Jennifer Lancaster

June 14, 2023

Developing Course Content from Industry News

How much time do you spend reading up on your industry news or doing training? Whether in the form of books, blogs, or talks, it costs you a lot of time to keep up with new techniques, better technology, reported surveys, and the like. So why not make extra income from all this learning? Capitalising on Your Knowledge with a Course When you develop a course, you draw on formal training and related information but you also put in your own learning from hands-on experience. And this mix is what is really valuable. Is it time to value what you’ve learned — and put a home study course or live webinar program together? A home study course can be in the form of video streaming hosted on a marketplace, or video streaming (private download). The most popular video course marketplace…

September 15, 2025

Book Editing

Finding the Simplest Explanations in Book Cover Copy

You might have heard of Occum’s Razor as a principle for logic and problem-solving. Wikipedia says, “… among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected”. It is often the simplest answer, as long as it’s also the most logical, that is the best. We can apply it to all sorts of things; I like to apply the principle to book description writing, aka book blurbs. You are inside your world, writing your book or your blog articles. In so doing, you may assume a lot of people have the foundations of your knowledge. They probably do not, so don’t confuse readers with long-winded book descriptions (blurbs) to furl their mind. Writing Good ‘Book Cover Copy’ – What’s in it for Me? Finding the simplest way to say something means looking at it from the buyer’s perspective…

August 14, 2020

Book Editing

Why is Book Editing Necessary and Often Expensive?

I’ve just been reading about self-published authors’ points of view on the necessity or editing their book, and was surprised to find out experienced authors do value professional book editing services – once they’ve experienced it. But how do we achieve affordable book editing rates? Obviously I have been in both the writer and the editor’s seat, so I know how much time it takes to edit to a good result and how at times you need to “switch brains”. With the luxury of time, it could be ten times that I’ve gone over my own books… checking, line editing and re-structuring. But why is all this ‘fluffing’ necessary? Well, think of the last time you selected a non-fiction book and handed over $25 or so. You were eager to read up on this subject, so you can overlook a…

November 20, 2020

Selling eBooks and Media

Creating a profitable information publishing business

Do you dream of information publishing, but you’ve been going it alone with niche research, website building, and online marketing? We all need a helping hand in this area. I certainly do! Before handing over $1,000, $2,000, or even $5,000 to digital people (SEO, design, dev, copy), it pays to get a minor education in these areas. I got my initial digital marketing education through the training tools at Site Build It (SBI!) Three years later, I am adding to that education with Inbound Marketing training at Hubspot Academy. To gain a partly-passive income from information, you need to MASTER Keyword Research. As a copywriter, I used Market Samurai (2009-2013), a software tool for research of all kinds. But even I was surprised at the depth of knowledge that was missing to interpret data, like keyword competitiveness and numbers. So I looked…