If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class then you know that the single most common piece of advice for a writer to hear is that you should write what you know. In creative writing, this basically means that you draw from your own experience to create your characters. However, this advice can be applied more literally when you are writing non-fiction work. It can even be applied to writing short non-fiction works such as ebooks.

When you write an ebook, you are typically writing a short book that provides useful information to someone on a topic that they’d like to research online. When you write what you know, you provide that information without having to do a lot of research yourself. For example, if you already had to settle credit card debt in your life then you can easily write an ebook discussing debt settlement options without having to research what those are.

Writing what you know reduces the amount of effort that you put into the work but still lets you tell people what they need to know about a subject. This is important because ebooks don’t pay writers as well as published print books do. Because of that, you don’t want to take up a lot of time writing them. Nevertheless, you don’t want to get known as an author who puts out bad information so you should only write what you know.