Last Updated on by Michael Brockbank
Did you know you can combine the layout of a book to come up with ideas for blog posts? What’s better is that you can then use various plugins to convert those posts into an actual eBook. The strategy lets you repurpose your blog for further engagement.
Well, that is as long as you’re good at storytelling and drawing an audience. You can’t just whip up anything you want and expect big things to come from it, especially on a blog.
If done right, though, it could be something to accentuate your library as both a blogger and an author.
What is Storytelling When Blogging?
You’ve probably heard experts suggest doing more storytelling to grab the reader’s attention. This is when you use a clear narrative and the basics of a story to keep people reading your content.
Storytelling often includes elements of personal stories, anecdotes, and making yourself a relatable “character.” It all centers around being more memorable to your visitors.
Then, when you convert blog posts to create a book, the reading flow is just right.
This is one of the areas where AI ultimately fails. It can copy your tone and style, but drawing on inspiration and experience is far more effective.
It’s one of the reasons why I only write about what I’ve experienced or learned. I mean, how can I write a list of the best products if I’ve never tried those products?
I know a lot of “experts” who teach others how to write reviews without actually reviewing the product or service. That’s when things start to feel robotic and clinical, which is funny considering how the editors of Textbroker accused me of being too clinical in my writing.
Yeah, I guess I broke the habit of sounding like an IKEA manual on Valium.
The Blog to Book Strategy
Storytelling is only part of writing a good blog post for a future book. Unless you plan on focusing purely on fictional content, there are a few important aspects to consider.
Even then, you still need to organize fictional content correctly to keep readers vested.
1. The Main Purpose of the “Book”
First, you need a primary topic for the “book” you’re planning. Are you writing a fictional story, or do you want to put together an ultimate guide for a specific purpose?
For example, what if you wanted to create a guide for writing a book with Reedsy to publish on Amazon? You’d want to make sure you cover as many aspects of the topic as possible.
You want it to be an informative and engaging read.
Of course, this will play into how long your blog posts and book chapters will be in the end. So, it’s really up to you how deep you want to dive into the topic.
2. Outlining the “Chapters”
Now that you have an idea, it’s time to outline your “chapters.” For all intents and purposes, the chapters for your book are going to be the blog posts that you write. So, you’d want it to follow a logical trajectory.
Taking our example from earlier, you’d put together chapter ideas for each subtopic within your idea. In this example, I would start by going into the importance of a degree for writing. Then, I would write a post about getting the most out of the Reedsy book editor.
Essentially, I’d create a spreadsheet to keep track of each chapter’s topic, relevant keywords (which I’ll go over in a moment), the blog’s title, and the word count.
I also collect information from Google’s Search Console to see how well the blog version of the content compares. But you don’t need to go to that extent.
The idea is to plan out the topics of the idea in such a way that when you combine the posts for the book, it won’t lose your audience.
3. Length of Your Book vs the Blog
As you’re planning out the chapters, you also want to have an idea of the length of your book. Shorter books would need fewer and/or shorter chapters.
Because I have a tad of an OCD when it comes to numbers, my blog posts are roughly the same size in order for my book to reach around 85,000 words. That’s because I am debating on offering a print version and want it to be a good size for what it is.
I decided to go with 23 chapters with a base length of 3750 words each. That gives me plenty of space to dive into all of the topics to help new writers.
A good length of a chapter for any book is between 1500 and 8000 words. This also depends on the topic or content of each chapter. Some will be relatively thin while others might be quite long.
The thing to keep in mind is the value of each blog post as it pertains to the chapter of your book. In other words, you want to put as much high-quality effort into blogging as you would writing a novel you plan to publish.
You should be doing that anyway, but it helps to keep it in mind as you write.
4. Driven By Research & Keywords for SEO
Now comes the tricky part. Unless you plan on writing a serialized fictional story for your blog, you’ll need some research and keywords. This is so your blog content shows up in a Google search for those specific topics.
Let’s take a look at my example, again. The third chapter in my little blog book centers around story ideas. I used the keyword “story ideas” in Yoast SEO and then put together a 3190-word blog post on how to get a seemingly endless stream of book ideas.
The hope is that the blog post will perform well in search. If not, then it will still be an important chapter in my particular book. Or, at least, I hope it does.
If you’re writing serialized fiction, then you won’t need to worry too much about SEO. People are coming to read a story and are probably not searching for it in Google. That just means you need to promote it heavily outside of search engines.
But that’s a story for another day.
5. Organize the Blog for the Book
After planning out the chapters, you’ll need to organize them. Not just for visitors to your website to easily find the content, but because most blog-to-book plugins will need tags or categories.
Tags in WordPress work similarly to how they work in social media: connecting similar content together. It’s best to create a tag specifically for the book you plan to export.
For instance, I would use something like “From Idea to Amazon” as a tag. That way, the plugin I plan to use will organize only those posts. No other content will use that particular tag.
Categories are kind of like tags but are more related to the overall subtopics of your blog. For instance, all of my articles relating to publishing books on Amazon are in the “Self-Publishing” category.
In any case, you want to keep all of the blog posts you’re writing for your book in their own section. That way, the plugin or conversion service won’t get confused or add too many things that you wind up removing afterward.
6. Export the Book with a Plugin or Service
Once all of your planned posts have been written, you then export them with a WordPress plugin or external service.
For instance, MPL-Publisher has a lot of great tools and functions for converting posts to eBook format. Its free version offers quite a bit, but the premium tool offers designs, audiobook voiceovers, and an advanced cover editor.
WordPress plugins aren’t the only way to convert blog content into a book, however. There are also online services that can do it for you as well, such as BlookUp. It’s a bit pricey compared to other options but might be worth exploring.
You can also simply copy and paste your blog’s content into any number of word processors, such as Word or LibreOffice. Then, you can save them as ePub files for eBooks and offer them from your site.
Out of the various options, I often opt to use automation. Sure, I could copy all of these posts and paste them into something like Reedsy. But that would take quite a chunk of my time. I’d rather just run something like MPL-Publisher directly from WordPress and make tweaks as necessary.
7. Making a Few Tweaks Here and There (optional)
Depending on the method in which you exported a book from your blog, you might need to make a few tweaks. That’s because there are a few things that might not translate well from one format to another.
For instance, if you plan to offer printing, the links in your blog post wouldn’t be of use. It’s not like someone can tap the underlined phrase in the paperback and then all of a sudden, their computer goes to the site.
That would be pretty cool, but it’s not how the world works, unfortunately.
Take time to verify the formatting of your book looks good for both digital and printed copies. It’ll save you a lot of aggravation and possible embarrassment down the road. Most platforms let you make a few tweaks before exporting, so take advantage of the platform’s features.
Why Consider Creating a Book from Your Blog?
The whole premise behind the blog to book strategy is to help you outline a potential book while providing ideas for blog content that are rich and detailed. Theoretically, those posts should perform relatively well in Google. That is unless search position isn’t your goal.
The second part of the strategy revolves around reusing content. In a nutshell, you’re getting two forms of content for various types of readers with a single post. That is as long as you’re writing a book people would want to read.
Instead of trying to sift through your blog, all of that content is available immediately as an eBook. This works great if you decide to sell it on something like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The people looking for the topic on those sites might not even know your book exists.
But even if you don’t plan on exporting a book from your blog, the strategy is quite sound for coming up with content ideas. This is especially true if you’re diving deep into the topics.
Just plan out the “chapters” as you would a book and write the blog posts accordingly. Then, you have quite a bit of information regarding the topic on your site, which is great for SEO.
What Kind of Book Are You Going to Blog About?
Whether you’re going to print out a book, eBook, or just want some ideas for building authority, writing a book on your blog can be quite beneficial. From content ideas to making a few sales on Amazon, this content strategy is worth exploring.
The content may take a bit longer to write, but the results are worth the time.
I plan on writing a few of these as guides for various topics and offering them as free eBooks on my personal website. Not only is there potential for helping another reader, but it looks great to have several books published under the name.
All it takes is a bit of planning, some good writing, and an engaged audience.
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