Reasons to Blog a Book

Did you know that every year on November 1, millions of people celebrate authors and the books that they write on National Author’s Day. 

Can you name a few of your favorite authors?

Recently on an episode of the Delaware Blogger Podcast, I talked about turning a podcast into a published book, and here on this episode of Blog Your Way to a Business Profit Podcast, I talk about why you should blog a book or reasons why you should turn your blog into a book.

Now if you have been blogging for a while, then you’ve probably already created enough content for a book. I betcha, take a look at your blog archives.

Do you see the making of a manuscript? 

When they stop to look, many bloggers realize they have produced more than a book’s worth of content – hey maybe even several books if they have been blogging since the early 2000’s.

When it comes to repurposing content, which was addressed in episode 27, many of you may decide to “book your blog” or repurpose the posts into a manuscript and then into a published book. 

Reasons to Blog a Book

• Monetize Your Blog
• Expand Your Audience
• Become an Industry Leader

What about you, do you want to “book your blog”  or “blog a book” if so, follow these few steps:

For a short book book, such as my “Basic Blogging Tips for Beginners” you can plan out the outline or table of contents and write from scratch or:

• Choose the published blog posts that fit your topic or title of book
• Copy and paste all the posts into a Word or Google document to create a manuscript.
• Fill any content gaps with new material.
• Review then rearrange text into chapters

Short books can be a big ticket to branding, upping your expertise status with current customers and clients turning it into cash! Today, you can produce 4,000 to 20,000-word e-books on Kindle, and self publish with any of the vast majority of companies on the market.

A Blog is:

• Fast and easy thanks to the various blogging platform such as WordPress and Wix
• Useful for developing a consistent writing practice
• Ideal for sharing ideas for books in advance
• A great way to start a business
• Something almost anyone can do – especially if you like to write

A Book is:

• Something you can use as a professional calling card
• Ideal for finding new readers and making an impact in the world
• Yes, it is more time-consuming and costly than blogging, but it can be a creation from which you can earn a side job or additional streams of income

Writing a book is no different than writing a blog, however, there is more work involved, no doubt about it, but anything worth having is worth working for.

Many bloggers want to become authors, they want to turn their blog followers into readers of their books, that is, customers and that is cha ching…bling bling in the bank!

You can find out what your readers like by publishing extracts of your work sooner via a blog post – what are the most read posts?

Turning a blog into a book this way is quicker this way because after you have written and published these posts you can gauge the reader’s reaction within a few days, as opposed to writing a book without popular blog posts and hoping it will get read.

Great writing is rewriting which you will need to do to provide more content to your readers.  The more time you spend rewriting the better your final work will become so keep that in mind.

If you’re turning a blog post into a book, you gain another opportunity to rewrite older pieces of your work while working towards a deadline.

Another way to gauge the popularity of your content and to grow your audience as a blogger is to publish blog posts on other people’s blogs as a guest writer and on Medium or Quora consistently.

Medium is an excellent social media network for writers and Quora is great for question and answer research – what are readers looking for?

So if you think about it, not only can you turn your blog posts into a book, you can also grow your blog as you work towards the goal of becoming an author at the same time.

Writing a book, much like blogging is a marathon and not a sprint which I have stated in my own book, “Basic Blogging Tips for Beginners”. Success comes from breaking down your writing over the long term not a quick sprint.

Remember, if you’re going from blog to book, you’ll probably need to:

• Ensure the blog post works as a chapter by expanding on or cutting out key sections
• Consider how the blog post will become a book chapter
• Update old information in the blog post for your book, include new links and references

How To Blog a Book Fast

It won’t take long to write your book if you use your blogging skills to do so. If you are currently publishing at least three posts per week, each one about 500 words long, then  you can write an e-book in a few short weeks.

Self publishing and eBooks are easy to create, publish, upload and sell, which is what I did with my “Podcasting Your Purpose” Resource Guide which is available on Amazon.

If however, you publish more posts more often, then  you will finish your book faster. But keep this in mind: It’s better to publish shorter posts more often especially when trying to build a bigger audience so make sure to test the waters.

Quick Tip: If you’ve written a book, you can publish chapters into blog posts.

Are  you thinking about blogging a book?  If not why not, it’s a great way to broaden your brand and expand your exposure online while earning a little extra income.

Let a comment below if you have a published book as I would love to take a look at it!