Blog Posts into Books
I’ve had some good feedback from my previous blog post titled Turn Your Blog Posts into Books. I think it sparked a few ideas for some readers and I thought I’d expand on it here by offering five ways to turn your blog posts into a book.
It’s become a long article so I’ve broken it up into four posts…
1 Just Stick a Title on It – Almost!
The first and simplest way to turn your blog posts into books is to simply bundle them together and put a title on them. Well almost… Whilst this is 80% of the work, you do need to go a little further.
Chris Brogan
For example Chris Brogan did this with his book called Social Media 101 published in 2010 by Wiley. The book comprises 87 chapters which is a lot for a typical book and this highlights the origin of the work from a bunch of blog posts. Some chapters are super short – a mere 150 words – and others are 500 words or more.
Chris admits in the introduction that a lot of the material is available for free on his blog posts if you’re willing to look for it. However he also says that he’s made a lot of updates and edits to convert it into a book.
Seth Godin
Another great example is Seth Godin. Many people are amazed at how Seth can put out such clear, precise and concise content every single day. In fact, he recently announced that he had posted every day for ten years. That’s a huge achievement! Seth’s blog is one of the most popular on the planet and is uniquely structured to compile into books. He writes and publishes between 50 and 200 words in a typical blog post so they are way shorter than most blog posts.
This makes it relatively easy to copy and paste the blog posts into a book format. And, I believe this is his secret to being prolific in writing lots of strong blog posts and lots of great books. It’s much easier to motivate yourself to write a lot of blog posts if you know you can cash them into books at a later date.
If you’ve got too much time on your hands you could probably reverse engineer Seth’s books by searching for the titles within his books and matching them to his blog posts.
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Flow
The essential point to re-emphasise is that when you read Seth’s books they still have a consistent flow to them. This is the most important thing you need to ensure when you’re converting your blog posts into books.
Tip: Think of your blog posts as jigsaw puzzle pieces. 80% done! When you’re ready to write your book your task is to put them together so they flow as a coherent story and make one big amazing picture. 100% done!
Tip: If you are just going to simply put a title and a book cover around your blog posts and publish this as a book make sure you read it so that it’s got some flow. I have read a number of books that have been done in this way that are just plain hard work to read. They might be easy to read as individual blog posts but reading a volume of them all strung together is a different experience for your audience.
