ghostwriter of eBooks, too. there’s a lot more than meets the eye, isn’t there? Tiff
January 11th, 2007 at 9:03 pm
I’m glad I made you a believer Isabella. Tell Diigo to hire me as part of their PR team.
And Tiff… yes there is a lot more than meets the eye. But as you know, the more organized you are, the better. I hope that’s the message everyone is receiving.
Alexis
January 15th, 2007 at 2:47 am
This step-by-step guide is like the lost chapter of DBO. It’s great to watch a work in progress!
In total, how many hours would you say you’ve spent on the research, outline & organize phase?
-chris
January 15th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Hi Chris,
I would say I’ve spent about 10 hours total so far. I probably could have done it faster. But with the holidays and daughter home sick, I had to work under less than ideal conditions.
Alexis
August 28th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Diigo looks awesome, I can’t wait to try it. I have a bad - badddd habit of saving paragraphs into an outlook express email and then saving it to the drafts. Which is totally unorganized.
My laptop before it died had over 700 drafts. ugghh