Two More Ways to Extract Book Content from Your Blog

I’ve written searching through your categories and using tags to find content for your booked blog manuscript. You also can find content in your existing blog post to repurpose into your book in other ways. Some of these require manual work, others more technical savvy.

An old search method, of course, simply requires you put search terms and phrases into your blog’s search engine (provided you have one). This will bring up the blog posts most closely related in topic. You can then pilfer through them to see if anything new comes up that you haven’t already found when looking through your categories or tags. You can use this method alone if you have not used your categories or tags well in the first place.

If you are a Mac user, you can do what LifeHacker blogger and author Gina Trapani did. She used a Mac program called DEVONthink Pro. This program creates a database of web pages, plain notes and word processing documents out of your blog. You then can organize this data into a book outline. Using this program Trapani was able “to suck all 5,000 of Lifehacker’s blog posts into its database immediately” as she worked on her book. Pretty cool.

With that in mind, you might be able to find a coder to extract your blog posts into a data base even if you aren’t a Mac user. It’s amazing what a good coder can do—and for not very much money. Try placing a request on ODesk.com or Elance.com and see what you get back.

When you have finished extracting all those posts from your blog, you will, indeed, have what looks like the makings of a manuscript. Don’t, however, get too excited yet. You still have a lot of work ahead of you.

In fact, now the real work begins. You must edit and revise those posts into a manuscript that shines. Right now all you have is a bunch of posts lumped together into the framework of a book. That said, it’s a great start—probably pretty close to the first draft of your book if you did the planning I suggested here.

<<Previous Post   Next Post>>