Plenty of bloggers have assumed a big archive makes a book and put a cover on their old posts. You can spot one immediately. The chapters are the wrong length and the wrong shape. The tone shifts because the pieces were written eighteen months apart. Things get explained twice because each post had to stand alone, and things get skipped because the post that covered them was on a different site.
These books are a rip-off. A blogger with years of real thinking in the archive deserves better than a pasted-together book, and so do the readers who pay for it. Both of them lose, and it usually happens because somebody sold the writer on how quick and easy it would be. Your book needs a reason to exist beyond I wrote some stuff and people seemed to like it.
What counts as a reason to write a book?
Solving a problem for a group of people.
That’s narrower than it sounds and it’s the test. Covering a subject won’t do it, and neither will showing expertise or collecting the greatest hits. I tell writers to find a specific problem, held by a specific group, that the book resolves by the end, and if they can’t, to keep blogging until they can.
Maybe you’ve been blogging about freelance writing for three years and have worked out something about pricing that nobody else says. That’s a reason. The posts become evidence and examples for an argument you’re now making deliberately, a different activity from having made it accidentally across thirty Tuesdays.
The book on this: The Blog-to-Book Blueprint is a 90 day system in five parts for turning an archive into a book, with no posts pasted in whole.
Why is a blog archive not a book?
Because posts were built for a completely different situation. A blog post assumes a reader who arrived from nowhere, has read nothing else you wrote, and may leave in forty seconds. So it introduces itself, establishes context, makes one point, and closes. That’s correct design for the job.
A chapter assumes a reader who started at the beginning, is committed, and is carrying everything from the preceding chapters. It doesn’t reintroduce. It builds.
Those requirements are incompatible, so pasting posts together produces something that reads as repetitive and disconnected at the same time. The reader is being reintroduced to a context they already have while missing the connective argument that would make it a book.
What if the posts have nothing in common?
Then look for threads instead of topics, a different search.
Somebody with hundreds of individual poems posted online has no organizing principle beyond having written them and put them up. The subjects will be all over the place. But work written across a particular period often shares a preoccupation, and the preoccupation is more useful than the subject.
The same applies to prose. Three years of posts on unrelated topics frequently turn out to be circling one question the writer never named. Finding that question is the actual work of the project, and it’s the part that can’t be done by sorting. I love the moment a writer sees it, because the book suddenly has a spine.
How much rewriting does a blog-to-book project involve?
More than anybody wants to hear, and it’s the difference between the two versions of this project.
The good version treats the archive as raw material. You have the thinking, the examples, the phrases that worked, and the knowledge of which pieces landed. That’s an enormous head start and it’s why blog-to-book is worth doing at all. What the archive can’t be is a draft. The system I use runs over ninety days and assumes rewriting throughout, and no posts go in whole. The shortcut takes an afternoon and produces something nobody finishes, and I think the people selling that shortcut to bloggers should be embarrassed.
How do you launch a book if you are a blogger?
The biggest mistake bloggers make is treating the book like just another blog post.
Hey everyone, I wrote a book, here’s the link. I’d call that an afterthought, and it throws away months of work in a single post. Your book deserves more fanfare than your average Tuesday post about productivity tips.
The advantage a blogger has here is real and mostly unused. You have an audience that already reads you, and most first-time authors would trade a great deal for that.
Build anticipation with it. Bring people into the process while you’re still writing. That costs nothing and means the launch is arriving somewhere instead of announcing itself to strangers.
How do you find a real reason to write your book?
Name the problem and the person. If you can’t do that in one sentence, you don’t have a book yet.
Find the thread and ignore the categories. The tags on your blog aren’t the structure.
Decide nothing goes in whole. Every piece gets rewritten to serve the argument.
Work out what’s missing. There will be chapters the blog never produced, and they’re usually the ones holding the book together.
Start the launch while you’re writing. The audience is your advantage and it won’t use itself.
The archive is worth a great deal as material, and it’s worth very little pasted in as chapters. I’d rather a blogger wait another year and write the real book than rush out a stitched archive, because that first book is what readers will judge them by, and they don’t often give a second chance.
