Blog Your Book in a Month

It’s that time of year again: National Book Blogging Month (NaBoBloMo). No…that doesn’t mean I am suggesting that you review books on your blog for a month. Indeed, bloggers who review books call themselves book bloggers, but I’m talking about writing a book on your blog—in 30 days. You can be that kind of book blogger by partipating in NaBoBloMo. Game?

Prepare for NaBoBloMo 2015

If so, gear up by following these steps:

1. Come up with a topic you can blog about for 30 days or several times a week for a month. This should be a topic that lends itself to a short book.
2. Create a content plan that includes material you will publish on the blog as well as new material for the finished e-book book. For example, blog all but one chapter, or plan to write an introduction and a conclusion for the finished version.
3. Break your content into blog-post sized pieces—300-500 word chunks or whatever length will work to publish posts two to seven times per week for 30 days.
4. Create a blogging schedule and stick to it for the next month. Decide how often you will blog or need to blog to complete your book and on what days.

How to Blog a Book in a Month

If you don’t normally find the time to blog often or consistently, here’s a tip: Schedule time on your calendar for writing posts. To successfully complete NaBoBloMo, you need to sacrifice some other activities—like television watching, reading, and lunch with friends. This will open up the hours you need in your week to write the additional posts. If your weekdays are quite busy, you may need to set aside one day on the weekend to knock out three or four posts and then schedule them to publish later. (Hopefully, this will help you develop the discipline to continue writing more regularly after NaBoBloMo.)

Don’t make the mistake of writing all your posts in WordPress only. Instead, create a manuscript in a word processing program. Write your posts in MS Word, Scrivener or Pages. Then copy and past the individual posts into WordPress. In this way you create a full manuscript to edit at the end of April. This also serves as a back up.

Stay focused on your book! Don’t go off on a tangent and write about something else. Use your content, or blog, plan, which should tell you what subject to write about and publish on each day. Don’t waver.

Don’t feel overwhelmed. Remember, a blogged book can be short. It can be comprised of a series of 10 to 30 posts. And to publish an e-book on Kindle, you need only about 4,500 words. That’s only 15 posts if you average 300 words per post.

That said, if you really want to blog a full-length book in a month, you can. If you publish three posts per day, each one averaging 500 words (or one 1,500-word post), you’ll complete a 45,000-word manuscript by the end of April. You can then add an additional chapter, an intro and a conclusion; this might amount to another 5,000 words. A 50,000-word book is a respectable length for a nonfiction book.

How to Particpate in NaBoBloMo

NaBoBloMo is a personal challenge. You won’t find a forum here on howtoblogabook.com or any special events. You don’t need to check in, register or report on word or post counts.

If you want to declare your goal so you have accountability, please do leave a comment below stating the fact that you are participating in NaBoBloMo. Describe your blogged book, and include your blog URL so others can read it. Feel free to come back and comment again on this post or any other post during the month to provide an update on your book blogging progress. And read the posts this month, which will pertain to blogging books fast.