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Free Software For Creating Information Products

By Thomas Christopher

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Published: 07Sep2009
Word count: 491
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The majority of your income as a speaker comes from selling books, CDs, and DVDs at the back of the room. You can create all of these out of audio recordings of your speech. There is ample free software for the PC that you can use in creating these products.

You will need to edit the audio recordings of your speeches. I recommend using Audacity. It allows you to combine several audio tracks, so you can add music to your presentation or combine parts for more than one speech. It allows you to cut out parts of the speech, fade the music in and out, and adjust the volume level.

You can package one or more of your speeches on audio CDs. You can have the CDs duplicated for as little as $1.75 including printing, packaging, labels, and inserts.

You will need to create cover art for your CDs, DVDs, and books. I use GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It has all the power that you will ever need.

You will need office software. Unless you already have Microsoft Office, you should consider getting OpenOffice, a free equivalent. The most important components of the suite for creating information products are Writer, equivalent to Word, and Impress, equivalent to PowerPoint.

To create a book from your speeches, you will need them transcribed. For an ebook, you will need, say, 15,000 words, or 2.5 hours if you speak 100 words per minute. For a physical book, you will need about four times that much. You can get an inexpensive transcription of a speech over the Web.

For creating your own e-books, you will need to combine the cover art with the body of the book. I use PDFCreator. I just save both the cover and the body in Postscript, drag them into PDFCreator, merge them, and save the result as PDF.

Rather than laying out the body of the book in Writer, I have started using Lyx. Lyx is not WYSIWIG, and most of its templates are oriented toward scientific articles and books, but it does a beautiful job of formatting text and figures. Having committed myself to using Lyx, I find I don't waste my time diddling with formatting the way I have in every other system I've used.

You need physical, bound-paper books for back-of-the-room sales. You can lay out your book yourself and have it printed on demand for a modest price without huge up-front costs and inventory.

You can create video slide shows by combining an audio recording of your speech with images of your slides. Which mean that you would be using Audacity and Impress. These can be combined in Windows Movie Maker, available free from Microsoft. You can have DVDs duplicated for $1.75 each, the same as for CDs.

As you can see, with free software and inexpensive web services you can convert recordings of your speeches into a variety of products, digital and physical, with little up-front commitment of money.

For more information on how to create income streams with your own information products, follow these links. Dr. Christopher offers classes for speakers, writers, and self-employed professionals in the Colorado Front Range and online.

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