Guest Post - Writing a book from your blog posts By Tony Riches

I read somewhere that it was a great idea to format a dozen of your most interesting blog posts as an ebook – and publish it on Amazon.  It just happened that I‘d reached the last in a series of posts on my writing blog about social media tips for authors wishing to increase their readership. Each post had ten ‘top tips’ for a particular social media channel, such as Twitter, Facebook and Goodreads, so as there were now ten of them I could call it something like ‘100 practical Tips’.

It didn’t take long to format the ebook, as I simply copied and pasted the blog posts then ran it through my free tool ‘Mobipocket Creator’. I used a free cover template, as I wasn’t going to spend ages designing one, then published it on Amazon and Smashwords.

Then the problems started. Amazon sent me a terse email saying they had discovered that the contents of a book I had just published was available free online, so I had to remove it immediately. They were, of course, referring to the posts on my writing blog. I reluctantly had to then delete the original posts from my blog, which was a shame as they’d had a lot of visitors.

Next Smashwords sent a warning that they couldn’t distribute the ebook to their usual channels as it contained links to Amazon. They were right – I had a whole chapter on setting up your Amazon author page.  I removed the actual hyperlinks from the text but they still haven’t accepted it - and I don’t think they will until the ‘A’ word is gone altogether.

In the meantime the book is selling on Amazon – and I decided to give it away free to anyone who guest posts on my blog, which has worked well.  It was also useful that when Twitter recently changed the header layout I was able to easily update the ebook – which I probably would never have remembered to do for the blog posts.

So there you have it. It can be a good idea to ‘recycle’ your old posts as an ebook, although there may be hidden problems that can take you by surprise!

How to Build Your Online Author Platform: 100 Practical Tips is on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IUQ7QSK

About the Author- 

Tony Riches is a full time author based in Wales UK.  His blog The Writing Desk is at www.tonyriches.co.uk  and he has a Wordpress site for his published work at http://tonyrichesauthor.wordpress.com/ You can also find Tony on Twitter @tonyriches and on Facebook