Prior to beginning to blog your book, create a content plan. This serves as your road map as you write and helps you determine what content to include in your blogged book. Every day when you sit down, you will look at it and know exactly what content to create as part of your manuscript. And you will copy and paste it onto your blog.
The easiest way to create a content plan is with a mind map. While I failed to include a description of this process in my first draft of How to Blog a Book (the version that appears here on the blog) because I could have had a better content plan (Learn from my mistakes!), I discuss mind mapping and creating a content plan in detail in the edition released recently by Writer’s Digest books. You can also learn about mind mapping in this post, which was written during a series on booking blogs, or repurposing blog content into a book.
Your content plan will include your table of contents for your book. It will also break every chapter down into post-sized chunks-250-500 word pieces. Additionally, this plan will include content that will not ever appear on the blog. In other words, you will decide upon content you will hold back for publication in a digital or print versions of your book. This material serves as an enticement to your loyal blog readers to purchase the printed or digital version of the book. It also provides an enticement to publishers to want to publish the book when so much of it has already been “published.”
What material will you leave out of your blogged book? How about:
- a few extra chapters
- profiles of people related to your subject or story
- success stories
- Q & As
- a prologue
- an epilogue
- certain sections of all your chapters
- a tip or tool offered at the end of each chapter
- an introduction
- a conclusion
- details around vignettes (for a memoir)
Can you think of some other things you might leave out and surprise a reader or publisher with later? Let me know in a comment.
Photo courtesy of Danilo Rizzuti
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[…] if you followed my advice here on the blog or in my book, you created a content plan that included some material that you did not publish in your blogged book. In other words, you kept some juicy content only for the printed or digital book (or both) but you […]