Today we published our first official ebook at WSO2. This is something I’ve been wanting to try for a while, ever since David Meerman Scott began talking about ebooks as a valuable viral marketing tool.
It was more difficult to write than I thought it would be, as most first-time experiences tend to be. As opposed to longer more formally written datasheets and whitepapers, this had to be a completely different style.
The writing style of an ebook is most similar to a blog post actually. The paragraphs should be much shorter, with one key point per paragraph. Sentences should also be as short as possible (I’m terrible at that; I tend to over use semi-colons and parentheses).
From a design perspective, it took us several overhauls and the input of at least 3 designers to get to this point. Our internal graphic designers are fantastic, but have engineering backgrounds. This is a huge asset when it comes to drawing architectural diagrams or visual representations of highly technical concepts, but I think it’s more difficult to give an engineer a blank slate with the instruction “draw something interesting and cool.”
The look we attempted is clean “web 2.0″ styling, with strategic use of white spaces and bold subheaders. There are several types of images, ranging from technical diagrams to a cartoon bee. (In case it needs explaining, the product, WSO2 Carbon, is a set of components which we visually likened to a honeycomb; hence the bee.)
As difficult as it was, I think future ebooks will be significantly faster to produce. But I probably won’t mention a new ebook project to my team for at least a couple of weeks, lest I get laughed out the door…
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