Blog a Book Faster than You can Write a Book

Eighty-one percent of the U.S. population wants to write a book, but only about two percent will become published authors. The other 98 percent will continue calling themselves aspiring authors because they think writing a book is a long, drawn out process. Or they feel overwhelmed by the idea of writing a book.

Indeed, completing a manuscript can be a big goal to accomplish, but it doesn’t have to be. You can write a book in a month—or less. I wrote one in ten days. I wrote another in three months and one more in five months. I know you can write a book in six months or a year—or less. And you can accomplish this goal by writing for as little as 30 to 60 minutes per day.

Not only that, you can produce your manuscript while getting your writing read—possibly by more readers in a day or a month than the average book sells in a year.

To do so, blog your book. You can blog a book faster than you can write a book almost any other way.

Don’t Write Your Book—Blog It!

To blog a book, write it intentionally on your blog in post-sized bits. Plan out your manuscript so you publish your posts regularly, building a fan base for your book as you do so. With this process, you can finish a book in under a year—even under six months.

While the average book today sells a measly 250 or so copies per year or 3,000 copies in its lifetime, a blog that is reasonably successful can have 300 to 3,000 readers per day.

Plus, bloggers write and publish a post several times a week if not every day. By writing and publishing your book one post at a time, you get it written in record time, and get it read as well.

Here’s How Fast You Can Blog a Book…

How fast can you blog a book? If, for example, you write 300 words per day just four days per week, you produce 1,000 words per week. That’s four thousand words per month. In 12 months, you’ll have written a 42,000-word book. That’s not a long book, but it’s a decent length for the first draft of your book. (It will get longer when you revise. If you use the plan I suggest in How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition, you will have planned to add a bit of extra content to the finished manuscript anyway.)

If you write more often, you produce more words in less time; the same is true if you increase you word count just a bit. Let’s say you average 350 words per blog post and write five days per week. That’s a 45,500 book in six months. You can determine how fast you complete your blogged book, but it doesn’t take a large time commitment to finish your first draft.

My first draft of How to Blog a Book (First Edition) was only 26,300 words. I completed it in five months writing  three to four days per week and averaging about 350 words per post. By the time I edited and revised, my book more than doubled in length.

If a long book puts you off, write a short one. You can write a series of posts and turn that into an e-book or a booklet, for example. My book, 10 Days and 10 Ways to Return to Your Best Self, is based on ten blog posts I wrote during the Jewish High Holy Days. Consider writing a 15 to 30 post blogged book if that feels easier to start out. Problogger author and blogger Darren Rowse’s bestselling product, an e-book called 30 Days to a Better Blog, is based on 30 posts he wrote consecutively—a series. My ebook, Authorpreneur, was also written as a series of posts over the course of about a month, and Blogging Basics for Authors was written over a few months.

How long will writing a post take you? That depends on how quickly you write. For most people, a 300-word post takes about 30 to 90 minutes to compose. (Note: The posts that comprise your blogged book are not full chapters but small segments of your chapters.)

The Blog-a-Book Process (condensed)

If you want to blog a book and you are new to this site, here is a short version of the process:

1. Create a content plan or table of contents.
2. Break the contents (each chapter) into posts-sized pieces (350-700 words).
3. Write you book as blog posts on a manageable schedule.
4. Create a manuscript at the same time as posting on line.
5. Each time you complete a post, publish it.

You can learn more by reading How to Blog a Book Revised and Expanded Edition or by following the original blogged-book version on this site.

Using the blog-a-book process, you quickly and easily will write your book. In fact, you can blog a book faster than you thought possible and faster than most people ever write their books. You’ll become a published author before you know it.

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