5 Ways to Turn Your Blog Into a Book-Writing Machine
If you are
like most writers I know, you struggle to find time to write, especially if you
are trying to build author platform. When life doesn’t get in the way, you
spend precious writing hours on blogging, social media and general promotion—so
you can produce a successful book. But your manuscript remains unwritten.
For this reason,
many aspiring and published authors consider giving up their blogs. That time
spent might be better spent writing a book, right?
Wrong.
Your blog
represents the cornerstone of your author-platform-building effort. You need a
platform if you want your book to succeed. But you know that. That’s why you
blog.
Here’s what
you may not know: Your blog provides an effective way to write your book. In
fact, you can write your book on your blog. You already may have written a book
on your blog.
The
following five strategies transform your blogging time from a promotional
activity into a book-writing activity as well.
If you have
been blogging for a while, you might have produced enough content for a book.
Look in your blog archives. Do you see the foundation of a manuscript?
When they stop to look, many bloggers realize they have produced a book’s
worth of content—or more. Then they decide to “book” their blogs or to
repurpose their posts into a manuscript and then a published book. If you
want to book your blog, follow these five steps: ·
Plan the outline or table of contents for the best book you could write from
scratch.· Find published blog posts that fit your
outline.· Copy and paste the posts into a word
processing document to create a manuscript.· Fill
any content gaps with new material.
If you
already post consistently to your blog, you have time to write a book.
Intentionally produce a manuscript on your blog, or blog a book. To do this,
write your manuscript in blog-post-sized pieces and publish them regularly on
your site.
As you do
so, you’ll build platform—a loyal fan base of readers eager to purchase the
book you are blogging. (Yes, your blog readers will buy the published
book.) And you’ll have great content to share on your social networks.
Blogging a
book is easier for nonfiction writers, but novelists use the strategy
successfully, too. In either case, don’t publish whole chapters as one post;
publish each chapter as many post-sized bits.
Take these
steps to blog a book:
·
Create a table of contents or outline
·
Break each chapter into post-sized
pieces.
·
Plan to keep 20 percent of your
content as “unpublished material.”
·
Write each chapter as numerous
300-to-500-word blog posts.
·
Produce a manuscript as you blog.
Once you
know how to blog a full-length book, you can blog short books, too. Short books
are your ticket to branding, expert status, customers and clients, and cash!
Today, you can produce 4,000 to 20,000-word e-books on Kindle, so do not think
you need to produce a magnum opus to become an author.
To blog a
short book, brainstorm a series of ten to 30 posts. Once you’ve published these
on your blog, repurpose them into a book manuscript.
My book, 10 Days and 10 Ways to Return to Your Best Self:
A T’shuvah Tool Bridging Religious Traditions, started out as ten blog
posts I’d written as a series. Now it’s a 72-page print book.
This year I
released an e-book called Authorpreneur: How
to Build a Business Around Your Book. I originally blogged it as a series
over a period of about six weeks.
Next month,
I’ll release another short blogged e-book called Blogging Basics for Authors.
That took me about three months to write on my blog as a sequence of “lessons.”
4. Book
Short Books
Maybe you
already published a series of posts—or many posts related in some way. At the
time, you didn’t write these with the intention of producing a book, but that
shouldn’t stop you from creating one now. Short series are the easiest books to
blog!
I recently
took a series of 12 posts I’d written called “Demystifying the Nonfiction Book
Proposal,” added additional published posts on the topic, and wrote an
introduction and conclusion. Then I published it as an e-book called The Nonfiction Book Proposal Demystified: An
Easy-Schmeasy Guide to Writing a Business Plan for Your Book.
I’m not the
only one booking short books. For example, Frank Hecker, published 23 posts on
the topic of redistricting in Howard County, Maryland. He then created an
e-book called Dividing Howard: A History of
County Council Redistricting in Howard County, Maryland.
I also know
someone who produced 18 short (4,000-to-20,000-word) Kindle e-books in 18
weeks. Most of those were booked blogs. She plans to combine them into a
full-length book.
My e-book, The Write Nonfiction NOW! Guide to Writing a Book
in 30 Days, also produced within the last 12 months, provides a good
example of a booked-blog anthology. It is comprised of repurposed guest posts
(published with permission) from my National Nonfiction Writing Month and posts
I wrote, too.
Blog a Book
Fast
It won’t
take long to write your book if you use your blogging skills to do so. Publish
three posts per week, each one about 500 words long, and you write a 10,000+
e-book in seven weeks.
Or publish
100 posts, each one about 500 words long, and you produce a 50,000-word
manuscript. Publish posts three times per week, and you finish your manuscript
in 34 weeks.
Publish more
posts more often to finish your book faster. Or increase the length of your
posts to complete in record time.
But keep
this in mind: It’s better to publish shorter posts more often (especially when
trying to build platform). Don’t publish 2,000-word posts once every two weeks.
Overly long and infrequent blog posting doesn’t attract readers and makes the
book writing process feel harder.
So stop
complaining about not having time to write. Turn your blog into a book-writing
machine. You’ll build your author platform and finally get your book—or many
books—written.
Thanks for
visiting The Writer’s Dig blog.
Brian A.
Klems
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