Don't worry about style for now, just try to write something that you like and then think about editing/proof reading stuff.
I don't mean to be arrogant but see there it is again:
Think about editing. ...as if on average I don't proof read or meticulously consider my posts.
If I really want to think about editing then I have to include style.
No...I have to include everything. Beyond the "everything" that I know, consider or care on my current post per post basis.
...and for that, a book demands more from anyone than any blog or forum post.
Even if someone accuses a book author of not putting effort in editing, setting aside ghost writers, chances are few people would equate the lack of thought to be on par with a poorly edited blog or forum post.
You just need to make your points in simple possible ways (not too short or too long type of stuff like seth godin).
No offense to you or Seth Godin but I often found Seth's concepts to be... complicated and under-explained.
Take the bootstrapper's bible, based off of a quick skim, it's built on two things. Obvious (to the reader) outlines + anecdotes and references to stories to serve as the meat for concepts that can stand on their own as single sentences.
There's nothing wrong with doing it that way and in fact, it's how many successful marketers produce their most praised articles but there's two weakness that's lacking from that method.
1) When I sweep away at all the references, it becomes nothing more than a glorified motivational blog post. Inspiring but it's certainly not an attempt to make an actual useful guide more understandable. (This is based on my skimming.)
2) It's not simple. It's over-simplified. Everything written is almost to get the reader to nod their head and reduce their need to think. (again, my own conclusion although I've read other book reviewers of other books who have described certain books this way) I'm the farthest from someone who cherishes the elite feeling of figuring out a difficult book but the reality is I am not an expert. I don't write to provide the answers. I write to share my vulnerabilities, in the hopes that I might help others and others might help me. Most importantly, I've always tried to target my writing to someone who is as desperate as me.
For me simplicity is not about shortness. It's about a text that is as lengthy as necessary but not longer than that.
It's just one of the conundrums I have to face with my writing style. I hope this is clear enough but if it isn't, let's just say if I don't worry about a style (particularly the personality of a lay-out), I'll have to worry about something else like pictures, lack of sentences, over-use of sentences and forced number of sentences and other elements of style that technically isn't style.
Here: this is something I just finished writing while trying to do a Seth Godin-like post sans heavy addition of anecdotes.I'm not saying it's a good copy of his style but just that mere attempt to mimic made me feel like I wrote one of the most unhelpful and useless blog post I've written.
This is not to discredit Seth or anyone else. It's not like I had a month of editing and proof-reading to squeeze the best example out of my own two fingers.
However, this is often how my simple articles turn out. Just as long. Maybe short. (Who knows anymore - I've heard it explained both ways) but ultimately something that feels hollow to write.
By the way even mark foster suffers from this problem which you can see in his freely released book "how to make your dreams come true". I think his writing style in that book was very cryptic and it took me some time to understand his thoughts behind it.
Forster and I are incomparable. He has a working system already. (setting aside a fanbase)
It's the difference between someone who has already coded a software and someone who hasn't.
Just the title alone would make people pick up and skim the book.
This may seem irrelevant to the actual confusion behind his writings but IMHO no one is going to write a forum post stating, by the way even Paul Keith suffers from this problem.
Just that alone means Forster can just lurk and he'll have a free reference to the different wants and needs of his audience. Even better, since he's trying to write "to them" and not with them - as most experts (and fake experts) tend to do, he doesn't really need to focus on a lay-out as much as he needs to focus on raising the acceptability and credibility of what he's saying. (and only if the lay-out is the problem does he need to change the lay-out)
There's a reason almost no writer uses e-books as a replacement for blogging and forum posting. If I was better or more intelligent, I wouldn't head down this route either. I'm not though.
I sincerely thank you and the others for at least having liked some of my posts here but to make up for my shortcomings, I need to raise the bar and be a better communicator and the deeper I considered all the advises that has been shared with me (along with those that I have read), the more I realize my blogging efforts just weren't enough and that if I put more effort into this, I have to settle on a single medium of publishing. If I blog, I have to know things like CSS and the correct placing of images as well as where to acquire them. I may even have to consider purchasing Premium Blogging Frameworks.
On the opposite end, if I go into e-book writing, I at least have a free desktop software in Scribus. More importantly though, a book is heavily dependent on content. Even if I'm writing something which has no reference and is purely opinionated - the only reason why someone would add fluff is to make a blog post come away feeling like a book. There's almost no way that the amount of text I've written can be considered a novel. It may not even count as a short booklet.
Therefore, at the heart of e-book publishing is the challenge of content over readability. I have to make it readable, but after that, I have to put my soul even for something like a handbook because most of those who even consider to read it aren't going to care about it's length or it's clarity. It's all going to be about "everything" and the depth of everything I put unto my post.
