How to Find a Book in Your Blog by Nina Amir

June 03, 2012

How to Find a Book in Your Blog by Nina Amir

Three years ago industry experts claimed the blog-to-book trend had reached its peak. This was after Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia made a huge splash, as did Christian Lander’s Stuff White People Like, Pamela Slim’s Escape From Cubicle Nation, and Walker Lamond’s Rules for My Unborn Son. The experts were wrong.

The trend has done nothing but continue its upward curve as more blogs have been picked up by traditional publishers—even recent blog-to-books like Jill Abramson’s The Puppy Diaries, Jill Smokler’s Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Sarah Wu’s Fed Up With Lunch, and Martha Alderson’s The Plot Whisperer. Not only that, indie publishers are getting on board as well.

The majority of these bloggers didn’t set out to blog a book, writing their books from scratch on their blogs as I suggest writers do in my blogged book, How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time. They simply blogged. They blogged day in and day out on their chosen topic. They blogged so well they attracted a huge, loyal following of readers. And those readers acted like beacons to agents and to publishers, who troll the internet looking for successful blogs to turn into books. That’s how they landed their book deals.

Once they signed on the dotted line of the publishing contract, though, these very same bloggers had to figure out how to book their blogs—repurpose all those posts into a manuscript that would read like a book and not like a blog. In much the same way, bloggers wanting to book their blogs so they can self-publish or submit to agents and publishers must figure out how to go back and organize their pre-existing content into a workable manuscript.

Booking a blog actually represents a more difficult task than blogging a book from scratch. That said, a lot of bloggers never considered blogging a book. If you are one of them, you may be scratching your head and trying to figure out how to repurpose your content into a book. It can feel like an overwhelming project if you’ve been blogging for several years. Or maybe you are a writer who has been blogging in an attempt to promote yourself—and grumbling all the while about how this activity took you away from your “real” writing time. Now the light bulb has gone off. Your blogging efforts suddenly have true “writing” value because you realize that while you were blogging you churned out tons of content on a regular basis—content you can compile into a book—a book you you may already have written.

How to Book a Blog

How do you find that book within your blog? How do you book a blog, or repurpose existing blog content into a manuscript you can publish in a variety of ways, such as an ebook or a print book, or submit to a traditional publisher? Here are 10 steps to help you accomplish this goal:

1. Decide what type of book you will produce from your existing content. Here’s a list of a few types of books you might consider compiling:

a tip book

a workbook

a memoir

a chap book (poetry)

a collection of short stories

a collection of inspirational stories

a collection of guest posts (to give away)

an anthology

a prescriptive nonfiction book

a short book (booklet)

2.     Evaluate the marketability of your book idea. Look at what other books have been written on your topic. Make sure the angle you have chosen for your book is unique. You want your book to be different from the other books already published, to “fill a hole” on the book store shelves. Also, discover if there is a market for your book and a need for your book.

3.   Plan out your book’s content. Treat a booked blog like any other book, and start with basic steps, like a content plan. Don’t begin looking at all those blog posts you’ve already written until you ask yourself some hard questions about the book you want to compile, such as:

What topic do you want to write about?
If the topic is broad (ex. beer making), what aspect of the topic will you focus on (ex. a specific brewing process)?
What subtopics will you include (ex. what hops to use, how long to ferment the beer, what types of bottles to use, etc.)?

4.   Map out the content for your book. The best way to complete step #3 is to do a mind mapping exercise to discover all the different topics you want to include in your book. Once you have completed this exercise, create a table of contents from this information. Break each chapter down into subheadings, if appropriate.

5.     Find the relevant previously published posts to fill in your content plan. This is how you piece together a manuscript, much like putting together a puzzle. You will locate posts that meet your content needs, and then, as mentioned in the next step, copy and paste them into a word processing document. You can find the content in several ways:

Use the tag or label function in your blog to search by the keywords you’ve assigned to your posts; these search terms should relate to the subject matter you need for each chapter or subhead in each chapter.

Search inside your categories for relevant posts. If you have filed your posts in categories by subject matter, you should be able to find appropriate post within relevant categories.

Use your blog’s search engine function and search using keywords and keyword phrases. This is much like searching for something on Google or Yahoo.

Read your whole blog looking for relevant posts.

6. Copy and paste relevant posts into a word processing document. Place them in the appropriate order, thus creating your manuscript based upon your content plan. In this way you create a manuscript.

7. Edit and revise your booked blog manuscript. Keep in mind that your posts were not written as a book; they were written as unrelated blog posts on the same, similar or related topics. You now need to make them read like a book. Thus you need to edit and revise to:

Fill in the gaps or elaborate.

Smooth out the transitions.

Reduce the number of bulleted lists.

Take out references to “posts” or “previous posts.”

remove hyperlinks (if you aren’t planning on producing an ebook).

Eliminate redundancies.

Incorporate reader comments as appropriate.

8. Add new, unpublished content. Although your manuscript likely will get longer when you edit and revise it, which means you will have created new content that did not appear on your blog, it’s a good idea to add a chapter or two—or an introduction and conclusion at the very least—to your booked blog. This provides an incentive to blog readers and to publishers to purchase your book so not everything between the covers is “previously published” material.

9. Hire a professional book editor. Every book, even a booked blog, benefits from the services of a good professional book editor.

10. Publish your book or find a publisher to do so for you. At this point, your booked blog is ready for publication. You can either self-publish or produce a query letter and book proposal and submit to traditional publishers. In the latter case, hopefully all those unique readers you garnered as you blogged will convince a publisher your book is worth publishing. Why? Because like the books mentioned earlier, you will have proved there’s a market for your book and that you have an author’s platform.

How to Blog a Book

What if you don’t find enough content or any content already existing on your blog to fill a manuscript? What if you can’t book your blog? Blog a book instead.

Come up with a book idea, evaluate its marketability, create a content plan, chunk it down into blog-post-sized bits, and then start bogging it post by post on the internet. Do this consistently over time. Before you know it, you’ll have written your book and attracted the attention of both readers and publishers. You’ll have promoted it (and yourself) while writing your book. At that point, you can successfully self-publish or land yourself a book deal for your blogged book—if you didn’t already.

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About the Author

Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose.

The author of How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), Nina has also self-published 10 short books, including the How to Evaluate Your Book for Success and 10 Days and 10 Ways to Your Best Self. A sought after editor, proposal consultant, book and author coach, and blog-to-book coach, Nina’s clients’ books have sold upwards of 230,000 copies and landed deals with top publishers. The founder of Write Nonfiction in November, she writes four blogs, including Write Nonfiction NOW!, How to Blog a Book and As the Spirit Moves Me, and appears weekly on the Dresser After Dark radio show.