In the span of 10 chapters, Amir walks readers through the process of turning a blog into a book. Because of her book, I am hopefully going to turn a couple of my ideas into books.
Why Blog a Book?
Amir began by explaining why she wrote a book about how to blog a book. She pointed out that you can benefit from the best of both worlds—sharing through regular blog posts as well as sharing a finished book product at the end of the process. During the process, you can improve upon your ideas based on comments you receive on each post. The result should be a better book.
The first couple of chapters focused on the basics of blogging, primarily, what is a blog, who can blog, and is your idea suited for a blog and subsequent book. Amir also focused on the benefits of blogging a book such as publishing while you write, getting exposure for your ideas, developing your audience, and testing your material. Blogging a book also breaks down the process in manageable chunks. New writers can show proof of concept which may lead to a book publisher.
Blogging a Book Process
Amir then dove into the mechanics of blogging a book. She explored choosing a topic, creating a title, drafting an outline, writing a pitch, and researching the subject. One of the concepts that was new to me was the idea of writing a book proposal. She stressed this was important because if your blog leads to a book deal, you would be ready. In this chapter, she outlined four reasons to develop a book proposal and then listed the elements necessary for a solid proposal. She then provided some detail about each element as well as pointed out resources you could explore for more information.
Once you have an idea what you will write, Amir then wrote about the process to create an actual blog for your blogged book. She made recommendations for selecting a blogging platform, acquiring a domain name, choosing a theme, installing plug-ins, and building pages.
In chapter 6, Amir focused on actually writing the blogged book. In this chapter, she focused on the composition of blog posts, writing style, the use of keywords, analytics, the use of links, scheduling the distribution of posts, and responding to comments.
Amir also addressed the issue of getting traffic to your blogged book. She included a wealth of sites to notify for each post. Additionally, Amir pointed out that individuals who want to blog a book must become familiar with and use social media tools. She focused on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ but also talked about the importance of networking and interacting on other people’s sites.
In chapter 8, Amir wrote about the actual process of turning a blog into a book. She looked at it from the perspective of working with a book publisher or going it alone with print on demand. She also explored creating an e-book. Once you are done with the book, you can, according to Amir, repurpose the content into a number of other products to include courses, presentations, lectures, and coaching opportunities.
Success Blog to Book Projects
Finally, Amir examined a few successful blog-to-book projects. In an interview-style format, she asked the authors 10 questions from choosing a topic, deciding to convert the blog to a book, getting traffic, to blogging success.
I found this book to be very informative and, more importantly, inspirational. While I will probably deviate from some of the advice in the book, namely, I will not start a separate blog for each book, I do plan on putting a lot of what I have read into practice. In fact, over the next few days, you can expect to see some results to materialize. My intent is to turn six ideas into books.
If you have an idea for a book, you may want to consider this method. If you are already a blogger, and I do know some, you may want to repurpose your blog into a book. The ideas in Amir’s book, How to Blog a Book: Write, Publish, and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time
Additional Reading
- #ATD2015: Writing Blogs, Articles, and Books to Boost Your Career by Cathy Fyock
- Dictating a Blog Post
- Evolution: The Blogging Scholar
- Book Review: Published.: The Proven Path From Blank Page to Published Author
- What I Have Learned Writing a Book
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