Blogs to Books | Books to Blogs

As a writer, your ultimate goal is probably — at some point — to publish, sell, and reach your audience through word-based products — books.

Blogging, Email Newsletters, Internet Marketing, and Audience-building are essentially evolutions of direct mail marketing and article marketing. Blogs are marketing channels — advertising. Blogs are closely related to books — they feed off one another — but they are very different mediums.

How do you re-package existing writing and create something of additional value?

Material Re-mix
I’m currently developing multiple information products using Shift Your Spirits material — giving priority to producing an audiobook. Instead of just dumping already existing free article content on paper and calling it a book, I want to create products that are truly unique and original — incorporating and re-using a lot of hard work, while offering the audience something that can’t be found on the blog.

Anyone who knows me in “meatspace” can tell you — I am a talker. My writing is actually a shadow of my speaking — an attempt to capture or transcribe my conversation into words.

Books to Blogs
Most of the authors I work with offline already have books they want to promote using blogs. Several of them are self-publishing or looking for a publisher; a few of them have publishing deals and have been told by their editors they need a blog to help promote the work.

Don’t the mainstream publishing companies market your book for you? In a word “No.” Or barely. First-time authors are generally expected to promote their own books, with woefully little assistance. At least the big publishers have finally caught up enough to realize that the best way authors can spend their meager marketing allowance is by establishing a blog.

Some of the questions I get from these Book-to-Blog authors are:

• “What do I blog about without just giving away the content of the book?”
• “Do I just post excerpts?”
• “You mean I have to write MORE?”

I generally advise authors who already have books to treat their blogging as a kind of “Behind the Book” documentary — share the process for researching, writing, and developing the book. Start a conversation with your readers about the subject of the book — the bigger topic that exists around your book’s focus — all the information related to the book that’s not actually in the book — and about your personal experience writing it.

This type of blog should work well for fiction or non-fiction authors.

I started Shift Your Spirits to build an audience for another existing memoir — to upgrade my clout at the bargaining table and to essentially pre-market the book. I started off a year ago turning all the related material I had sitting around that did NOT belong in that book into articles and blog entries. My articles about spirit guides, clairaudient intuition, and manifesting techniques have since taken on a life of their own.

Blogs to Books
As my agent is shopping my memoir Answering to Mary I’m still left holding tons of new material that I am free to develop and self-publish as other books.

I anticipate an on-going series of posts here on Spiritual Blogging where I share the thought process and my work flow turning blog entries into a book — concentrating on some of the conceptual issues that I run into. The technical aspects — such as software, tools, and services — I intend to release in a tutorial format.

Blogs, Articles, E-books, Books, and Audiobooks are very different species of information products — even working with the same base material, each type of format has its own set of requirements and peculiar quirks. I’m finding that you can’t move your words around from one media to another without a lot of re-working of the existing material.

A few major differences to consider:

• books are linear; blogs can be read in a different order by each reader
• blog entries are keyword redundant — the repetition is maddening in book form
• ebooks work best for instructional information — few people want to read a novel on a computer screen

The differences of form and context — and how to handle each one — is a LONG list and a potentially on-going conversation. Many of the issues only present themselves after you dive into development… In this series I’ll keep you posted about what issues I run into going from Blog to Book to Audiobook and how I decide to handle them.

The good news is:
Having a healthy collection of blog entries and articles to work with is a helluva lot easier than starting from scratch with a stack of blank pages and a vague idea.

Having your own original, valuable, unique information product to sell online is financially life-changing.

What’s your big project?

• Have a book you want to build a blog around?
• Need some advice about where to start blogging?
• Do you have a blog full of content you want to develop into a book or other information product?
• Trying to figure out how to package and sell all that hard work and great writing?

I love collecting brainstorms in a bucket and catching idea-flies in jars…

Make a donation and I’ll help you identify the perfect product goal for your blog.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.