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.

Step 1. Select the blog posts for the book

Not every old post is book worthy. Go through your archives and look for posts that could form a coherent theme together. My theme was broadly around finding science in interesting places, but depending on the topics covered in your blog you can perhaps find a specific niche. If you have a lot of content, you can even think about splitting them into two themes to create two books. (But just focus on one at a time).

When you’re selecting your posts, think about whether you have the rights to all the content you included. If you need to leave out images, would you need to rewrite the text? If the post was sponsored, do you retain the rights to the blog post?

Once you’ve selected your content for the book, it’s time to clean it all up with a thorough edit.

Step 2. Edit and fact-check everything

Of course you checked all your posts carefully the first time, and if there were any big mistakes your readers already picked those up in your comment section at the time, but now it’s time to be even more critical.

Read through all the posts that you selected, and think carefully about which order you want them to be in the book, whether all sentences still make sense outside of the context of a blog, and whether the text still includes all relevant information if you removed all the links. For example, if your blog had the phrase “after an unexpected delay I arrived at the conference” and “unexpected delay” was linked to a news article about grounded flights around the world, consider rewriting your text to be more explicit about what the delay was.

At this stage, you also want to fact check everything and update any outdated references. In my book several chapters had to be drastically rewritten because the text needed to be updated after the pandemic. I had one chapter that referenced PCR tests, for example. A few years ago not many people knew what those were, but the phrase “PCR test” became much more well-known once it was linked to covid testing, so I acknowledged that in the rewritten text.

Step 2 is by far the hardest and most time consuming step. At this stage, you are your own very strict editor. If you would rather hire an editor to help, jump ahead to step 4 for info on possible tasks you can get help for, but don’t forget to look at step 3, because you need to do that immediately after step 2 and before getting further help.

Step 3. Decide how to sell and format the book

If you’re self-publishing your book, you’ll need to choose how you’re distributing your book and, based on that, how you will format it. You have several options for self-publishing depending on whether you want to sell physical copies, ebooks or both; and in which markets (local or global).

If your blog covers content specific to one city, it might make sense to aim for local distribution or only sell books at in-person events and choose a printing service that makes that process easiest. Other people might only want to sell ebooks on Amazon through KDP Select. In my case, I wanted both ebooks and paperbacks, and I chose IngramSpark for global distribution because I knew that I had readers in several different countries.

Depending on how you choose to distribute the book, you might also need to buy your own ISBN codes. Some publishers create them for you, but that can limit which bookstores carry the book. I chose to buy a block of ten codes from the UK ISBN provider (because I needed two — one for paperback and one for ebook — and a block of ten was cheaper than two loose ones)

You also need to decide how to format the book. Which software will you use to create the final look of the pages? Paid professional software like InDesign has the most flexibility but is not in everyone’s budget and has a somewhat steep learning curve. I chose to use the Reedsy book editor, which wasn’t as flexible but did what I needed and was easy to pick up. The publishing platform that you chose might also have their own internal formatting tool. (I chose not to use IngramSpark’s native tool, even though they had one, because I wasn’t able to format everything the way that I needed it to be.) And of course, you don’t have to do this yourself. You can always ask for help.

Step 4. Get help where you can

Until this point, I had chosen to do everything myself. I work fulltime as a science writer and I’ve done enough editing that I could critically assess some of the biggest flaws in my old posts and rewrite them. It helped that many of the blog posts were so old that I didn’t remember writing them and could look at them with fresh eyes. But it’s not always easy to assess your own writing.

For the early stages of editing, where you’re figuring out how to present your ideas effectively (during step 2), you could seek help from a developmental editor. To look over the details of your writing, such as your sentence structure and flow, you could hire a copy editor. They can also help with formatting, so it makes sense to involve them after choosing your publisher, so that you know what they require from the formatted files that you need to send them.

Even if you edited everything yourself so far, there are some things that require a second pair of eyes, if not more. That’s why I decided to hire a proofreader and recruit some volunteer beta readers.

Beta readers are test readers. They read your book through the eyes of a reader and give you feedback about the overall book. You’ll want to find beta readers that reflect the audience of your book (and that, in turn, is likely to be a similar audience as your blog had). Anyone can be a beta reader, so just ask around!

Proofreaders go over your final formatted manuscript to find any inconsistencies in spelling, font, notation, spacing and more details that you wouldn’t even have considered. They’re one of the last people (besides yourself) to look at your manuscript before you publish.

Step 5. Actively promote and sell the book

Once your book is formatted and edited, and you’ve incorporated everyone’s feedback, you can upload it to the platform you’re using to print and/or distribute the book.

Several platforms allow you to make the book available for pre-order for a certain period of time. During that time the book is not yet officially out, but people can order it and you can start promoting it. I chose a pre-order period of a month during which I announced it to all my online networks and encouraged everyone to pre-order. Traditional publishers often set pre-order periods to be several months long, so that they have enough time to send the book to review sites, which often require at least three months’ notice before launch date. So if you want your book to already have reviews when it comes out, you will need to pick a long lead time to accommodate book reviewers’ busy schedules.

Some people don’t use pre-order periods at all, and just start selling and promoting the book after it has launched. That’s also fine.

To promote your book, think about who and where your audience is. Are there any relevant organisations, topical forums or websites that can help you promote the book? The more defined your audience is, the easier it is to target your marketing to them.

If your blog is still active and has a regular readership, they would of course be the first to hear about it! My main blog was already dormant by the time my book came out, but many former readers had moved on to my Substack so I announced the launch there.

You can also use paid ads on different platforms. For example, to promote Hey, There’s Science In This, I placed an ad on Facebook targeted to people who followed a science page with a broadly similar audience as I was aiming to reach.

Other promotion methods can include contacting book bloggers and booktokkers, planning a launch event with a relevant organisation, or tying in your launch with an existing timely event. (e.g. launching a sports book in an Olympic year when interest in sports is high). You can come up with all kinds of other ideas to share the news that your book is launching. Just get creative with it!

My book, Hey, There’s Science In This is now available via Amazon US, Amazon UK and several other online retailers as paperback and ebook.