Blog a Book in a Month

It’s spring. As the natural world seems to give birth to new blooms, leaves and flowers, it’s time to give birth to a new book—to bring that idea inside you into the world on your blog. That’s right. This month we are focusing on blogging a book in 30 days. Call April National Book Blogging Month (NaBoBloMo). Time to get spring fever for a blogged book.

Yes, we have missed three days already, but that also means this is not an April Fool’s day joke. I warned you at the end of last month it was coming…

Okay. How to start. First, you need to know what you are writing. Let’s not start with your magnum opus, although you can blog that, too, and you should. I don’t suggest this month, though, because you won’t gain many enough followers in 30 days to get discovered by an agent or acquisitions editor. You will, however, gain some new readers, I’m sure. And you will get a book written. That’s cool and builds platform; plus it gives you a way to monetize your blog. But what I’m talking about this month is blogging a book fast. That means blogging a short book, like I did last month when I blogged about how to book a blog. Basically, I blogged about 6,000 words of a first draft minus an intro, conclusion and one or two extra chapters.

Here are a few ideas for short books.

• A tip book
• A how-to book
• A handbook
• A guide book
• A book of quotations with your comments
• A travel guide
• A gift book
• A book of rules or steps
• A book of meditations

Now, come up with a structure for your blogged book. Figure out if you will have any special features in your book, like quotations, interviews, sidebars, tips. You might look at other similar (printed or electronic) books to see what types of features they have or what structure they have used.

Obviously, you will be blogging your book in a month, so you need at least 20 or 25 posts. (I’m leaving a few days off for editing the finished manuscript.) Decide out how many words you want your book to have, or how many pages. Now do the math. How many words on each completed printed or ebook page? How many words do you need to write per day? How much time do you need for this? Create a schedule.

Last, map out your content. You can do this with a mind map. I’ve explained how to do so previously in this post. Or you can just create a table of contents and break it down into subheadings, which will be your blog post titles. That’s pretty simple.

Now that you have a content plan, start writing at fever pitch! Have a book written before summer. You can do it by simply writing a post a day.

Tell me what book you are going to blog this month.

My birthday is on April 5^th. Want to give me a birthday present?
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