(Image credit: howtoblogabook.com)
New writers often create blogs as a way to promote themselves by getting published online and developing a following over time. If you are a blogger-writer trying to break into book publishing, whether an e-book or print, turning your blog posts into a book (‘repurposing’ content) can ease the transition into getting published. An idea for a book might be right there in some of the posts you’ve already written. If your blog has a theme, such as ‘Social Media for Startups’, this could serve as the theme or title of your book, or you might prefer to focus on other concepts or story angles, and work your blogs into that.
Where to start?
If you want a book that will be bought and read, you can’t just insert unrevised blogs between a set of covers and hope for the best! Skip the quickie apps available and work with a respected, experienced publisher from the beginning – you’ll save time as well as a lot of editing headaches.
- First, as with any book, decide what you want to say and define your audience. Are you writing about complex and highly technical or scholarly subjects or is this more ‘mainstream’, such as fashion, cooking, or pet care? Have some of your posts received more attention than others? This may give you a good idea what to include – or delete. Is there a common thread throughout from post to post or have you jumped from topic to topic?
- Your book needs to be marketable, so keep this in mind when creating your book’s ‘roadmap’ or outline, such as its table of contents. This will help you to stay focused on your message as well as indicating where you may need to add more content, perhaps by posting future blogs, to fill any gaps.
- The next step is to list relevant existing posts to fit that outline, as well as ideas for related future posts. If you’ve been creating categories and content ‘labels’ all along as you’ve blogged, you should be able find these easily. You might start off with 50 posts but decide to narrow it down to only 35 or so of the best.
- If you can involve your readers in the writing process by asking for their opinions about what they’d like to see included, and offer them some new bonus material not already covered in your blogs, you can turn that participation into anticipation of the finished product – a huge marketing plus.
- Once you’ve found what you want among your blogs and related content, cut and paste these using your word processing software to create a new document (manuscript).
- Now you need to edit, delete, perhaps add new content, edit and revise some more. If you haven’t already done so, hire an experienced editor to give your manuscript the final polish it deserves.
Your book is now complete, and, with the publishing and marketing help from the WinePress team, it’s time to let the world know!