How to Go From a Blog to a Book
Medium writers who have published books share their secrets
Even in today’s very-virtual world, many creators maintain the goal of writing and publishing a book. Look, we love writing online (obviously!). But at the same time, there’s just something about curling up with a physical, paper book — and if you’re a big reader of books, chances are, you dream of writing one someday.
Of course, going from writing Medium posts to writing an entire book is like going from sprinting to doing a triathlon. Here’s some expert advice on how to train:
Blog as you go
“My process for writing a book doesn’t start with planning out the entire volume,” writes Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractable. “Rather, I blog my way through the book. I’ll take interesting parts of the problem and break it down into posts I publish here on Medium and on my blog, NirAndFar.com.” Eyal calls writing an entire book “the hardest fun thing I know how to do,” but points out that “by consistently publishing an article weekly, I chew on the topic enough to offer readers something interesting but more importantly, I answer tidbits of the bigger questions in what will eventually become the book.”
Choose your influences carefully
While blogging can help you get your ideas down, entrepreneur Luke Burgis points out that you do need to read the kind of format you’re working on. He’s talking specifically about books in this piece — the books he read while working on his book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. In this post, Burgis goes into detail about the books that inspired him as he wrote — some because of their subject matter, some because of their structure, and some that gave him “the courage I needed to try my best to write true sentences and capture ideas faithfully as I embarked on this project of writing.”
Systems are your friend
UX researcher and author Ximena Vengoechea used some humble-seeming — yet crucial — systems to organize her work as she wrote Listen Like You Mean It. She writes: “When you are working on a multi-phased project, no matter how fast a writer you are, you’re going to need to put some systems in place to keep you organized. Enter the lowly holy spreadsheet: a place to capture every item on my growing list of book to-do’s. I kept a tab for interviews I wanted to pursue and research I wanted to undertake; a tab for random marketing ideas that popped up; a tab for major deadlines; a tab for tracking day-to-day progress.” (Vengoechea shares more useful systems in this post!)
Take it slow and steady
Benjamin Sledge, an army veteran whose book, Where Cowards Go To Die, comes out this year, shares some useful lessons about how he wrote his memoir while working full-time and parenting. “The truth is, you make time for what you want to make time for in life,” he writes, revealing that he wrote his book by getting up early every morning to put in an hour of writing a day. An hour a day doesn’t sound like much, but because he stuck to this schedule every day, by the end of a year, he had a draft. Slow and steady, bit by bit, we have to do the work.
