If you need an introduction to the concept of coworking, and some suggestions on how it can help you, Coworking: How Freelancers Escape the Coffee Shop Office provides a useful overview. If you already have an in-depth working knowledge of coworking spaces, you may find the first half of the ebook less useful. However, the real value in Coworking is in the interviews that make up the second half of the ebook. These profiles of individuals give clear ideas on the many forms that coworking can take and how people can choose to use a local coworking space. If you aren’t sure of how you might fit into a coworking space, these personal stories provide the insight you need. With almost fifty pages of information provided by real people who make a point of working out of a coworking space regularly, you’ll get views inside coworking spaces that you just can’t get any other way.

Kwiatkowski and Buczynski wrote the book to provide those interested in coworking a deeper look. Kwiatkowski has a unique perspective on coworking: she’s the founder of the Cohere Coworking Community, a space located in Fort Collins, Colorado, that offers a home to more than forty freelancers, remote workers and entrepreneurs.

Coworking: How Freelancers Escape the Coffee Shop Offic is available for $6.99.

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All of these products are good at what they do, but they are either tied to a specific vendor, or don’t support Adobe’s widely-used system of copy protection for PDF and ePub files. These files are also sometimes called Adobe Content Server 4 (ACS4) documents.

For reading such books, the free Bluefire Reader for iPhone, iPad and iPad touch is now available. It has a simple interface that is attractive and easy to navigate. The app doesn’t have the wealth of options that Stanza does, but it does allow you to select font size, page turn animations, contrast, and black-on-white or white-on-black text (other color schemes, called themes, are coming). The app can operate in portrait or landscape mode, and it allows you to bookmark and copy text.

In order to read books using the Adobe copy-protection system, you can register the app using your Adobe ID and password, a process that went very quickly and smoothly for me.

As the current version is a 1.0 release, Bluefire Reader is still missing some features. Notably, its system for actually acquiring books is pretty limited. The “Get Books” option offers access to the Feedbooks library of free original and public-domain books, but there isn’t yet a way to copy books from one’s desktop computer, or to access free or paid e-book libraries like Fictionwise or Mobipocket.

The developers told me that they are working on setting up access to other sources, including some of the systems used by public libraries. Here in Seattle, for example, our library system uses Overdrive Digital Library Reserve; other systems are used in other places. I gathered that the developers were rather surprised at how quickly their app was approved, and now seem to be working overtime to add the missing features.

It would certainly be nice if DRMed books fell out of fashion, just as copy-protected software (mostly) did. But until then, Bluefire Reader looks like it will be a good way to read them.

What e-reader do you use?

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One of the advantages of being a web worker is not having to worry about travel on days like today, but if you have colleagues who are being forced to temporarily join our ranks, why not send them our e-book, “Web Work 101: How to Escape the Cubicle.” Written by the WWD team, it’s chock full of hints and tips for web working newbies, covering topics like what apps to use, what to do if hardware fails, and maintaining work/life balance — and best of all, it’s free. You never know, it might just encourage them to become a web worker full-time.

Photo credit: Flickr user cooljinny http://www.flickr.com/photos/11600215@N02/ / CC BY 2.0

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• Deployment Platform
• Planning Deployment
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While primarily aimed at system administrators rather than home or small business users, if you’re looking to make the move to Windows 7 there will undoubtedly be some information in here that will help. The book is a free download (6.5 MB PDF) from Microsoft.com.

Are you moving to Windows 7?

(via gHacks)

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There’s no shortage of free learning materials available online for both new and experienced freelancers. While you can turn to hundreds of articles and blog posts, there’s nothing like reading a longer, more comprehensive book to really get some insight on a particular topic.

Here’s a collection of some great downloadable PDFs, e-books and manifestos:

Freelancing and Teleworking

Go Freelance

Leif Kendall’s “Go Freelance” is an introductory guide to the world of freelancing. You’ll go through the process of preparing yourself for the leap to the freelance world, finding work, networking and setting rates. If you’ve been freelancing for while, some of Kendall’s advice might seem elementary. But if you’re a new freelancer or about to become one, you can easily learn the basics from this e-book.

A Human’s Guide to Freelance Living

Unlike the nuts-and-bolts guide listed above, this PDF from Charlie Pabst focuses on productivity and work habits. As practicing freelancers know, these things are just as important as business skills.

Business Tips

Your Business Brickyard

Howard Mann’s guide strips away the non-essentials of business building, allowing you to “go back to the brickyard” and start with the fundamentals. It’s a useful book if you’re encountering problems with your business. On the first reading, I was able to take a long, honest look at my own freelancing practice and spot several weaknesses. There’s also an accompanying goal-setting worksheet you can download.

Getting Real

“Getting Real” from 37signals (the company behind the popular project management app, Basecamp) may be about building web apps, but many of the ideas are applicable to almost any kind of freelancing endeavor — especially if you find yourself working with a group. This e-book is free to read online, but if you prefer to read it as a printed book or downloadable PDF, you’ll have to buy it.

100 Ways to Help You Make Money

Although the title sounds gimmicky, the advice contained in this guide by management guru Tom Peters is practical. It includes points on thanking your clients, getting up early and finding your story. At over 60 pages, this book is much longer than most of the guides in this collection, so you might want to read this in small doses over a few days.

Improving Your Web Presence

The Simple Web

For anyone who has ever wanted more from their blog or web site, Skellie recommends that you evaluate each element based on four categories — Gripping, Resonating, Interacting and Talking. As the name implies, the ideas in this guide are simple and easy to implement.

Killer Flagship Content

This is required reading for anyone with a professional blog. In this e-book, Chris Garrett talks about the importance of compelling blog posts, the “flagship” content that will be the core of your blog. (Note: a feed subscription is required to download the book)

Rockstar Personal Branding

If you’re new to personal branding, this free download provides a clear, actionable introduction. Throughout the guide, Skellie asks some simple yet compelling questions that can help anyone form their brand, be they generalists or specialists. Other topics include how to craft your personal elevator pitch and how to leverage blogging for your brand. (Note: a newsletter subscription is required to download the book.)

Inspiration

The Liberation Manifesto

In this guide, Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind lists the reasons why you should liberate yourself from the cubicle-bound lifestyle. Mead provides an inspirational boost to aspiring teleworkers, particularly if they have a rebellious streak. A recommended read for those who can’t seem to push themselves to take the first step.

How to be Creative

Hugh MacLeod, best known for his business card cartoons over at Gapingvoid.com, compiled this honest, straightforward collection of blog posts on what it takes to be creative. It’s worth reading over and over again, especially when you’re feeling uninspired or frustrated with your work.

Have you read or made any e-books that you’d like other WWD readers to know about? Share them with us in the comments.

Image by lusi from sxc.hu

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Photo by: borman818

As a freelance online community consultant, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to stabilize my income to reduce the ups and downs that come with having my own business. The most obvious solution is to manage your pipeline to make sure that you have new projects to replace the ones that are completing, but it’s also a good idea to have alternative income streams to complement your main client work and fill in any gaps.

In an ideal world, you finish one project on Friday with your next project ready to start on Monday; however, we don’t live in an ideal world, and even our best planning efforts occasionally go awry. While my client base has been fairly steady, I’m always concerned that I might have gaps. I would rather have plans to fill those gaps rather than being caught off guard and unprepared, so recently, I have been experimenting with alternative income streams that will generate regular revenue without relying entirely on client work.

This isn’t a new topic on WebWorkerDaily. Georgina recently wrote a great post with some of her recession avoidance techniques: saving more, managing debt and spending, and strategies for finding new work and staying motivated, while Anne Zelenka wrote a great post with 10 new ways to make money online, and Mike and Aliza followed up with 10 more new ways to make money online. However, I wanted to write about my personal experiences with alternative income streams.

Regular blogging and writing gigs in your area of expertise are a good place to start. I started blogging here on WebWorkerDaily last December, and I have really enjoyed the experience. I can do the writing whenever I have some spare time, in between client meetings or in the evening, so it doesn’t interfere with my regular client work. In this case, I get to do something that I love and I get paid for it, so the revenue stream from blogging was an easy first step for me.

My second regular income stream comes from a self-published book. Late last year, I decided to take the online community content from my blog and turn it into an e-book: “Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy“. While I started this project as a PDF e-book, it eventually snowballed into something bigger with Kindle and paperback versions now available. This was a great experience in a couple of ways.  Not only is the revenue from the book useful, but by taking the existing content from my blog, updating it and reorganizing it, I found several gaps in my writing where I had talked about the later steps in the community-building process without first outlining the work that needs to come before. You need to be a little careful with this approach, since you must make sure that you own the rights to the content before republishing it. If you are blogging for a company, you probably don’t have the right to republish that content.

I am also experimenting with training classes. I held my first Yahoo Pipes training class last week in Portland, Ore., with about 10 students. As a first class, it went pretty well, but I still need to work on the course content to make a few improvements before I do a second class in late June. I’m hoping to expand my training classes with face-to-face training on other topics, like online community management, and I also hope to reformat the material into an online course, too. Offering it online would allow me to make it available to a wider audience and, hopefully, increase the frequency of the class.

These efforts have come with a whole new set of challenges for me. The biggest challenge has been pricing, which seems to be part art form, part science that I have yet to master. I tend to make the rookie mistake of pricing things too high and then needing to offer discounts or lower prices later. I am starting to get a better feel for pricing these types of products and services, so hopefully this should get easier. My second challenge is marketing. While I do a pretty good job of promoting my work and getting the word out via social media, the people who need more training and my book are not the people who live and breathe social media, so I need to get better at finding traditional marketing channels to augment my marketing strategy.

What are your alternative income streams? What are your success stories, and what challenges have you experienced?

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So what is WEbook, really?
From what I understood so far, it is a collaborative tool for writing books. You can create a book project, invite anyone to co-author with you – including an open invitation to the entire WEBook community – invite feedback from others including the community, and then submit for consideration to be published by WEBook in either print-on-demand, e-books, audiobooks or all of the above. The community votes on a submitted manuscript (the American Idol portion of the site) through a 1-5 rating system.

The first published book from WEBook’s Alpha phase is titled Pandora, an international terrorism thriller composed by 17 writers.

Available through WEbook, BN.com, Amazon.com (although this could change based on Amazon’s recent announcement that they will stop carrying non-Amazon POD books) and even SMS. The first four chapters of Pandora, for example, are available by texting “WEbook” to the phone number 41411 or by visiting Mobile Pandora from any web-enabled mobile device.

According to the company’s press release, WEbook is breaking the traditional publishing models and not a moment too soon.

The staid $50 billion publishing industry is dominated by a few traditional publishers that wield tremendous power over the titles that reach bookstores. Writers face a daunting challenge—the odds of an unknown writer securing a publishing deal are 15,000:1.

What about protecting one’s book ideas?
Copyrights and IP issues are top of mind with WEbook, and they’re working on sophisticated IP protections. Any member can keep their writing entirely private and opt never to submit to publication through WEBook. So I can, for example, start using WEBook to collaborate only with the co-author on a new book project where I already have a book deal.

Or my husband could start working on the third book in his science fiction/fantasy trilogy about a new age after the Third World War and allow an editor, family and friends participate to give him feedback before he shops it around with the first two books that are already finished. At the moment, WEBook doesn’t provide tools to upload a completed manuscript with ease for further feedback and editing.

The company’s Terms of Use covers copyright and ownership issues, and they will have a short video explaining the risks (and rewards) of publishing any writing online, particularly in such a collaborative environment. There are also safeguards in place to monitor for plagiarism.

So why try publishing through WEbook
If you go for a regular book deal with or without a book agent and going through traditional publishers, you are looking at least a year from acceptance of the proposal to publication of the book but more typically two years. WEbook says the process from acceptance (by the WEbook masses and the WEbook company) to publication is about two months.

If you self-publish, the long and hard part of book-writing is writing it, getting feedback and editing it. Bringing in other writers could certainly ease the time suck of writing the whole book by yourself, but even enlisting editors or people to give feedback on your edits can speed up the entire book-writing process.

Personally, I am looking forward to seeing how it works on several book projects I have – one with a single co-author, one with two additional co-authors, and several essay anthology ideas that have been in limbo but through WEbook, I can solicit essays from other writers and begin compiling the actual book.

And the deal with WEbook if submitted for publication is not onerous. They have six months to decide if they will actually publish the book or not. Most traditional publishers want a year.

WEbook pays royalties from sales to the writers, editors and other contributors to the finished work so everyone can share in the rewards of a successful book.

What else can members do?
Once a member, you can ask to participate in a variety of open book projects. Right away a children’s book about the plight of wild mustangs caught my eye, and I’m going to see what other anthologies are in the works so I can possibly contribute an essay or two such as the one about ex-pats writing about their experiences living abroad.

And of course, WEbook has all those little social networking tools that link members with like-minded writers and editors including a Friends list.

All in all, I have to say I’m pretty excited about putting this tool into action for my book writing projects. I’ll report back in a few months to let you know how it is going.

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