Geek to Live: Turn your blog into a book

There’s a world of difference between being a blogger and a book author, but more writers are wearing both hats these days. It’s not surprising that pro writers are becoming bloggers, but “amateur” bloggers getting book deals are turning heads online and off.

If you’ve got a book in you, a blog could be just the stepping stone you need toward your first deal. More than ever before, literary agents are paying attention to quality weblogs, and publishers are looking for someone with writing chops and a fresh take on a topic.

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From online baby blogs to printed baby books

Online and offline are no longer mutually exclusive realms. The latest illustration comes from the world of online baby journals, where purveyors are increasingly beginning to offer print versions as well.

To wit: Kidmondo, has added a print option to its offerings. Through a partnership with custom publishing platform Sharedbook, Kidmondo now gives parents a fast and easy way to turn all the content they create online into a “KidBook” in the brick-and-mortar world. Users can pick which parts of the online journal they want to include in the book as well as customizing the content, cover, titles and more.

Blog to Print: Laughing all the way to the Bank

Mr. Birmingham started Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves in early January, uploaded the first entry and asked readers to contribute. Within days, visitors were supplying him with snapshots of bulldogs in bunny costumes and cats wearing wigs. The blogosphere noticed — and so did the publishing world. Within a week, he was contacted by editors and literary agents. By the second month, he said, he had sold a book based on the photos to Three Rivers Press, an imprint at Crown Publishing Group, for “enough money to buy a Lincoln Town Car” — with change left over.

Not bad for an unpublished novelist who is allergic to animals and admits that he is “terrible with computers.”

Of course, it’s not unusual for blogs to form the basis of books. For example, Christian Lander, author of the humor blog Stuff White People Like, wrote scores of blog entries and then reworked them into a popular 2008 book of the same name.

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Turn travel blogs to books

Turn your travel blog into a book and view it onscreen instantly. Upload content to your account or import from supported sites.

Write unlimited blogs, unlimited photos and full color books up to 600 pages. Share your projects with friends, family or the world.

Print bookstore-quality hardcover and softcover designs available.

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Book Structure

Using WordPress to setup a blog that is chapter based.

1. Create a page called “front”.
2. Create a page called “index”.
3. Create a page called “chapters”.
4. Go to Settings > Reading. Make “front” the front of your blog.
Make “chapters” the area for your blog posts.
5. On the “front” page, make 1 link to your “index” page.
6. Write a post – your Chapter 1. Publish it. Copy the URL of this post
7. Edit your “index” page and place a link to Chapter 1
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 for each chapter

Design

Less is More
Cluttered design is confusing and difficult to look at. Keep it simple, if it detracts from your intention, get rid of it. 

Fonts
Just because you have many cool fonts doesn’t mean that you should use them all. Pick one appropriate font and use it throughout your blog. If you feel the need to use more, make sure that you use them consistently. 

Color Management
Optimize and edit your images in a bitmap program such as Photoshop for color levels, sharpness, cropping, etc before uploading them to your blog.

Create Custom Cookbooks

The traditional book publishing route is an option available to few, but there are now many non-traditional publishing channels available for self publishing.

So do you want to gather grandma’s treasured recipes into one tome? Web site TasteBook lets users upload their own recipes, grab choice dishes from Epicurious.com and other sites and compile them into a professional-looking book. A 100-recipe, spiral-bound book costs $35.

Why turn your blog into a book

There are several digital publishing sites that will take your blog, including postings, photos even comments, and turn them into a hard or soft cover book. Most of the sites offer e-commerce options to sell the publications from the site as well. One might ask why anyone would want to create a book from a blog?  A blog, by definition, is interactive and immediately “updateable” so why turn it into an old-school static book. Even worse, many of the critiques of vanity presses also might apply to would be authors in the digital age: material that commercial publishers won’t touch,  egomaniac authors, obscure subjects, etc. 

Personalized digital publishing has been a presence on the web for the last five years and has only become easier. Most of the books involve documentation of highly personal events such as landmark birthdays, vacation travels, family events, children, etc.And, that appears to be the reason for most of the blogs. Check out Blurb’s blog to books sales area and you can see that these books fit the same pattern.  A random review of selected “blogs to books” underscored their personal nature of limited interest to family and friends.

So there is an obvious benefit for blogs documenting travels, family reunions, pets or children, but other blogs dedicated to politics, art, education may also benefit from the conversion to a book. For example, I am considering using a blog I created while working on the Obama campaign last year to document the historic Latino participation in this presidential election. My partner on this site, Janet Green, an art professor at CSU East Bay,  is contemplating converting an art blog to a book. We are looking to understand why others have chosen to convert their blog to a book so please give us your comments.

Most of the providers of blog services were already in the digital book printing business and developed the blog-to-book service as a specific marketing niche. QOOP, for example, is a company that focuses on ecommerce with established services in the custom print arena such as posters, calendars, etc, using your original photography or art. It doesn’t focus on why authors turn their blogs into books, but assumes that anyone would want to turn their blog into a book if they could. Blog2print, a division of Sharedbook.com has a variety of focused personalized publishing projects including a Legacy book publishing service that will convert a funeral guestbook into a hard or softcover book (just add photos). The layout and design are already set up. Last, Blurb, a favorite among Mac aficionados, provides the most layout and design options to would be blog-to-bookers.

Again, we would love to hear from any of you who have considered or already have turned your blog into a book. Comments welcome!