After writing a technology blog for a UK-based magazine for about three years and notching up hundreds of blog entries, I approached the magazine editor and suggested this interesting collection of articles was worthy of a book.
He immediately began asking questions, including, "Why on earth might anyone be interested in a series of blog posts collected together into a book?" He was also concerned about the complexities of publishing, but having already published with Lulu, I knew this was the least of our worries - I published that book in 2009.
Can anyone turn his or her blog into a book?
In theory yes, but there are some questions worth considering before you initiate that big WordPress download.
Is there an audience for the book?
You don't need to do a lot of market research on this. You can publish with online publishers such as Lulu even if you anticipate a limited or specialized audience.
How much effort is required?
If you are doing this because you just want to see your name on the spine of a book, you should consider that selecting your best posts and formatting them for the printed page will be quite a bit of work.
Will your blog work as a book?
The blog I converted to book format was mainly journalism and commentary, so I could easily imagine it on the printed page. On the other hand, turning your years of Tumblr posts into a book may be a futile exercise - and may even infringe copyright unless you personally own every image you shared. Remember, your posts may work well in the context of a blog where you might feature video clips, Instagram photos and other media that looks great when viewed on an iPad, but is not going to translate to the printed page.
Are the blog posts relevant now and in the future?
Blog content almost always features a date-stamp, which can translate to book content in an epistolary format - dated blogs in sequence - but there is an important time distinction between blogs and books.
Blogs are written and published in the now, usually referencing the exact time they were written. As time goes on, new posts may update or supersede earlier ones. As such, some of your blog entries will be completely unsuitable for use in a book because they are comments on a moment, rather than less time-bound thoughts or comments.
A book needs to be planned with a much longer shelf life than an individual blog post. When you publish a book, it is published at a moment in time and cannot be quickly updated except through new editions. In general, book content needs to be planned so that it will not become quickly dated.
Will the structure of my blog translate to a book?
It is worth viewing your blog in the round. You may have a hundred thousand words of great content, but you may end up stripping away half of that content to preserve your best posts. It is worth thinking about whether you want a literal version of your blogs in book format or whether you can do more with the text when planning how it might be read on the page. For example, you may be able to connect several blogs together and present them as longer essays.
Why should I do it?
If you are already blogging then you are a writer. Many writers have used short publications that were eventually collected together into a longer book format - The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens is one of the most famous examples. In fact, there is little to distinguish the way Dickens wrote then from a blogger today who releases short articles then collects them together into a longer book.
Posterity is as good a reason as any to take a close look at your blog to see if it might be worth publishing as a book. Even if your blog posts are individual and cannot be collected together into a coherent story, there may still be value in collecting them together. In my case, my articles from 2006-2009 that went into my "book-of-the-blog" have now been deleted from the magazine website. Now my book is the only place where they continue to live!
This blog originally featured on the Lulu.com blog here.