Wohoo - after saving up for a while, I got my hands on a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking. The installation progress seemed to take forever as the little green progress bar slowly made its way across the screen, while I was busy daydreaming about writing my e-books in days rather than weeks.

Apparently, there’s just one thing I wasn’t counting on…

I don’t think Dragon Naturally Speaking is designed with non-native speakers of English in mind?

Now, look, my Russian accent isn’t all that bad. I don’t sound like a Russki Boris talking to a Russki babushka somewhere in the village of Baranovichi in the middle of Russian nowhere. However, sadly, the taint of my origins is still there a little bit - and I guess Dragon Naturally Speaking doesn’t like it. The accuracy is really way below what I expected, though maybe it’ll improve as I do more training sessions (I’ve done about 3-4 so far and have noticed a considerable improvement).

Still, writing and talking at the same time is really quite a challenege, as I’ll have to adjust the way I dictate (never done it before). I guess Voice Recognition software makes more sense for people who already know a lot about the subject they’re writing on, rather than for folks like me who research as they write.

But, anyway, just thought I’d let you know that I am now officially a dragon, and you can hear me roar - in Russian.

Recently, I came across an absolutely invaluable piece of advice in Jim Edwards’ “7-Day E-book” - and, while I cannot disclose all the great stuff you can find in his work, I’d like to share with you one important point.

Sometimes, it can be very difficult to define the scope of your info product - what topics it’s going to cover, what makes it different from the competition, etc. And if you write your sales letter based on the finished product, there’s always a chance that you’ll end up delivering as much as the guy next door.

And if you’re playing the Internet marketing game, you had better overdeliver, right?

Well, that’s why it’s such a good idea to first write the sales letter for your info product, and only then the e-book itself. Why? Because writing a sales letter forces you to deliver on the promises you made in it! Just by explaining what makes your product unique and valuable you already set up a content structure for your e-book.

It’s not a very intuitive technique, but I can assure you that it has worked miracles for my product - and it can help you, too.

Well, another week has gone by and I’m not any closer to releasing my information product. Sadly, the sheer amount of stuff I’m having to deal with every day is plain ridiculous - in fact, Tuesday was the only day when I was free of both helping my girlfriend and attending my part-time job, so I took that opportunity to relax as well as get a little bit of writing done.

With my Mum’s project still on the backburner (she’s as swamped with work as I am), I started working on a separate product as well pending the completion of her part of the job. However, this time around, I’m going to follow a more systematic approach by using the step-by-step guide in Jim Edwards’ How to Write an E-book in 7 Days. It’s a huge piece of writing (200+ pages), but it’s really worth every penny.

Basically, Jim explains really well how to write your own e-book in just a week. He gives you a 7-day schedule (with only 3 days allocated to writing, actually), and he claims you can even release your info product in a weekend (although I suspect he assumes that you already have sufficient knowledge of the subject and don’t need to do research). Some of the advice he gives isn’t really applicable to me (for example, he spends some time explaining how to overcome writer’s block or any inhibitions regarding writing that you may have), but it’s a great read for anyone new to writing.

I’ll be honest with you here - you probably don’t need Jim’s e-book to write one of your own, especially if you’ve already written a few of them before. However, if you have never done it, then Jim’s guide is really great. I’ll be following it for this week - let’s see if I can get my product ready by the weekend!

For those interested in Jim’s e-book, you can get it here.