Turning a blog into a book isn’t exactly a new concept—it’s been done by many over the years. One big recent example was highlighted in the movie Julie and Julia, featuring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. The movie was based on a blog-turned-book by Julie Powell, a woman who decided to spend a year cooking all of the recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and reporting on the results in her blog. Powell’s blog project quickly developed an audience, earned attention from The New York Times, and ultimately attracted a book deal and then a movie.
Powell hit the literary lottery. And while few bloggers-turned-authors will experience that level of success, it does demonstrate the power of blogging and how turning your efforts into a book can lead to some big success. If you want some more examples, check out 27 Popular Websites that Became Books from the A.V. Club blog.
The fact is that your existing blog can provide an excellent foundation for a book. And if you think book readers wouldn’t pay for something they can read online for free, think again. A book can reach a whole new breed of readers, and even faithful readers of your blog will want to own the book version because they already like what you have to say and they won’t want to miss anything.
If you’re not yet blogging on a regular basis, you can begin immediately with the intention of developing your book. This has the added benefits of building your online audience and website traffic while working toward completion of your manuscript. The good news is that writing a book is actually easier than most people realize. The average manuscript is around 60,000 words. If you wrote 1,000 words per day, the first draft of your book would be complete in 60 days!
Converting Your Blog into a Manuscript
If you’re starting from an existing blog, you need to first review your content and develop an outline for your book. Simply compiling all of your posts into a single document will only work if your subject matter is anecdotal or doesn’t necessarily warrant reorganization. Most blogs will need to be reviewed and re-ordered.
An outline will help you develop a logical flow of chapters. One easy way to accomplish this is to use the storyboard method. To do this, write each of your blog topics on sticky notes or 3 x 5 cards. Then, put all of them out in front of you and move them around until you find a logical flow of information, which then becomes your chapters.
Ultimately the goal is to copy all of that content into a single document to create your manuscript based on the order of the outline you developed. Spend time reading each post and refining you work. You may also need to fill in gaps, add detail, or remove duplicate information.
With a little time an effort, you can have a completed manuscript within days. After that, you’re ready to send it to a professional editor (this is essential no matter what!) and begin the process of publishing.
Congratulations! It’s a BOOK!
This is great Stephanie
Thank you, Jill! Glad you found it helpful!
Stephanie! this is great news. I actually have two blogs where I am trying to organize content I already have. I think maybe organizing the content through the use of categories using wordpress. I think I will start there after creating an outline. Can you go further on organizing the content. I have two blogs, nickcolebyrd.com a Christian empowerment site for women and then a business training site for training women entrepreneurs.
Hi Nickcole, That is great. As for how to organize the content, I think the key is figuring out how to create a logical flow for a book. It might be a matter of writing down all of your blog post titles and then arranging them into logical chapters. I’m sure you’ll need to fill in some gaps, but hopefully this will help. My books always include content from my blogs. I may do a bit of rewriting, but it certainly gives me a starting point. Good luck!
Love the concept Stephanie. I think I have 5 years of great content on one of my blogs and really moving in a new direction. I think the information on the old blog will be a good foundation for the new audience and so was wondering about just merging them. This may be the way forward in 2012. Thanks.
I don’t see any reason why you can’t merge them together. Good luck!
Thanks for this post. I’m following you on twitter and I’ve recently started reading your posts. And every article is extremely helpful. I hope to return to this page after two month from now and post another comment about my progress. Thanks again.
Great post, Stephanie! I’ve got lots of tips on my blog on how to both blog a book and book a blog–write a book from scratch on your blog or repurpose your existing blog posts into a book. In fact, I’m just finishing up a series on the latter topic; it’s easy to book a blog by using tags and categories as a research device. You do, indeed, need a content plan, though, no matter which route you choose. Blogging a book is the fastest and easiest way to write a book and build platform, too. In fact, that’s how I wrote my book on this topic, which is due out in April, 2012! (How to Blog a Book, Writer’s Digest Books). Thanks for being such a super resource.
Thanks for all the advice – this is great!!! I just wrote a book that was released last week – Reaching out of the Rubble: the Sky is not the Limit. I’m getting ready to start another and was looking to start blogging and figuring out what to blog and what not to blog that will be in my book. Your comments were helpful!!!!
Oh that is great, Marsha. Best of luck with your blog and your book!
I too have given some thought of “publishing” my blog as a book. Technically, the process should not be too difficult:
1) export your (WordPress) blog as an XML file
2) transform the XML file into something more book-like such as TEI
3) transform the TEI file into something designed more for printing such as a FO (Formatting Objects) document
4) convert the FO file into a PDF file using something like FOP (Formatting Objects Processor)
5) alternatively, start at Step #3, and transform the TEI into and ePub file