What are the challenges of converting blog content to a publishable work?

Books compiling previously-published articles are not new. The usual challenges there are selecting and organizing your material and editing it for a different audience. Compiling material that is still readily available (blog posts) adds one more challenge: how do you induce people to pay for what they can get for free?

I have bought books that originated from blogs (Rands in Review and Real Live Preacher). Here are the added values I saw:

• Additional unpublished material: add something to what's already out there, whether it's new essays, introductions, or something else. RLP had a popular series and added new essays in that series. Rands, writing about working and managing in the software-development world, updated essays for the latest trends.

• Presentation: a blog is optimized for short bursts of consumption; a book is optimized for sitting and reading for a while -- if you group and (if applicable) expand your content so it doesn't still feel bite-sized, and if you get all the physical aspects right (comfortable page layout, fonts, etc). Few people are going to spend several hours reading your blog while sitting at a computer, but they may spend several hours at a sitting reading your book if you make it comfortable.

If you just concatenate your blog entries into a book, you probably won't get many sales. But if you plan your content around that format and audience this can work.

(Not addressed here: the additional considerations of e-book publication.)

posted about 13 years ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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