How to Turn Your Blog into a Book
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Last week, I received an email from a real estate agent who wants to write a book to boost his business. But Amir has a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Like many successful business owners, he has very little time to spare on such a project. I asked him what he was already doing to establish his expertise in his market, define his brand, and attract new listings. Amir explained that one of his best marketing tools was a weekly blog that he’d been writing for almost three years. I told Amir to relax — because it’s very likely his book was nearly written.
The same could be true for you. If you’ve been actively blogging for a year or more, you might already have an award-winning book sitting on your website. And even if you don’t have a blog, you can start one with the goal of eventually turning your posts into a book.
As a book coach, I’ve helped many professionals and entrepreneurs turn their blogs into books. Since Amir and I are just starting to work together, I’ll be drawing upon my experience to help him craft an effort he can be proud of.
Here are the steps I’ll be guiding Amir through in order to produce a book that will boost his business — which you can replicate, too!
Determine Your Goal
Amir wants to establish a relationship with potential home sellers long before they are ready to sell their home. His goal is to connect with them months — even years — before they are going to list their property. He plans on using a downloadable version of the book on his website to capture email addresses of prospective clients in his area. This will allow Amir to stay in touch with them because he will have secured their permission as part of the download. His objective is to be the first person new customers think of when it finally comes time to list their home for sale.
If you’ve got ideas that are valuable and you think people will pay for them, your book goal could be simply increasing your cash flow. Or perhaps you want to write a book that will help readers get engaged in the fight to stop climate change; your book will be a call to action for anyone on the planet. Or maybe your goal is to use your book as a magnet that draws potential customers into your email database in exchange for free download.
There are many reasons for writing a book. The key is to be crystal clear about what it will do for you and also for your reader. If you’re not giving the potential customer something they need, they won’t be able to help you achieve your own goals.
Find Your Big Idea
Many of my book coaching clients are leadership experts. That’s a pretty vast subject area as “leadership” spans a whole universe of topics. There’s nothing wrong with having a blog about leadership. But when it comes to turning that blog into a book, the “Big Idea” needs to be unique or innovative, something that stands out as an idea that feels fresh and interesting.
The best books can be described in a single sentence. Encapsulate one idea that solves one problem. Your Big Idea needs to be specific and focused. In Amir’s case, he wants to help homeowners maximize the value of their most important asset when it’s time to sell. That’s a singular idea. But it’s not particularly unique. His challenge will be finding a way to make his approach to a basic real estate challenge seem creative, catchy, and effective.
Clarifying your goals and the Big Idea will help you focus on what comes next, the most challenging aspect of turning a blog into a book. Let’s dive into the details.
Sort Your Posts into Three Parts (and Chapters)
Creating new content for your website on a regular basis is demanding, and those demands can sometimes produce less-than-spectacular results. Most bloggers I know have put up at least one post written on a tight deadline that was fuelled by too much caffeine and not enough research. It’s no big deal with a blog because you can always remove that regrettable article about your opinions on a social issue that in the current climate might be taken the wrong way and hurt your image. (Yikes!) But a book is different. Once someone buys or downloads it, you can’t get it back. So you have to be selective about what goes in and what gets left out.
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I recommend that bloggers start by building a book in three parts that relate to your Big Idea. Begin by choosing three broad subject headings that your pre-written posts can be sorted into. Keep these headings quite general at first — you don’t want to eliminate posts that have even a slight chance of ending up in your book by keeping the content categories too narrowly focused.
Next, drill down further by organizing the posts into chapters. It’s important that your nonfiction book’s organization follows a consistent and repeated pattern. The good news is, you’ve usually used a similar approach in writing your blog posts! Each part has an opening of what you intend to discuss, your main points, and a conclusion (which may include a call to action). Your chapters should follow a similar structure: introducing an idea, discussion and expansion, conclusion and actionable advice.
For example, you might have twenty posts in each of the three parts. Read through the posts again and analyze their subject matter. Identify themes that appear in several of the posts and group these posts together. Try to come up with three or more distinct chapter ideas that contain posts supporting the message or theme. When you’re finished, each part should have several chapters consisting of multiple blog posts! There should be between 10,000-15,000 words in each of the three parts when all of the chapters and their posts are accounted for.
I’m just beginning to coach Amir, so here’s a guess of what his three parts might look like:
Amir could decide to organize his book under low, medium, and maximum impact areas of attention for increasing your home’s value.
Under maximum impact, a chapter on curb appeal would make a lot of sense. It could feature his posts on whether or not it’s worth installing new windows, and the pros & cons of hiring a professional landscaper.
A different chapter in the maximum impact part of the book could be on kitchen and bathroom improvements with several appropriate posts dropped into that section.
At this stage of the process, nothing is set in stone and you're free to move posts around from one part (or chapter) to another. You can also change, delete, or add new chapter headings. It’s even okay to put the same post into more than one possible chapter. You can also duplicate the post in two or more of the parts. Eventually, each post can only be used once, but you will find that, as your book gets more organized, certain posts will fit better in some parts or chapters than others.
Don’t worry if your book doesn’t look anything like a bestseller at this stage. (In fact, it will probably look like a mess initially.) You might even decide that you don’t have enough interesting material to support your Big Idea and decide to change the focus. Or, a stronger message for the Big Idea jumps out at you as your three parts and their accompanying chapters start gelling together. This is completely normal and can actually be a fun and creative experience that produces a much better book.
A Brief Note on Word Count
Research shows that for the best search engine optimization results, blog posts should be around 1800 words. That number can change as Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm, but the recent trend has been toward longer posts. The good news is — if you’ve been writing 1800-word articles for a while — a 36,000-word nonfiction book could be constructed from only 20 of these posts.
An 1800-word blog post is a significant effort and you may have been writing much shorter pieces. Perhaps you’ve been uploading your pearls of wisdom in smaller 600-word chunks. If you want to write that same book of 36,000 words, you’re going to need 60 of those posts. It might still sound like a lot, but that’s just a little more than one year’s worth of writing a weekly blog.
Bridge and Adapt
Once you’re feeling reasonably comfortable with the book’s parts and chapters, you’ll need to start shaping your book’s flow. Since your posts were only intended as standalone articles, this is where the bulk of your bookmaking efforts will be spent.
Since your parts and chapters are now roughly defined, I suggest putting all the posts within a chapter into an order in which one idea could potentially link to the next. This is called bridging. You’ll need to craft linking statements or even paragraphs that make the chapter feel like a continuous and cohesive idea as you move from post to post. The last thing you want your book to feel like is a compilation of blog posts, tossed together without any thought or care.
This also means you may need to prune repetition. You may have used similar information if multiple posts that were intended to be read separately, but now, collected in one place, the repetition will trip up readers.
This brings us to the adaptive phase. Some of your posts may need to be refined to reflect the message of the chapter, the part, and/or the Big Idea. This is not as hard as it sounds, and sometimes it’s a matter of changing only a few words in the entire post. Resist the temptation to rewrite the entire post. Sometimes this seems easier, but that's not always the case. The idea of repurposing your blog is that most of the hard work has already been done when you initially published the posts. Try to make it work through bridging and adapting before rewriting.
Fill in the Blanks With New Material
There are apps and software that can help you dump your unaltered, raw blog into a formatting program and call it a book. But I highly suggest putting in the extra effort needed to produce something you’ll be proud of. Part of this extra effort typically includes creating some completely new content.
Some authors find that writing new material to introduce each chapter sets the tone for that section of the book and clarifies how they will bridge and adapt the posts that follow. This approach has the potential to limit additional requirements for new writing.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a book where the bulk of the work is new writing and existing blog posts comprise a much smaller portion of the publication. Books are creative efforts and anything goes if the final result attains your goals and helps your audience.
The process of turning your blog into a book can be facilitated from a bit of coaching if you get stuck. Book coaches (or your editor) are usually quite skilled at developmental editing, which is exactly what bloggers need to become published authors. Fresh eyes can identify the gem that is waiting to be unearthed from the mountain of blog posts you’re working with.
Test Your Material
At this stage, you should have a general idea of what the finished book might look like. If you have colleagues or readers who represent your audience that are willing to read through your early draft, it can be a great way to ensure your structure is working for your readers. This might also highlight places where things weren’t clear, or questions that you could answer in your revisions.
Remember to take all feedback with a grain of salt, but feedback at this stage is easiest to implement before heading to publication. This can also help you refine who your audience is, and what your book’s greatest selling points or virtues are. This is important to also inform your book’s title, cover design, and marketing plans.
Now your manuscript is ready to submit to your designer or self-publishing services provider. They can transform your organized manuscript into a formatted layout that’s ready to hit the presses.
However you get there, it’s worth the effort. Good luck digging, sifting and polishing those pre-existing posts into a book that makes a difference to your bottom line – and the lives of your eventual readers!
Steve Donahue is a professional speaker, book coach, and the author of two bestselling nonfiction books. His works have sold over 100,000 copies and have been translated into Korean, Turkish, Russian and Greek. Steve helps new and experienced authors turn their book ideas into well-crafted publications that delight readers and inspire change. To learn more, visit his website at MyBookCoach.ca.
