One of the techniques to create ebooks that seems to be widely suggested is to put on a seminar, record it and then transcribe the result as an ebook.

The biggest problem with this technique is that it is high risk. You see when you put on a seminar you typically change and leave things off. After all a seminar is a living thing. No one is perfect and you simply can’t remember everything you have to say. Even with notes, you can guarantee that you’ll lose items, put them out of order and generally make mistakes.

In addition, the structure of a seminar is slightly (very slightly) different from that of a book. Once the transcription is created you’ll need to make sometimes very major modifications to force fit the result into a book form. That is why most of the suggestions include the recommendtion when writing ebooks this way to use the transcription as a base (effectively a first draft).

Now ask yourself one final question …. have you ever given a 1/2 day seminar? Do you realize how much work is involved? That’s what you’ll have to do to fill up a 20,000 word ebook. Even professionals add filler to half day sessions (called practice sessions). It’s just to hard to keep your audience alert otherwise. And of course, practice sessions don’t count to your word count.

I’m not saying that transcriptions aren’t a great idea for creating product. But when someone says that you can build your ebook business based on transcribing seminars you need to realize that they are simplifying.

Leave your transcriptions for filling in your product line. You need to build your ebook business by writing ebooks not by transcribing. At least for one attempt at ebook writing. Your main product.

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