One of the primary benefits of publishing your book as a webbook is the capability of making revisions quickly, easily, and as often as is desirable. No author ever finished writing a book and unless they were forced to (i.e., by the publisher putting it into print). Certainly many genres of books (e.g., novels) should be finished, cast in concrete, and not changed. But for those who do informational writing and publishing, revisions are highly desirable in order to keep up with the times and correct mistakes.
Organization
Books are organized by chapters, and for a webbook each chapter becomes a webpage. This is a natural organization, one that’s easy to put into effect. It’s also an organization that facilitates revisions. You can revise each chapter as needed without revising the entire book or issuing a new edition. Some chapters will never need to be revised. Other chapters may need to be revised fairly often. Thus, when you set up the organization of your book into chapters, it will be clever of you to use revisability as one of the considerations in organizing your book.
This does not necessarily mean that every chapter should be short so that any little thing you want to change appears as a single chapter. Long chapters are necessary and desirable for some topics. It does mean, however, that when you can separate two topics gracefully rather than jumbling them together, the greater need to revise one of the topics may be one of the reasons to separate them.
Advantages of Ongoing Revisions
There are a number of advantages to authors for making ongoing revisions:
- They are easy to make for a webbook. With a chapter as one webpage, you simply open the webpage and make your changes to a single chapter.
- It’s good SEO. The search engines favor webpages that change. If your webpages are static, you will not rank as high in the search engines.
- Changes give you the opportunity to stay in touch with your users (readers, customers). You can notify them by email every time you make a major change to a chapter.
- As an informational author, it’s more fulfilling to keep your information up-to-date and relevant than it is to let things go for months or years between revisions.
- Revisions enable you to not only make changes to content easily but also to make changes in marketing and advertising (to experiment) that provide revenue.
- You can also date your revisions so that users know just how old the information is. This builds readers’ confidence knowing that your information is up to date. Revisions give your book a Wikipedia-like character because your book is always easily available online as an up-to-date reference, and for users it’s just one bookmark away.
- A policy of ongoing revisions enables you to take advantage of your readership. Your readers will submit additional information, corrections to your mistakes, and even spelling errors and typos. This helps you publish a better book and gives your readers a sense of participation.
- If you compete with print books, ebooks, bookapps, and web-based training on the same topic, you can make revisions easier and quicker than the authors for the other formats.
That is not to say that you should update your information hourly, daily, weekly, or even monthly for a topic if not justified. But making revisions easily as they are needed is a great feature of publishing a webbook.
Make Additions
The revisions are not the whole story. How about additions? You can add chapters. You can add supportive data and information. You can add diverse media elements, such as graphics, sound bites, voice-bites, video clips, and embedded programming.
You might start with a small book and end up with something larger or even huge. Or you might start with a large book and decide to break it up into smaller webbooks. You can do whatever you please, because changes and revisions are easy to publish. As soon as the revisions or changes are online (in revised webpages or even new webbooks), they are published. This is a different paradigm than ebooks, book apps, or printed books.
Use Restrain
There is the danger of course that you can get carried away with revisions and additions. Your webbook could become huge and overwhelming for users in an era when users favor shorter publications. If you’re aggressive in adding to your webbook, there may come a time when you need to break it up into smaller webbooks. Nonetheless, you can keep the total body of information together by using generous links between the smaller webbooks.
Summary
With a webbook you can publish revisions and additions easily and quickly. A great feature of which to take advantage.
