Open Office Writer 3.2 is Oracle’s free Word Processor for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris. It can be used to write documents, and convert them to PDF E-books for authors to sell on Amazon, Clickbank, or give a way free on blogs, forums, and other websites.
E-books are books in electronic format which most modern computers can open. The most popular E-book format is Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) file since it can be opened with computers and laptops running Windows, Mac, and Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu.
PDF files can also be opened with E-readers like the Amazon Kindle, Tablet PCs like the iPad, Android tablets, and some smart cell phones like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Google Android phones, and Windows Phone 7 cell phones, etc.
E-books are also searchable with the built-in search engine on most PDF readers which allows you to easily find text from within a E-book like using a web search engine.
People with vision problems can also enjoy your E-books since there are programs which can read the text in your PDF and turn it to speech, or you can zoom in and zoom out of a PDF to make the text and pictures bigger or smaller, so you can read it easier.
It is also possible to insert comments, high light text and bookmarks in a PDF document with a PDF reader for note taking, and so you can easily come back to where you last read at another time without damaging your E-book.
Instead of flipping through pages like a paper based book, you’ll be scrolling down a screen like a webpage to read an E-book or changing a page like clicking a link on a webpage or blog like the “more stories” link found on all blogs.
E-books don’t require any paper or ink, so they are very economical and environmentally friendly to make. It is also very easy to make extra copies of an E-book by uploading a copy of an E-book on to a website. Everyone who downloads your E-book with automatically have a copy of your E-book once their download is complete, or you can burn them to a CD or copy your E-books to a USB flash drive, and you’ll have extra copies to sell or give to people. E-books file sizes are also very small. For example, my E-book I wrote for this tutorial is only 0.5 MBs/500KBs in size, so it will even fit on a Floppy drive, or USB flash drive very easily unlike other forms of electronic media like Audio books, videos, etc which can be hundreds of Megabytes in size.
E-books are also easy to share since you can upload them to your blog for people to download, send them by e-mail as a file attachment, or burn them to a CD to mail to someone.
You can also make money by giving away your E-books for free, by linking to affiliate links for products related to your E-books within your E-books. Affiliate links are links which pay the user a commission of 4-30+% of the profits from an sale of an item or service which your affiliate link generated by referring a user to a sales page, and the users buys the product.
Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, Google Affiliates, Ebay Partner Network and Click Bank are all affiliate programs which pay members a certain percentage of the commissions from sales generated like 4-30% commission for helping selling products via a members affiliate links or codes.
E-books are also a great way to promote a website since the downloader or buyer of your E-book will always have your website link which you embedded in your E-book as long as they still have a copy of your E-book on their computer, laptop, smart phone, or E-book reader.
If you want to promote your cause like “save the whales”, you can write an E-book, and burn it on a CD to hand out to people on the street, schools, and other public places. I also recommend burning an Installer file for Adobe Acrobat Reader or Foxit PDF reader for reading E-books just in case the person you are giving the E-book to does not have a PDF reading software installed on their computer already.
Go to foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ to download its PDF reader software for Windows to view PDF files on a computer running Windows Operating System.
Plus, some people might share your E-book with their friends and family which can increase your audience size.
I also notice Google and other search engines index PDF files, so your E-book is search-able on Google by searchers, so this can increase your traffic to your website from Google searches for a topic which a reader is searching for online. The latest version of Google Chrome web browser also has a PDF reader built-in to it, so when a Google Chrome reader finds your E-book with Google, he can automatically start reading your E-book from within Google Chrome.
E-books cost nothing to create as long as you have a computer with Open Office which you can download at openoffice.org you can start writing your E-book for free.
The first step to writing your E-book is making the title page. After you make the title page, you can make a table of contents if you are writing a technical book, but novels or fiction books don’t need a table of contents in most cases. Save your Ebook on a regular basis to prevent data loss.
What to write about?
If you want a larger audience in a short amount of time, it is best to write about technical topics or non-fiction topics like tutorials, how to, do it yourself, advice, biographies, etc. Very few people are good at writing fictional books except for established writers like J.K. Rowling RL. Stien, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.
But, if you know a lot about a certain topic like wood working, computer repair, gardening, you can write a very detailed E-book about a specific topics to teach a reader how to do something like “planting flowers in a pot” since it is a lot easier to write a good book where you explain how to do a task in detail then to write a novel which has a great setting, plot, character development, and climax.
If you are a great fiction writer, you may have some success writing a fictional E-book, but there are already many great fiction writers which you have to compete with like R.L. Stein.
Create the bookmarks for your Chapters which you use to link your “table of contents’ ” chapter headings to your Chapters.
1. High light your chapter heading at the beginning of each chapter.
2.Go to the insert menu on the top, and pick the bookmark option.
3.Name your bookmark, and click ok.
4.Repeat steps 1-3 for each chapter.
Now that you are done making your chapter bookmarks, it is time to make your links to link your table of contents to the bookmark which is related to the chapter heading in the table of contents.
Example: Chapter 1 bookmark will be linked to the Chapter 1 heading in the table of contents.
1. Highlight the Chapter heading which you want to link to your related bookmark which you made earlier.
2.Click on the Hyperlink button on the top toolbar which has a picture of a page with a earth in the middle of the page.
3. Click on the document section on the left sidebar of the Hyperlink Window.
4. Go to the target in Document section, and click on the Target/browse button.
5. Now go to the bookmark section in the “Target in Document” window, and pick the bookmark which you want to link to. Click the  Apply and close button on the Window.
6. Click the Apply and Close button on the Hyperlink Window again.
7.Repeat step 1-6 for each additional chapter heading in your table of content.
Double check your E-book for spelling and grammatical errors before you export it.
Once your E-book is free of spelling and grammatical errors, it is time to export your document as a PDF file.
1. Save your E-book.
2. Press the PDF button on the top toolbar in Open Office to start the Export PDF wizard.
3. Name your E-book and pick a location on your computer like the desktop or your documents folder.
4. Click the Save button.
Now your E-book is complete, and you can sell or share it online on websites.
Click Here to download my E-book on “Writing an E-book with Open Office Writer”
View my E-book on Google Docs if you do not have a PDF reader software on your computer. Sadly, the Bookmarks do not work after I uploaded it to Google Docs.
You can also downlod my E-book on Dropbox.com or MediaFire
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6427890/Writing%20an%20E-book%20with%20Open%20Office%20Writer.pdf
thanks for the tip. I kind of moved away from PDFing, since my Adobe license expired. But this is obviously a much more cost effective technique.
Indeed, this is very price effective since it is free. All you need is a computer which can run OpenOffice and you can write PDF E-books for Free.
thank you so much for explaining how to insert bookmarks with openoffice. BUT I have one more task to conquer with my ebook.
-Keeping my centered areas centered after conversion with epub. –
When I convert my open office doc (to epub format) my centering did not stick. how do you fix this with open office I read with Word they create a new paragraph style; (in “style box”, word can add a new title (centered) and highlight the paragraph which needs to stay centered and choose the new style created. with openoffice that is not an option could you assist me with this quest? HELP
Hi Catherine, have you tried inserting a one-cell table by going to insert table in the insert menu, and making the table border white or your background color to make it invisible.
You can also try the insert a frame option in the insert menu, and you can make the frame’s border white in the top toolbar for the Frame’s option, so it will be invisible. It is possible to align text left, right, and centered in frames and tables as well with the regular text align tools in the Open Office toolbars.
I’m not sure if this works in eub format, but it works for PDF for me.
You can also try one of the ePub export extensions for Open Office at http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/search/node/epub .
All you have to do is download the extension file, and open Open Office Writer.
Go to tools menu, and Pick the Extension Manager option then click the Add button to browse to your extension to add the extension to Open Office.
Hope, this works. Thanks for the comment.
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