How to Blog a Short Book that Builds Expert Status

Welcome to National Book Blogging Month 2017! This year the focus of the event is on blogging your way to expert status. Your blog provides you with a way to prove your knowledge, experience, and expertise. It’s a vehicle for moving you into thought-leader status. That’s why this year during National Book Blogging Month (NaBoBloMo) I want to encourage bloggers and authors to become authorities by producing 30 days of blog posts—preferably posts you can turn into a short book. Ready on to learn more. And be sure to follow all the April posts to help you blog your way to expert status.

You want to write a book that gives you experts status—one that shows off your experience, knowledge, and good old-fashioned know-how. And you want to write the book fast…in 30 days.

No problem.

After all, you have a blog. And you publish posts on it a few times per week already. Just ramp up your blogging schedule to five days per week. Write a bit of your book every day and publish it on your blog—or create your manuscript offline. In other words, blog a short book that increases your expert status.

The more often you publish authority building posts on your blog, the faster you become known as an expert. Plus, if you share your posts on social media sites you’ll drive traffic to your blog, and you’ll gain clients and customers. Not only that, if you write the posts with the conscious intention of producing a book from them, you will create a book manuscript in the process. And that book will boost your expert status.

But what goes into that expert-status-creating book? That’s the big question.

And I’ve got the answer.

How to Write an Expert-Building Book

To write a book that builds your expert status, you need to accomplish three steps. And you need to do so before you ever produce a word of your book manuscript.

Step #1: Determine How to Demonstrate Your Expertise

Before you write any book—even an ebook or blogged book—you need a plan. To begin working on your expert-building book plan, be sure you know:

• The needs of your market.
• What other published books on your topic exist.
• Your unique selling proposition—what makes you and your offering to readers (as well as clients and customers) unique.
• Your strongest areas of expertise and how they benefit your readers.

Your readers, customers, and clients want a book that gives them value—that benefits them in some way. And the only way for you to be seen as an expert is to provide that value from your knowledge base. You need to answer their pressing questions, solve their biggest problems, and give them the information they seek.

For you to be seen as an expert in their eyes, you also have to showcase your expertise. So get very clear on what that is and how it relates to the benefits they want to get out of reading your book.

Step #2: Craft a Table of Contents

With this information in mind, you can begin to craft a table of contents for your book. The table of contents provides a structure for your book.

As you plan out the contents of your book, organize it into chapters. If you are writing a nonfiction book—the best option for building expert status, your chapters will have subheadings or chapter parts. List your chapter titles and subheadings. The results: A detailed table of contents you can follow to write your book.

Look this over several times to makes sure the structure does a good job of showing off what you know. Each chapter title and subheading clearly should demonstrate the expert information you will provide.

Step #3: Create Chapter Summaries

Now go one step further. For each chapter and its parts, draft a paragraph or two description or a bullet list of what content you plan to include. Determine what you will write about in each chapter in detail.

With the table of contents and chapter summaries complete, you can evaluate if the book you plan to write will, indeed, demonstrate your expertise while also meeting the needs of your audience or target market. If it does, you’re ready to write!

One reminder: If you plan to blog your book, determine what content you will publish on your blog and what content you will save for the final published book. Or if you plan to sell the book, entice readers of the published book with extra content unavailable on your blog.

Some experts give away books almost like business cards. Why? A book proves their expertise. And a nonfiction book author is almost always seen as an expert in their subject matter.

Remember to Include Anecdotes

Remember to include in your book a solid author bio—one that demonstrates your knowledge, skill, and experience. Your book’s content and structure should put your resume to work.

More than that, the book should offer examples of your experience. Look over your chapter summaries and see where you can include anecdotes—your own or those of your clients.

When you illustrate what you write with true stories, readers connect to the struggles of others and how they overcame those struggles—with your help. They vicariously experience your expertise in areas of importance to them.

More simply said, show off your success! Doing so helps readers see that you are, indeed, an expert.

Blog (or Write) Your Book

Now you are ready to blog or write your book. How will you accomplish this in 30 days? Easy.

To write a book in a month, you need to know how many words you must produce per day. Or you can determine how many chapters you must write per week. With this information, you can create a writing schedule.

Let’s say you plan to write a 20,000-word ebook in a month. You need to write about 667 words per day for 30 days. That’s a blog post per day, seven days per week. Or you can accomplish the goal by writing 1,000 words per day Monday through Friday.

If you plan to have ten chapters in your book, you need to finish two and a half chapters each week over the course of four weeks.

To blog your book in 30 days, produce the entire manuscript in that period even though you may not publish all of the content on your site as you do so. So keep that in mind; even the content you plan to keep as unpublished or new for the published book must be written during the month.

Once you finish the manuscript, turn it over to an editor while you work with a cover designer. Once you have the polished manuscript and cover in hand, get your manuscript formatted either for a print or digital edition or both. Then you’re ready to publish. But these last steps likely will happen after your month of writing. You can finish them in another four to six weeks, though.

If you follow these steps, you’ll have an expert-building book in your hands—and in the hands of readers—fast! And you’ll have boosted your expert status considerably, especially if you blogged your book.

Are you blogging an expert building book this month? Share the link to your blog below along with a comment about why you are an expert.

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