Lead Magnet Ebook Writer From Your Notes

Start with the problem your best clients have just before they hire you. Say you coach bookkeepers on running a practice. Before they need you, they need work, so landing their first clients is the problem to solve.

Then write the promise in one sentence: by the last page, this reader will be able to do or have something they can check. A number or a deadline makes it concrete. Narrow is fine. A small promise the guide fully keeps earns more trust than a big one it can't.

Write the chapter headings before any prose, in the order the reader will do the work. Make each chapter one step, and end it with something to do: a checklist, a worksheet, a script or a decision.

Size the guide by reading time, not page count. Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 studies, published in the Journal of Memory and Language, puts adults' average silent reading speed for English nonfiction at 238 words a minute¹. At that pace, a 5,000-word guide of five to eight short chapters takes about 21 minutes, short enough to finish in one sitting.

If you'd like a form to fill in first, the nonfiction book outline template has room for the promise, the reader and one takeaway per chapter.

You've probably written half of it already. Pull from client emails, call notes, workshop slides, old blog posts and the questions people ask you every week. Your method and your stories are the parts a reader cannot find anywhere else, so build each chapter around them.

Draft each chapter the way you'd explain it to one client: the step, a sentence on why it matters, an example from your work, then the action. Skip the opening chapter on why the topic matters. Your reader signed up because they already think it does.

Strangers often meet your work for the first time in a lead magnet, so expect them to check what you say. Link every outside fact to its source, and quote your own numbers only if you can show how you got them.

Client results need the most care. In the US, the FTC's Endorsement Guides say a client's story about a key result will likely be read as what others can generally expect². If that result isn't typical, say clearly what is. The same section shows that a line like "results not typical" is not enough.

Ask before you use a client's name or story, and keep the details as they happened.

Lead magnet ebooks often go out as PDFs, a format built for print. Nielsen Norman Group, a user experience research firm, summed up 20 years of its PDF research in 2020. Layouts sized for paper, it says, leave readers with tiny type and, on phones, the need to pinch, zoom, squint and scroll³.

The firm's advice is to use a web page instead wherever you can. Your guide can be an unlisted page you link from your welcome email. If you send a PDF, lay it out for a screen: one column, large body text, real headings and working links. Keep the file small so it downloads quickly on mobile data.

An accessible PDF takes more than a straight export from your word processor. The same article says color, contrast, document structure and tags all need deliberate attention.

End the guide with one next step that follows from its last chapter, such as a free call, a workshop or a starter package. Give it one sentence on who it suits and one link. If the offer needs a full pitch, put that on a sales page, not in the guide.

Your signup form makes a promise too. Seth Godin, whose book coined the term permission marketing, writes that to get permission you make a promise, and then that is all you do⁴. He gave away a third of that book for an email address and never used those addresses again, because follow-ups were not part of the deal. Say on the form what you will send, and how often.

Send the guide the moment someone signs up. A welcome email sequence can deliver it, introduce you and lead to the next step. In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act covers those marketing emails. Each needs your valid postal address and a clear way to opt out⁵, and the FTC says you must honor an opt-out within 10 business days.

Have the method in your notes but not the hours to shape it? The tool at the top of this page drafts the whole ebook from your notes and marks a gap wherever a figure or story is missing.