How I turned blog posts into a book
A few weeks ago, my book Hey, There’s Science In This came out. It was a long time in the making, because all chapters originally started as blog posts. Turning blog posts into a book wasn’t as simple as copy-pasting everything and clicking “submit”, though.
I’ve had some sort of blog since 2001, and a dedicated science blog since 2005. Many of my older posts were still pretty interesting, but they were spread out all over the internet in various blog archives and not being read anymore. I wanted to highlight some of these posts again, so last year I decided to turn my favourites into a book.
Now that the hectic launch period is over and the first wave of readers has shared, recommended or reviewed the book, I have a little bit of time to reflect on what I did and share what I learned.
First, I should emphasize that the advice below is focused on self-publishing. That’s no coincidence. Unless your blog regularly attracts millions of views and you have something very special on your hands, traditional publishers are likely not interested. So for many blog-to-book projects, self-publishing makes the most sense and that’s what’s described in the steps below.