organize your blog to book project

Blog to Book Project — Suggested Reading

| C.E. Flores

If you feel that certain articles or texts should be read in their entirety by the reader, then you might include a list of suggested reading. The order may be alphabetical or thematic. It should list the full title and author of the text being recommended in either MLA and APA format. 

If you want to add commentary, add it to the end of the entry like you would for an annotated bibliography. An annotation describes the text, summarizing the major theme. The description isn’t usually written in full sentences, but rather parsed phrases. 

You may list a link to the article or website or a way to purchase the book via a landing page on your website. Remember, Amazon doesn’t allow direct links to products for sale on Amazon from your ebook.

This is a good section to include if the topic you have written about is complex and is worthy of further reading. It is also a great way to highlight resources that would benefit the reader in some way. So if your book is about turning your blog posts into a book, you might list several books and websites that would help with that process like the Chicago Manual of Style, EasyBib, Grammarly, Hemmingway App, and Evernote.

Assignment: Compile a Suggested Reading list for your book topic.

Blog to Book Project — Organize

| C.E. Flores

While organization seems like a given, it actually can be quite tricky. There are so many rabbits holes you can fall down that before you know it, your blog to book project has been in the works six months or more with no end in sight.

Now, everyone will do things just a bit differently and that’s fine, but I’ll go through my general organization process when I am working on a blog to book project to show you what I mean.

  1. Decide on a theme for your blog to book project. (Example: Herbal Remedies in Mexico).
  2. Go through your blog posts and cull all posts that have something to do with the said theme. (Found 16 blog posts).
  3. Create a new book in Pressbooks and come up with a catchy title. (New book: Exploring Mexican Herbal Remedies) NOTE: We will talk about Pressbooks tomorrow.
  4. Copy and paste each post into a chapter in Pressbooks.
  6. Determine how many more chapters would make a decent size book. (I think 10 more chapters would be good).
  7. Write those and post them to your blog staggering the publication dates.
  8. Add the posts to your book.
  10. Move the hyperlinks to the endnotes or appendix.
  11. Rearrange, remove or reformat any images.
  12. Edit individual chapters.
  14. Write the introduction.
  15. Write a conclusion.
  16. Add the author page, acknowledgments, dedication, foreword, preface, or epigraph if applicable.
  17. Choose a copyright license.
  18. Add cover image.
  20. Check your book in Pressbooks viewer for formatting errors.
  21. Export.
  22. Download.
  24. Upload to the publishing site. (I use KDP)
  25. Check your book in KDP viewer for formatting errors.
  26. Fix errors. Export again. Download again. Upload again.
  27. Publish.

Of course, your work as an author is not finished by a long shot. You still have to get people to actually buy and read your book. So marketing would be another organizational aspect that we won’t get into just yet.

Assignment:

Make an ordered list for your blog to book project.