Turning Blog Posts into a Book

Dec 19, 2011 | Writing A Book

It’s tempting to think that all you need to do to create a book is collect your blog posts and put them between covers. That’s a bad idea.

A book should be greater than the sum of its parts. It should deliver more value than the blog posts alone. You can use your blog posts as the basis for a book, but you need to do three things to add value and turn them into a good book.

Edit Your Posts

Blog posts are written at a specific time and they often reference the events of the day. When they appear in a book, that time context is lost. Edit to remove unnecessary references and explain the context.

Group Your Posts

When you wrote your posts, you chose the topic based on your inspiration of the day. When you put them into a book, you need to provide some order if you want to wind up with a good book.

Chronological order will work if the order demonstrates your changing perspective but that usually is less effective than organizing in some other way. Three ways to group posts are: by topic, by their place in a process, and as answers to common questions. You can come up with more ways.

Add Connective Tissue

One thing that separates a book from a bunch of posts is what I call “connective tissue.” That includes the introduction to the book and the sections of the book. It usually includes some brief introduction to each post that puts it in context.

Your blog posts can form the basis for a book, but you need to do some work to turn them from a bunch of posts into a book that delivers value.