Adapting your posts as source material for your book is a good start. But the key word here is adapting. Just stringing them together under chapter headings probably isn’t going to cut it. Here’s why.
A business blog post is usually a self-contained nugget of information or advice. You’ve written it to capture the attention of the casual reader who has found their way to your blog. It will probably open with a hook, expand the subject, then finish with a conclusion, or even a call-to-action. It’s a little story. A chapter may have the same structure, but the difference is it’s part of a sequence. Unless you’re writing a ‘dip in and out’ book, each chapter in your book needs to build on information in the preceding chapters, this is what’s going to keep the reader reading.
So how do you adapt your blog posts to material for your book? Before you even start you need to be very clear what you want the reader to learn from your book, and how you are going to teach it to them. Then you can map out how you are going to do that. Much like a post, your book needs to:
- Start with the hook (the problem to be solved)
- Expand on the subject (introduce your method and show how it can address the problem)
- Wrap up (draw it all together with a where-to-from-here section or similar).
Once you have a structure you can start looking through your posts to see what’s going to be of use. Some posts might fit perfectly into the structure, others might just have little gems that you can slot into chapters that you have yet to write. Taking the time to map out your book will result in a well-structured, informative read that offers your readers/clients good value for the time they’ve invested in it.
So yes, you can turn your business blog into a book, but it will take a little planning and patience, a number of drafts and ideally some work with an editor to get it just right.
