What is an E-Book & How to Create One using PowerPoint:
E-Book is short for “electronic book,” and uses either a computer, mobile device or ebook reader to display long-form texts in book form. In this guide, we will cover what is an e-book and also how to create an E-Book using PowerPoint. Ebooks have multiple digital “pages” that people can navigate through and are often packaged as a PDF document so they can easily be sent from one user to another.
The more care you dedicate to creating an e-Book using PowerPoint, the more strategic you make it and the more useful the content will be for your audience. This means that the amount of time and effort you put into its creation will directly impact just how often people download it. In this guide, you will learn how to create an e-Book from using PowerPoint step by step.
To maximize the impact, and the number of downloads of your e-Book created with PowerPoint, you have to look at it through the eyes of your audience. What are they most concerned about, and what information would be most valuable to them in that context? Where are they in their sales funnel? Based on that, should your e-Book serve as a research tool for them or a shopping guide?
Premium, high-quality content is meant to carry value far beyond the e-Book itself. Whatever the messages and ideas are in your content, the most important thing to do is make it consistent. Achieving that consistency will involve carefully and strategically structuring your PowerPoint e-Book to generate leads.
In What File Formats can E-books Be Saved?
E-books can be saved in one of several formats. Depending on your end-user, though, you might find a use for any of the following file types:
PDFs are likely the most well-known file type. The “PDF” extension stands for “Portable Document Format,” and is best for e-books that are meant to be read on a computer (digital marketers, you’ll want to remember this one). We’ll talk more about how to save your ebook as a PDF later in this article.
EPUB
This file type stands for “Electronic Publication,” and is the more flexible ebook formats. By that, I mean EPUB ebooks can “reflow” their text to adapt to various mobile devices and tablets, allowing the ebook’s text to move on and off different pages based on the size of the device on which a user is reading the ebook. They’re particularly helpful for viewing on smaller screens, such as smartphones as well as the Nook from Barnes and Noble.
AZW
This is an ebook file type designed for the Kindle, an e-reader device by Amazon. However, users can also open this file format on smartphones, tablets, and computers.
ODF
ODF stands for OpenDocument Format, a file type meant primarily for OpenOffice, a series of open-source content creation programs similar to Microsoft Office.
Can You Edit an E-Book created with PowerPoint?
Yes, you can do editing after you have published your eBook. If there is anything that you made a mistake on, you can publish it.
The reason this is so good is that this means you don’t have to slow down the rate of your publishing. You don’t have to have everything perfect when you are going to publish it right out there.
This is something a lot of people make a huge mistake on, which is they are waiting for everything to be perfect before they get their first book out. You can go back and change it, so there are no worries, whatsoever on that side.
So you are going to make mistakes. You can easily fix those mistakes in your eBook. The other is, you should still edit it before so you don’t get negative reviews and have to take it down.
Choosing a Topic for your E-Book:
If you already have a blog or active social media following, you’ve probably already identified your niche. If so, you’re already one step ahead of many would-be eBook authors!
But it’s also perfectly okay if you’re just starting – the strategies below will help you not only define your topic but your niche as well.
When starting to think of a possible niche to pursue, consider the following questions:
- What topics am I passionate about?
- Am I knowledgeable about and trained in?
- What problems do people already frequently ask me for advice on?
But don’t just stop here.
Once you’ve chosen your niche, niche down even more! In my experience, the more specific your niche, the easier it is for you – and your book – to stand out from the competition!
Outline Chapters for your E-Book:
Everything starts with an outline including eBooks, blog posts, case studies, products, and so on. Outlining your eBook helps you easily finish your job from start to finish. So how do you outline a PowerPoint e-book? Here are some quick tips.
- Analyze other e-Books table of contents (so you’ll get an idea about how to outline an e-Book). Go through the Amazon Kindle section to find similar e-Books table of contents and chapters.
- Break your e-Book into several chapters
- Treat each chapter as a detailed individual blog post (so you can work on each chapter a day or two or more if needed)
- How many pages should your e-book be? (Plan that in advance so it becomes so much easier later)
Break-Down Each Chapter of your E-Book:
The best way to get started writing an eBook is to work on one chapter at a time.
Here’s how it can look like;
- Introduction
- Chapter One
- Chapter Two
- Chapter Three
- Chapter Four (and so on)
- Conclusion
Once everything’s done, you can compile it into an eBook.
Design your E-book:
You’ll notice we only have one “chapter page” in the template (slide three). To create additional chapter pages, or any pages really, simply right click the slide and choose Duplicate Slide. This will make a copy of your slide and allow you to drag it to its proper place in your ebook via the sidebar or Slide Sorter section of PowerPoint. You can then customize it for any subsequent chapters.
Choosing the right colors for your E-Book:
Color psychology isn’t just a fancy gimmick that you learned in your Psych 101 class back in college; it’s 100% real! Marketing professionals always choose the ‘right’ colors for their campaigns just to influence your purchasing decisions all the time. As humans, we’re prone to be extremely visual – so it just makes sense for us to understand that choosing the right palette can influence our moods more than we might think.
But does it work in the presentation space? I mean, if we were to pick the right RGB values, hues, intensities, casts, and tints, would we be able to influence our presentation audience’s mood?
Abso-friggin-lutely.
Depending on the message, choosing the right colors will get your audience to see what you want them to see and feel what you want them to feel. There is no better tactic than this in visual communication because you’re tapping into your audience’s emotional cues.
So let’s get into this with a little more detail. I’m going to list five colors and how they can have an impact on your audience’s mood(s). Depending on your message, you can use these colors to sway the room’s collective opinion to your favor.
Orange:
People use orange to associate their content with enthusiasm, creativity, and encouragement. It’s the go-to color to use when you want people to try something or accept something new. I’ve used the color orange in various presentations that instilled change, for example. Above everything else, the color orange is strongly associated with happiness and energy. It’s a “good-mood” color that can turn a frown upside down.
Blue:
Blue is the ‘silent assassin’ of the color wheel. It’s not an in-your-face color like red or yellow. Its impact on one’s mood is subtle; things like confidence, wisdom, and intelligence are highlighted very discretely. Blue also tends to represent calmness and tranquility. The color of the skies and seas in our beautiful world is blue, and whenever we look epic at them, we always give ourselves a moment to take it all in.
Yellow:
Yellow is all about happiness and optimism. Think back to when you got that star-sticker in the third grade, or when you got a laughing emoji in your last text message. There’s a reason why those things are yellow. Yellow also helps whenever you want to categorize valuable points in your slide, and that’s only because it’s a color that stands from the crowd. I’ve used yellow several times in my presentations just to help me make each point stand out from the other.
Green:
Green is a little confusing. On one end of the spectrum, green is perceived as a “soft color.” It isn’t merely as intense as the other colors listed here. Instead, green is associated with things like nature or healing. Green exudes comforting vibes like relaxation, freshness, growth, or harmony. I’ve used green in my PowerPoint slides whenever I want to make my audience feel as calm and collected as possible. On the other end of the conundrum, the color can be linked to ‘negative’ moods like envy or jealousy. This is because green is traditionally associated with corporate-focused items like money or financing or profit. I guess it comes down to how you want to use it.
Red:
Red is a power color. If red was a person, and he walked up to you, the first thing he’d say is “bow down to me, simpleton!”
Alright, I’m exaggerating.
Still, red is a color that calls for attention. It is a color that binds itself to energy
because it is emotionally intense. When we interpret the color red, we could feel things like an elevated heart rate, or an increase in appetite. Think about it: don’t you think there’s some sort of explanation why Coca-Cola or McDonalds are branded the way they are?
Whenever you’re designing your slides, use red whenever you want to grab as much attention as possible.
Use Good Visuals for your E-Book:
I know you’ve heard it before: A picture speaks 1,000 words.
Most of the time people say it to remind us that pictures help other people understand something quickly, at-a-glance. And, that’s true (and is the basis for reasons 2-4).
But let’s flip that around and think about what that means for the presentation creator (i.e., us). Which sounds more time-intensive: Dragging/dropping a picture -OR- typing out 1,000 words? Even compared to typing out 50 or 100 words, it’s easy to see that adding a picture saves you time compared to writing out a bunch of text.
And I can speak from experience. Once I created a good workflow and my visual database, I’ve been able to take all the text/bullets from my presentation and turn it into stunning visuals in minutes.
Seriously. MINUTES.
If you’re feeling like you already spend a lot of time on your presentations and you don’t believe that it could take less time, then it might be worth seeing if you’re spending time on ineffective strategies.
Place Call-To-Actions within your E-Book:
Now that your content is written and designed, it’s time to optimize it for lead generation, reconversion, and promotion.
Think about how you got here — you clicked on a call-to-action (CTA) in an email, on a social media post, or somewhere else. A CTA is a link or visual object that entices the visitor to click and arrive on a landing page that will get them further engaged with your company. Since your ebook readers have probably converted into leads to get their hands on your ebook, to begin with (more on this in Step 2 below), use the CTAs within your ebook to reconvert your readers and propel them further down your marketing funnel.
To hyperlink the CTA in your ebook (or any image or text in your ebook) to your destination URL, simply go to Insert >> Hyperlink in PowerPoint.
Now, we don’t have a dedicated CTA template slide in the PowerPoint ebook templates for you to customize … but it’s still simple! All you have to do is duplicate slide four (the Header/Subheader slide) and customize copy or add images as needed. You can also go to Insert >> New Slide and work from there.
Convert Into PDF File:
In the ‘File’ menu, select the ‘Save As’ option, and then click on ‘PDF’. Enter a file name and click ‘Publish’. Your eBook is ready in PDF format.
Easy Steps for Creating E-Book using PowerPoint:
Step 1: Open a new blank PowerPoint presentation & save it.
Click on ‘New’ from the ‘File’ menu, and then click on ‘Save’ to save the eBook. Do make sure you keep saving the eBook as you write, to avoid losing your hard work.
Step 2: Choose the e-Book layout.
Based on how you want your eBook to look, select the appropriate slide orientation from the ‘Design’ menu.
Step 3: Add the cover image.
Design a cover image for your eBook in the same layout, using either PicMonkey or PowerPoint itself. Insert the cover image by clicking on the ‘Picture’ option in the ‘Insert’ menu, and selecting the cover image where you saved it on your computer.
Step 4: Add the title page, copyright & disclaimer to your E-Book
The first page after the cover should contain the title, tagline, and author name. Click on ‘Text Box’ in the ‘Insert’ menu and start typing in your text.
Place another text box at the bottom of the page and type in your copyright & disclaimer.
Step 5: Add the page numbers to your E-Book
Click on ‘Slide Number’ in the ‘Insert’ menu and be sure to select the checkboxes for ‘Slide Number’ and ‘Don’t show on title slide’ as shown in the screenshot below.
Step 6: Include your E-Book table of contents (if required).
Unlike MS Word, the table of contents needs to be created manually in PowerPoint. So you will have to use text boxes to type in each of your chapter titles and the corresponding page numbers. Here’s what the table of contents for my ebook looked like. I used one textbox for the heading and another for the list of chapters and page numbers.
Step 7: Write the eBook.
Start each chapter with a heading in a bigger font than the rest of the chapter contents. You will have to insert text boxes into each page and lay them out based on how you want the page to look.
Step 8: Insert images to your Powerpoint E-book
You can also insert pictures from the ‘Insert’ menu and drag them wherever you want them on the page. You can change the style of the images (including borders, shadows, etc.) from the format menu.
Step 9: Add the author page to your E-Book
Make sure you add a good picture of yourself and your bio on the last page. Also, provide links to your website and social media channels so readers can get in touch with you.
Step 10: Convert your PowerPoint E-Book to a PDF
In the ‘File’ menu, select the ‘Save As’ option, and then click on ‘PDF’. Enter a file name and click ‘Publish’. Your eBook is ready in PDF format.
Create a Dedicated Landing Page for your E-Book:
Your ebook should be available for download through a landing page on your site. A landing page is a web page that promotes/describes your offer and provides a form that visitors need to fill out with their contact information to access your ebook. This is how you can convert your visitors into business leads that your sales team can ultimately follow up with.
Promote your E-Book:
Once your landing page is all set, you can use that destination URL to promote your e-book across your marketing channels. Here are five ways you can do this:
- Advertise your new ebook on your website. For example, feature a CTA or link to your offer’s landing page on your resources page or even your homepage.
- Promote your ebook through your blog. For instance, consider publishing an excerpt of your ebook as a blog post. Or write a separate blog article on the same topic as your ebook, and link to it at the end of your post using a call-to-action to encourage readers to keep learning. (Note: This very blog post is the perfect example of how to promote an offer you created with a blog post.)
- Send a segmented email to contacts who have indicated an interest in receiving offers from your company.
Conclusion:
Powerpoint is more than imagine, it provides everything for publishers to make an engaging book from scratch. I hope this guide has helped you in creating your e-book using PowerPoint
Disclaimer: My posts may contain affiliate links! Moreover, if you buy something through one of my links, you won’t pay a penny more, but I will get a small commission, which helps keep the lights on, thanks
To your Success
Juan Villar