How to compile your blog into a book

I’ve released multiple solo nonfiction books up to this point in my career and most of them were compiled almost exclusively or primarily through repurposing blog articles and Facebook posts.

Hi,

I’ve released multiple solo nonfiction books up to this point in my career and most of them were compiled almost exclusively or primarily through repurposing blog articles and Facebook posts. From those books, I developed a system for bringing my blog content into a book format that might be a good template for you to follow.

It’s important to note that I write a lot because it’s how I process the world. I don’t expect anyone else to write as much as me, but writing is how I self-soothe. I generally write fiction to have control of a world when it feels too chaotic to manage. I write nonfiction to process things I see in the world and make sense of concepts noodling around my brain. I don’t feel like I really understand an idea until I finish a piece about it.

You might only have enough content to make a book every five years or ten, or you might be able to do it every year. There is no right or wrong here; it’s just advice that might work for you.

Stage 1: Gather everything into one place

The first step to compiling a book is to get it off your blog to live in another document.

Personally, I like using Microsoft Word for this part of the process because I’m a fossil living in the past. I know Scrivener, Plottr, Atticus, and other programs make it easier to do this work, but I like Microsoft Word because it’s what I know, and my brain is wired to think using its functionality.

I appreciate that Word allows me to see all the headings and subheadings in the left-hand sidebar. This is very important to the next part of my process.

Whatever platform you choose, the first step is to manually transfer everything from your blog into this new document.

“But Russell,” I hear you say. “Why can’t I just export the whole thing into a document?”

Because the whole point is to create high touch points with your work. By manually transitioning each piece, it forces you to read and think about it. In doing so, you’ll find articles that don’t represent your best work, and you can cut them immediately. If you do this automatically or without intentional thought, it will disrupt this immensely important part of the process.

This is not a process to optimize. The process is the point.

When you get further into building this document, you’ll start seeing how certain articles could be placed together to maximize impact. We don’t usually write a blog in sequential order, so this is the first chance we have to impose order on chaos. Don’t fight the urge to group similar things into what we call “buckets”. Having 3 to 5 good buckets of like-minded bits and bobs will really help you move forward.

It wasn’t until I started compiling this sequence that a theme emerged meaty enough to warrant being considered a book. Finding the thematic throughlines by reading your work again in short order and curating only the best things is what we’re after with this process.

This kind of work takes as long as it takes. Don’t hire an editor yet or have AI replace you to do this work. Once you’re done, we’ll have what they call in the movies an “assembly cut”.

It’s supposed to be awkward and clunky right now. We’ll refine it in future stages.

Stage 2: Bringing order to chaos

At this point, you have a book or at least the makings of one. When I do this work, I usually end up with 100,000+ words at this point, and that’s okay. We’ll be cutting it down to 50-80k through the next part of the process.

From here, we will develop focus. Whether you’re working in nonfiction or fiction (yes, you can do this with a short-story collection as I did with the forthcoming Bulletins at the End of the World), there should be a clear theme developing in your compiled work.

In the last stage, you began the process of grouping like topics into buckets. In this section, we will fine-tune that process. Did you pick the right buckets? Do you have too many of them? How do they feel to you looking at them together? Does it make narrative sense?

If you work in nonfiction, especially self-help or business, these buckets could start to form a framework for your whole teaching practice. If you already have a teaching practice, then your buckets should map into the 3-5 pillars of your framework.

In How to Build Your Creative Career, there were five buckets:

• Making Great Content.

• The Basics of Sales.

• Building an Audience from Scratch.

• Making a Profit at Live Events.

• Launching a Successful Kickstarter.

This book was written over five years ago, but it still acts as the pillar of my teaching modalities even today.

In How to Become a Successful Author, there were three:

• Mindset.

• Writing.

• Marketing.

During this process, you want to cut everything that doesn’t fit your buckets and eliminate duplicate posts that double up on the same concepts too closely. Conversely, if you think both pieces are strong, you might consider merging pieces into one more powerful piece instead of eliminating one of them.

We all have recurring themes in our work we often don’t see until we look at them together in one place. If you’ve never done this kind of work before, it should help you find some of the universal themes you keep coming back to in your work.

I’m a huge fan of mixtapes, and I have strong feelings that any good mixtape tells a story and has a narrative flow. I believe every good album has a narrative flow (and that we are currently in the best album era in all of human history. It is one of my hottest takes).

Similarly, every good book compilation has a narrative flow that takes people on a journey. Regardless of the format, your job is to create and then deliver a transformation in your readers. If you don’t know the transformation of your compilation yet, you have some work to do.

The transformation you deliver raises your book above a compilation into something that will endure for years and become beloved among those who read it.

Once you finish with this part, you should have cut at least 1/5^th of the story down into a “rough cut”, but you could cut as much as 1/3^rd of the book. That’s okay and totally normal. It’s not about the quantity of the words in your book. It’s about the quality of the transformation you deliver.

If you’re having trouble with either of the two bits above, you should think about hiring a developmental editor to help you find the vision and narrative flow of your story.

Stage 3: Filling in the gaps

Once you finish honing your buckets and find the narrative flow of your book, you will likely discover that there are gaps in the narrative that need to be filled to deliver a cohesive experience to your readers.

This is where a great editor can be super helpful. In How to Become a Successful Author, my long-time editor realized that in the writing section, I hadn’t written anything about working with an editor. So, I had to write that part to complete the section.

In Direct Sales Mastery for Authors, Monica found gaps we failed to cover throughout our previous 20 books. So, we set out to write all of that material to fill in the story and deliver on our transformation. Don’t try to fit a round peg into a square hole by keeping something that doesn’t fit. Just write something new to fill in the gaps.

This kind of fill-in work happens all the time with short story collections. Once writers and editors find the narrative thread and settle on the themes they want to tackle, they will often realize they are missing certain key elements that tie the story together and have to write something new to satisfy readers.

Even though we’re building a compilation filled with seemingly disparate elements, we are still telling a story here. The sequence of those elements and the way in which they build out the story are what make it resonate as a cohesive hole.

People always ask about naming conventions for a compilation, but just like anything else, that comes when the narrative becomes clear. If you don’t have a name by now, then you probably missed something critical in Stage 1 or Stage 2.

Once you finish filling in the gaps, you definitely want to hire an editor to make sure you didn’t miss anything, or at the very least, bring it to a reader group or beta readers to make sure it delivers for them.

Stage 4: Tightening everything up

By this point, you might have jettisoned up to half your pieces to find the right narrative, and it’s really starting to feel like a book. You could have had to rewrite some sections, add in more examples, or weave a meaningful personal journey between your pieces that moves the book along, but by now, it should feel like a cohesive piece instead of disjointed and disparate pieces.

If you’re still having trouble weaving the narrative together and making your piece feel like a singular whole, here are some strategies you could employ to help you.

• Create a framework based around a work or concept, like Tim Ferris in The Four-Hour Workweek.

• Create a narrative thread around your personal journey, like Sarah Ramey’s The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness.

• Take us on an actual journey, like Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love.

• Create a narrative weaving around and through your short-story collection, like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Building a narrative between the elements of your story can help create a connection with your readers. It’s not necessary, though. If you’ve grouped your pieces well and they tell a nice, compelling story, you can create a great book without one.

Most of the rest is tightening your story to make sure it resonates with readers the right way. You might have to rewrite specific sections for narrative flow or add more examples to flush out your transformation. Your editor, writer’s group, and beta readers should be able to help you get there, too.

Even though your book is a compilation of your blog, it’s really a translation of your blog into a book, so it can and should feel a bit different than the original source material.

What you’re trying to do is thread all these disparate throughlines into one cohesive narrative that delivers for readers. It’s your job at this stage to thread and weave it all together into something that makes sense.

Why would anyone buy it if they read it on my blog?

By now, this should be obvious, but let’s say the quiet part out loud. Readers will buy your book even, and often because they read it on your blog because the transformation is totally different!

There are just too many examples of writers who’ve done this successfully, from Allie Brosh to Jenny Lawson (AKA thebloggess), that I think we can definitively say it can, does, and will work. Still, it takes more than dumping your blog into a Word document and hitting publish.

Maybe that will get your existing audience, but even they want more. If you’re going to reach a wider market, then you’ll need to put a lot more effort and intention behind your compilation. It requires finding a deep, resonant transformation and delivering it well to get people to love your book, and that transformation is totally different than reading a post on your blog.

People who read pieces by way of disparate blog posts will have an entirely different experience when they see it all laid out in an order that builds on each other. They might have a little lightbulb go off, but it won’t land for them until you tie it together for them in a cohesive narrative that works.

I’m a huge fan of both Allie and Jenny’s work. I read their blogs for years before their books dropped, and I had a completely different, more transformative, and better experience with the books than their blogs because of how they weaved the stories together.

It’s the same reason people buy courses or consulting when they can get the same information from a book. The transformations are completely different, and that’s okay.

Even I, the writer of my books, find a more powerful transformational impact reading my work as one coherent piece than when I originally wrote it for my blog. Often, things I barely realized the first time slap me in the face once they’re all laid out in one place, and connections make sense in a way I never thought about before I bound them together in a book. In fact, I don’t stop editing until I can see that impact in myself, just like I get for readers.

If I can have that kind of transformation by reading my work in the right order, I promise your reader will as well. Additionally, people don’t like searching through a complicated and messy blog to find the one piece they want to cite. They want it bound in one handy place for them. People pay for convenience, and having everything in a single, neat, convenient place is very handy.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, people want a totem they can share with their friends and people who matter to them to affect the same change in them that they got from you. Sending them to a blog is just not as satisfying as putting a book in their hands.

At the end of the day, a blog compilation is really just a book, and, really, what you’re doing is creating a new experience out of your work that can deliver a bigger, more powerful transformation for your readers.

What if you don’t want to make a book?

This is still a good exercise for your own growth, even if you don’t want to turn it into a book.

I’ve identified four main stages of Substack growth during my time on the platform. These are very broad categories, but pretty much every human I know has gone through them at one point or is currently in one of them.

• Figure out your publication. Spend as long as you need to write whatever, flit around, pretend, explore, get good, and futz around. Don’t even worry about a name yet. Just start and call it whatever.

• Rebrand. A publication almost always has to rebrand once they figure their stuff out, so don’t worry about your name at the beginning. You’ll have time to get it right once you’re ready to get it right. I had two that I can remember. I started as Wannabe Press, then went to Author Ecosystem, before finally ending up with Author Stack (and am currently fiddling with another thing that might change my branding again, though not for the main publication).

• Lay out your case. This is the one most people miss, jumping straight from stage 2 to stage 4 and missing a big part of the growth pattern. Once you know what you want to say, you should go through a 3-6 month period where you lay out your case with long essays and other cornerstone pieces that you can drive people back to whenever they find you. These are critical pieces because people will come to your publication from random places, and you need to be able to give them something to latch onto and let them know they are in the right place. Not every post should be this kind of content, but over time, you’ll build it out until it’s lush. It should also be said that you might need several cases. I think I’ve built out 3 different cases since I’ve been on the platform: Author Ecosystems, How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, and How to · Build a World Class Substack. Each of these “cases” became the books we talked about earlier, but they started as Substack collections.

• Push forward. Once you have your case built, then it’s time to push forward and keep writing about the things you like. Who knows? Maybe you’ll need to rebrand again.

While this is ideal with an education or culture publication with a tight niche, even if you have a random, memoir, or fiction publication, the third part needs to be done so people feel like they know you or your story.

So many people simply never do the work of grounding people in your “theory of the case”. If you can figure out your stance on life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, then it can only help you focus your voice as you move forward.