When you travel, you open yourself up to lots of new and exciting experiences. New sights, new sounds, new smells, new tastes, new textures. And they all have ability to form a reaction with something else.

Don't have time to hop on a plane to India? Take a day trip to a town you've never visited. Or, if you can only spare a few hours, seek out a park you've never been to or a museum you've been meaning to see or even that new cute little shop that just opened. You can always find somewhere new to visit no matter how long you've lived in same city. And if you're truly desperate, try walking around your neighborhood on opposite side of street in opposite direction you normally walk. (It can help jolt you out of rut.)

3. Open yourself up to new things. Of all of these, this one is probably scariest. But, it also has potential to be most powerful.

Take time to try new things. Meet people outside your normal circle of friends. Attend associations, nonprofits, hobby groups outside of ones you usually go to. Listen to speakers on topics you know nothing about. Take a class at a community college about something outside your scope of knowledge. Or even have dinner at an ethnic restaurant you've never tried.

Now I'm not just talking about "typical" creative things, like taking an art class or learning to belly dance. If you're a creative professional, take a class on doing your own taxes or budgeting your finances or repairing your car. (Oooh, I bet all you creative folk felt a chill when I mentioned that.) The point is to really stretch yourself past your comfort zone. Make yourself uncomfortable. It's not only a great way to grow, but it's a fabulous way to keep your muse fat and happy.

And that helps keep ideas flowing.

Creativity Exercises -- Prepare banquet

Over next month, I want you do to at least one tactic from each of above three techniques.

1. Read something you know nothing about. Even if you only spend five minutes skimming an article about quilting when last time you tried to sew a button on a shirt you stabbed yourself with needle and got blood all over material.

2. Travel somewhere you've never been before. Even if it's an antique shop and most antique piece of furniture in your house is a bookshelf your parents bought from Sears when you were a little kid.

3. Stretch yourself in a different and potentially scary way. Even if it's attending one of those Home Depot gardening workshops despite every plant you've tried to grow didn't and if your thumb was any blacker it would fall off.

You know how you work better when you're not hungry, see how well your muse starts churning out ideas after a good meal.

Next, make a list of reasons you are writing your ebook. Do you want to promote your business? Do you want to bring quality traffic to your website? Do you want to enhance your reputation?

Then write down your goals in terms of publishing. Do you want to sell it as a product on your website, or do you want to offer it as a free gift for filling out a survey or for ordering a product? Do you want to use chapters to create an e-course, or use your ebook to attract affiliates around world? The more you know upfront, easier actual writing will be.

Decide on format of your chapters. In non-fiction, keep format from chapter to chapter fairly consistent. Perhaps you plan to use an introduction to your chapter topic, and then divide it into four subhead topics. Or you may plan to divide it into five parts, each one beginning with a relevant anecdote.

How to make your ebook "user friendly"

You must figure out how to keep your writing engaging. Often anecdotes, testimonials, little stories, photos, graphs, advice, and tips will keep reader turning pages. Sidebars are useful for quick, accessible information, and they break up density of page.

Write with a casual, conversational tone rather than a formal tone such as textbook diction. Reader's respond to feeling that you are having a conversation with them. Break up length and structure of your sentences so you don?t hypnotize your readers into sleep. Sentences that are all same length and structure tend to be a good aid for insomnia!

Good writing takes practice. It takes lots and lots of practice. Make a schedule to write at least a page a day. Read books and magazines about process of writing, and jot down tips that jump out at you. The art of writing is a lifetime process; more you write (and read), better your writing will become. The better your writing becomes, bigger your sales figures.

In an ebook that is read on screen, be aware that you must give your reader's eye a break. You can do this by utilizing white space. In art classes, white space is usually referred to as "negative space." Reader's eyes need to rest in cool white oasises you create on your page. If your page is too dense, your reader will quit out of it as soon as their eyes begin to tear.

Make use of lists, both bulleted and numbered. This makes your information easy to absorb, and gives reader a mental break from dissecting your paragraphs one after other.

Finally, decide on an easy-to-read design. Find a font that's easy on eyes, and stick to that font family. Using dozens of fonts will only tire your readers out before they've gotten past your introduction. Use at least one and a half line spacing, and text large enough to be read easily on screen, but small enough so that whole page can be seen on a computer screen. You will have to experiment with this to find right combination.

Of course, don't forget to run a spell and grammar check. You are judged by something as minor as correct punctuation, so don?t mess up a great book by tossing out semicolons randomly, or stringing sentences together with commas. (By way, that's called a "comma splice.")

Last of all, create an index and a bibliography. That's it! You've written a book! Now all you have to do is publish your ebook online, and wait for download request from your website visitors.

Brought to by Larry Strawson author of many articles and ebooks on internet marketing.