How to Blog a Booklet in Less Than a Month

There are some great reasons to blog a booklet-length book, and you can easily do so in a month or less. Booklets may be my favorite form of short book. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, many short books can be printed as booklets. These saddle-stitched (stapled) books come in an assortment of sizes and can be produced most effectively on a booklet press, but I’ve had them done at Kinko’s and Office Depot as well. They tend to be inexpensive to produce, and you can run down and have just a few printed whenever you need them.

You can put a variety of blogged content into a booklet. For instance, you could blog a booklet with:

• a series of posts related to a longer book you plan to write
• a series of posts related to a workshop, class or webinar you teach
• just the introduction or first chapter of your book
• content based on an idea you want to test market
• information related to a speech you give

You might notice a theme here: Booklets are a great way to produce a short version of a book you plan to write or a product you can sell in conjunction with something else you do.

In the first case—the short version of a book you plan to write, you can actually test market the subject matter to see if there is interest in your book. By blogging a portion of your book, you can track the number of readers you get to those posts. If your traffic increases as you write that series, you know you have a winner. You then also can edit the series into an actual printed booklet and sell it when you go out and speak on the topic. Or simply sell it off your blog or website as an ebook. See how many sales you get. Depending upon the length, you might be able to sell it on CreateSpace. You can upload it to Smashwords.com and make it available for a variety of e-readers. In all these cases, you can see how well it sells, and then, if it does well, proceed with the full-length version.

In the second case, if you teach workshops, webinars, teleseminars, or give talks or speeches, you should be selling products at the back of the room. This gives you an added source of revenue. It also provides another way to test market your idea—both as a talk and a book. The easiest way to get the booklet written is via a series of blog posts on the topic of your speech. When done with the series, which need only be about 10-30 posts, edit the manuscript, have it simply designed with a cover, and then print it up.

Depending upon the length of your booklet, you might be able to design it into an actual print-on-demand book at CreateSpace or with a digital printer. This is a cheap option as well, but then you don’t have a booklet, you have a book. The advantage of a booklet is that you can easily make changes to the document and resend it to the print shop. I just send a PDF to my printer. The next day I pick up as few as one copy. And they may cost as little as $1-2 dollars to print.

In many cases, I’ve been able to design these myself. More recently, I’ve had cover designs done for my booklets. I’ve included the covers here in this post so you can see some of them.

I’m always amazed at how many of these I sell when I speak. I teach a class on how to write a short book fast, and I always sell a ton of my booklets. People buy them as examples of what they can produce on their blogs or simply by writing them the traditional way. I highly recommend blogging booklets, though. You can have one written in 10-30 days with no problem. Try it. Once you’ve completed one, you will want to do it again. I promise. It’s so easy. Let me know how it goes.

 

 

If you missed the announcement, you can win a free, signed copy of How to Blog a Book by participating in NaBoBloMo. Here’s how. Write a post a day and get at least a 7,500-word manuscript completed in a month. That’s a 250-word post per day (or a longer post 5 days per week). Here are the rules/requirements: Send in your 7,500-word manuscript with a table of contents, a 50-word pitch, and an overview of the book (synopsis). It must arrive by 12 p.m. 4/30/12 Pacific Time.  Email it to me at nina (at) ninaamir (dot) com.