Publish & Prosper

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Publish & Prosper

Turning Your Blog Into A Book

April 16, 2025 • Matt Briel & Lauren Vassallo • Episode 67

Whether you’re a food blogger, travel blogger, business blogger, lifestyle blogger, finance blogger, or any kind of blogger, you all have one thing in common: your content would make a great book.

In this episode, Matt & Lauren explore the value of publishing your blog as a physical book. We also review the key steps to getting from blog to book, including how to choose the right content to include, outlining and formatting your manuscript, and what tools can help you along the way.

Dive Deeper

💡 Content, Inc. Episode 61: Tilt to Blog to Book to Speaking

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Webinar | Fun With Formatting
How to Use a Book for Lead Generation
The Content Entrepreneur's Guide to Book Publishing

Sound Bites From This Episode

🎙️ [8:29] “The general public concept of writing a book, people still have that like, inherently, subconsciously in their brain: you've done something a little more impressive than the average person by writing and publishing a book.”

🎙️ [50:46] “If you are a blogger, you already have everything you need to sell your book direct to your audience. This is a great opportunity for you to be selling direct…keeping people on your website, not sending people away from your blog. That defeats the purpose of creating this lead magnet.”

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Matt: Welcome back to another exciting episode of Publish & Prosper, where Lauren is working on making time speed up.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And or stand still.

Lauren: Oh, no.

Matt: No, just speed up.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah. Before we start recording, Lauren revealed to me that she's working on it. So. That would imply that one has some sort of a blueprint or plan they’re, they're trying to do.

Lauren: I mean, it's…unfortunately, I don't think it's something that will apply to everybody else. Just me.

Matt: Oh, well, okay. I didn't realize you're gonna be selfish with it either.

Lauren: Well, I don't know, because my current strategy for making time go faster is to just constantly be doing things.

Matt: Ah, I see. Okay.

Lauren: So the more that you're doing…

Matt: All right.

Lauren: The less you realize how slowly everything happens. So.

Matt: Yeah, I think I was thinking more along the lines of like you and your cat in your apartment are building some sort of a machine that would help you speed up time. But maybe I watch too many cartoons and science fiction shows.

Lauren: I mean, on the one hand, it would be great.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: On the other hand, the key problem in what you just said is specifically that Rose is the kind of cat that you can't leave anything unattended for more than like, thirty seconds.

Matt: Wait. That's the key problem?

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Is that your cat?

Lauren: She would destroy it before we ever even built it. So.

Matt: The key problem, ladies, and gentlemen, and others –

Lauren: In time travel.

Matt: – is not that Lauren cannot develop a machine. It's that her cat will probably derail the project.

Lauren: Unfortunately, I just quite simply will not be able to solve the problem of time travel because I have a real brat of a cat.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: That's the only thing stopping me.

Matt: All right. Well, with that. Today, we're going to be talking about turning your blog into a book.

Lauren: That’s a –

Matt: And how to do that.

Lauren: That's a form of time travel, right?

Matt: Uh, no.

Lauren: Oh, okay.

Matt: I - maybe.

Lauren: Well.

Matt: I don't think we're going to be able to connect the dots on that one.

Lauren: No. Okay.

Matt: I just – yeah. Blog to book strategy. That's what we're talking about today. We will no longer be talking about time travel or anything else.

Lauren: I make no such promises.

Matt: Okay. So one of the things that we get asked about a lot, or a decent amount, I should say. And, and where we've seen people actually have success with trying to create a book or monetize their blog, is this whole strategy of taking your blog content and turning it into a book. So, we're going to address a lot of the common questions and misconceptions. Everything from, if they already read my blog, why would they pay for a book? All the way to how in the world do I turn a blog into a book? Right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Am I on the right track?

Lauren: You sure are.

Matt: Do I need to slow down or speed up time?

Lauren: No, I think you're, you're right on the mark.

Matt: What if people listen to this at 2x?

Lauren: I would highly discourage that.

Matt: I mean, that's a form of speeding up time, right?

Lauren: This is a debate that my friends and I have all the time, actually, about audiobooks. Because there are people that listen to audiobooks at 2x speed.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And I, as an audiobook girlie, I would actually throw myself off a cliff before I listened to an audiobook at 2x speed.

Matt: That's very dark. But okay.

Lauren: It could be fun.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: I just – I can't. I can’t imagine.

Matt: I've never listened to anything at 2x speed. So I don't know what that sounds – I mean, does it sound like?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like you can tell like, it's the guy at the end of the commercial trying to get all the terms and conditions in before…?

Lauren: Yes.

Matt: Yeah, that would drive me nuts.

Lauren: And like, God forbid the, the narrator already has a little bit of an annoying voice or something. You've just sped it up and made it ten times worse.

Matt: That might make it sound better.

Lauren: At that point – well, that is, any time that I have changed the speed on an audiobook, that's been why I've been doing it. To try to mess with the narrator's voice a little bit and see if I can make it…

Matt: Now I see. I like that.

Lauren: Yeah. And that actually does work. But even then, it's usually like 1.15. Definitely not two times.

Matt: Oh, just barely?

Lauren: Yeah, just like a little, just a little, a little tweaking. So.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: If I wanted to read the book that fast, I would just read it myself.

Matt: All right. Very good.

Lauren: Yeah. No. So I mean, I guess, I guess if you, if you've ever listened to this podcast and anything other than 1X speed, I'm so sorry. And don't let us know, because I don't want to know that.

Matt: Now I feel like I need to listen to this podcast at 1.5 to 2X.

Lauren: Please don't.

Matt: I just – I'm, now dying to know.

Lauren: I don't have time to deal with that when you decide it sounds awful. I have too many other things to do right now.

Matt: No, you don't.

Lauren: You're right.

Matt: You don’t.

Lauren: I have nothing else going on right now.

Matt: You are podcast only.

Lauren: Free as a bird.

Matt: That's right. I'm going to listen to it in 2X when I leave in my car on the way home.

Lauren: Great. Can't wait.

Matt: I might get home faster.

Lauren: Maybe you will.

Matt: Maybe we just solved time travel.

Lauren: Maybe that's it.

Matt: Listen to everything at 2X.

Lauren: Makes you drive faster. I do notice that I drive faster when I listen to faster music.

Matt: Done. I'll take my Nobel Peace Prize now.

Lauren: Perfect.

Matt: Please.

Lauren: I'll submit it. I will actually just submit this recording as, as evidence.

Matt: But do it in 2X?

Lauren: Yes. Perfect. We're on it. Anyway.

[5:27]

Matt: All right. Why are we talking about this today? We're talking about this today because there are a lot of people out there that are still stuck at that, that point where they, they've got a blog, but they're struggling with ways to monetize it. Maybe they've made some space to allow some programmatic advertising on their site, you know, a couple of banner ads or whatever, but we all know how gross that is. And unless you're pulling down large traffic numbers, that means you're probably not making a lot of money off of it.

Lauren: And also, not only are you probably not making a whole lot of money off of it, but you are giving away real estate on your page to send people away from your content.

Matt: Well, you're not giving it away. But yeah, essentially you're right. For the people who do click on those ads, they are leaving your blog. Yeah, you're 100 % right. They're paying you for that, but it's not – nobody's getting rich off that.

Lauren: At what cost?

Matt: Exactly. Yeah. So why we talk about blogs specifically is primarily because, well, I mean, quite frankly, you know how to write. You have a blog.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: The idea is that you've been writing, like for you to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard is clearly not an issue. You have a blog, you've been blogging regularly, hopefully. You're putting out short form and long form content or, you know, a mix of the two and you understand the idea of conceptualizing something, turning it into a piece of content and then putting it out there in the world. For you, that process would be extremely similar for a book. And technically you have the content. So we're gonna talk about other reasons why you should do this, what you can do with it, how you can do it. Maybe we'll talk about some other pointless things along the way.

Lauren: I always try to talk about some pointless things along the way. That's my favorite part.

Matt: All right, so why else should they do this just because, you know, our two smiling faces tell them they should?

Lauren: Well, there's a lot of reasons, honestly, and I'm sure some of them have occurred to you already, but that's okay. That's what we're here for. Obviously, you know, we've talked in the past about how valuable a book can be as a lead magnet, and as kind of a sample of what you're capable of and what you can do and what your expertise is and what your knowledge is in. It's hard to really articulate to somebody in a conversation exactly what you can do.

I mean, not in the sense of like… Everyone can say, oh, nice to meet you, what do you do? Oh, I'm a food blogger. Everyone knows what that means. No one's going to question like, you're a food blogger? What does that mean? You're a travel blogger? What does that mean? But it's like, actually being able to showcase and highlight your work is not as easy to do when it's digital like that.

Matt: Yep, I agree with that.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So it's a great opportunity for you to show off your work and also a great opportunity for you to show off yourself as well. You're, you're literally – look, I mean. We're past the window of time… We've had all these different flash in the pan trends over the years, where we felt like everyone and their mother had a blog for a little while. Everybody and their mother started a podcast at some point in time.

Matt: My mom didn’t.

Lauren: You know, everyone has tried TikTok, whatever, but not everybody can write a book. Well, that's not true. I mean, we will make the argument that everybody can write a book. But the general public concept of writing a book. People still have that like, inherently, subconsciously in their brain. You've done something a little more impressive than the average person by writing and publishing a book.

Matt: Yeah, I think it's okay to say not everybody can write a book.

Lauren: Great.

Matt: I think that's different than saying not everybody should write a book. I do think there are a lot of people who can't write a book. Not that, I mean, there's a lot of people that can't just sit down and write a book. It's very hard. I would even struggle – and do struggle – to just sit down and write a book, like without the access to proper tools, resources, people, things like that. Not everybody can just sit down and write a book. So I think it's okay to say that. And that's why a lot of people never will write a book.

But it's also why when we do see that somebody has written a book and it looks better than, you know, fourteen pages stapled together where things were drawn like stick figures with crayons, we should give them some credit and say wow, okay, they've got a book on the subject. They must be somewhat knowledgeable. And by the way, they must have some decent level of work ethic and drive and determination. Right?

Lauren: Absolutely.

Matt: It's not, it's not easy to write a book, per se. I know we say that a lot, but I think when we say that what we really mean is that the resources exist, the tools exist, the technology exists, so that everybody has a fairly equal shot at writing a book, but it doesn't mean everybody can or will. So yeah, I think that saying that not everybody can write a book is okay.

Lauren: Okay. I'm glad we're on the same page about that. Because I immediately was wait like, I don't know if that’s the stance I want to take here. But, yeah.

Matt: Yeah, I – you know. I knew where you were coming from now.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: And we do often, we sometimes throw that out there like everybody can write a book and everybody should. I mean, sure, everybody should write a book at some point, or create some sort of book or just create in general. I don't think enough people in the world just create stuff. Right? Who cares if it's crappy.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like, create stuff. Kurt Vonnegut was very famous for saying create bad stuff if you have to. Like, badly drawn art or badly written books, but just create stuff. But it also doesn't mean that everybody's gonna be able to create a good book that's gonna go on to sell more than a hundred copies.

Lauren: Which is fair.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I mean, that's –

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: That's just the reality of it. But the point is that if you have done that, and you have a tangible physical book that you can show people and say like, yeah, you know, I've been, I've been running this blog for a decade. I've put a lot of effort into it. I even turned some of my content into a book recently and look at this cool book that I have. That is absolutely a little extra step in, oh, that's really impressive. Oh, you must actually really know what you're talking about. You must actually be really dedicated to this particular subject, this particular craft, whatever it is. Like, you've really taken it a step further. And that's impressive.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: It's a great way to name yourself as an authority in your field. It's also a great way – I was listening to our friend Joe Pulizzi's podcast while I was working on outlining this episode. And he talked a little bit about – this is something that he's done on more than one occasion. And he kind of called it the blog to book to speaking pipeline.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Talked about how if that's something that is like, all three of those things are something that you're interested in doing with your content in the long term. That's a great kind of strategy for you to take. It's giving you a content strategy. You come up with an idea for your book. You figure out what content you need from your blog to fit that book. So that's going to give you kind of a content calendar for the next few months.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And then when you have that book, you start pitching that as your speaking sessions at major events. So it's kind of giving you a variety of different content all based on this one strategy.

Matt: Yeah, it's also a strategy that is basically your path to speaking. So for some people, that's their goal, is that they're trying to get to a point where that's what they do primarily is speak.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: That's gonna be their primary income. So the blog is a starting point. A book is the next step, you know again, to establish that authority, grow that audience, make people aware of who you are and your expertise. The book helps you get your foot in the door to speaking at events, conferences, and, you know, ultimately becoming a keynote speaker where you're sought out, contracted, and asked to come speak. So yeah, there's a number of different angles to take with there, but that's a really good one.

[12:48]

Matt: We mentioned expanding your audience. So, you know, when you write a blog, you're basically speaking to your audience on the internet, in the digital world, and that's just kind of your audience. And your hope is that you can grow that audience, right? Digitally through a couple of different ways, you can do paid efforts and paid ads and stuff like that. You're hopefully doing the right thing in getting people to sign up for your mailing list as you get them over to your blog, and so that creates another channel to hopefully not only build but expand on your audience. But you can literally expand your audience from the digital into the analog world by writing a book. And that's a whole new audience that can come back and now discover your blog. And I think that's a great way to go from one medium to another and then back.

And a lot of people don't think about that. They just think digital only. Digital first and digital only. But it's not until you've actually, you know, written and utilized a book for some of these things where, where it really clicks and it makes sense like, oh, okay. There is a whole audience of people out there that don't really read a lot of stuff online. They're not huge blog followers or they're not reading a ton of articles online. Maybe they got a couple of newsletters that they subscribe to that they'll read through on occasion, but they choose to get their information from books.

This is a very prevalent thing in the world of science and technology and these other fields where people are used to reading books. They've been in school for a lot of time, you know what I mean? They use reference manuals a lot, the medical professions. So these people are used to reading books. They're not your typical audience that you're going to catch necessarily on your blog. So understanding that there's a whole other subset of people out there that they would rather read a book than sit on their laptop for a couple hours reading a bunch of articles and stuff.

Lauren: Yeah, I mean, I'm one of them.

Matt: Me too.

Lauren: I'm not – I'm not really a blog reader. I sign up for newsletters all the time and sometimes I read them and sometimes I'll click into the blog posts within them. But, you know, I'm never like, browsing just for blog content, but I do pick up books all the time. I do –

Matt: I'm worse, and I hesitate to say this, but I print that stuff.

Lauren: Of course you do.

Matt: So when there's articles that come into my inbox, or like, and I and I do want to read it, I will literally print it here, where I'll print it on the printer and then just read it. And then I can highlight it, can mark it up.

Lauren: Yeah, I get it. One of my favorite books of the last few years, I've definitely referenced it on this podcast before, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, started – he started a podcast of essays, that all the podcast episodes were essays that he wound up turning into this book. I have loved him as an author for years. I have loved him as a content and media creator for years. I didn't listen to a single episode of that podcast. I bought the book when it came out, read every word of it, loved it, bought the audiobook so that I had the audiobook version of it too. And I still to this day have not listened to a single episode of that podcast.

Matt: Wow.

Lauren: But I've read the book multiple times and I've listened to the audiobook multiple times. I enjoyed it. I just – that wasn't the primary medium that I was used to getting content –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – from him. I do listen to podcasts. I am a podcast person – professionally now, too, I guess, but –

Matt: Now?

Lauren: Now, well, but back then –

Matt: A year and a half later.

Lauren: You know, it's fine.

Matt: This is episode 67.

Lauren: I – look it’s…we're getting there. It's – don't worry about it.

Matt: Yeah, It's almost a year and a half.

Lauren: It is. It's – we're actually, we're coming up on the two year mark of when we first started talking about it.

Matt: Well that’s not a, that's not an anniversary.

Lauren: Okay. It is in my head.

Matt: Anniversary’s from the publishing of the first podcast.

Lauren: I know. Which is Halloween. So.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: That's right.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That's not an accident in case anyone was wondering.

Matt: I don't think anybody was wondering, by the way.

Lauren: No, I don't think so either. I think anyone who's listened to more than thirty seconds of us talk –

Matt: It was either going to get launched on Halloween or some anniversary of Disney, whether it was when the first park opened or Mickey Mouse's birthday –

Lauren: Oh, a kind of missed opportunity on that one.

Matt: Which is right here by the way. Yeah.

Lauren: Kay.

Matt: So nothing is coincidental.

Lauren: That's true. So true. But yeah, I mean, it is a great opportunity to get your content out in front of other people, to reach new audiences, to reach audiences that you might not necessarily – whether that is because your book is going to, like, you're going to reach a new audience of people because you're getting speaking engagements that you might not have gotten without the book. Whether it's because you just are reaching an audience of people that are book readers and not digital content readers.

[17:06]

Lauren: There are plenty of reasons that somebody might want to turn a blog into a book that has nothing to do with… I'm not interested in speaking. I don't want to travel to events. I don't want to do this, whatever. Maybe I just want to have a physical, tangible version of my content.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Something, something that has a little bit more longevity than a blog that could get deleted any day. Or maybe it's something that is, your content is a lot easier to navigate in a physical form.

Matt: Yeah, I mean –

Lauren: Like.

Matt: So there's the practicality of it as well.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Depending on who your audience and genre is. Our friend Stephen that just wrote the book about… I forget the title.

Lauren: The Disney Physio?

Matt: Yeah, the – about staying physically fit while at Disney. It's pocket book size. You can take it with you. But then, you know, there's some travel creators who, they have people who read their blogs or whatever and come back to them and say, well, you know, this is great, but I'd love to have this in book form. Because I'm sometimes in places where I'm off the grid. No electricity, no Internet. And they like it that way. It's not like it's a… so they'd like to have the book as a way to –

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: – either read or as a reference, if you write travel content that is geared towards helping people survive or whatever. So, I mean, there's a, there's a practicality aspect to it.

Lauren: Yeah. We had this problem in London. Not even off the grid somewhere. When we were in London, a few of the people on our team had just, even though they were supposed to have international roaming on their phones, just wasn't working out for them. And a lot of people were having connectivity issues and it was harder for them to navigate any kind of content that they needed from that.

Matt: T-Mobile did us dirty on that one.

Lauren: Verizon, baby. This is not sponsored by Verizon.

Matt: No, definitely not sponsored by T-Mobile.

Lauren: Definitely not. But you know, you never know when that's going to be the situation. Also, not for nothing, there are just some things too that like… It always drives me crazy when I'm trying a new recipe that I found online and I don't have like, a written copy of it because first of all, I want to like make notes if I change anything on there or like if I'm changing the quantities or something like that. But also I do not want to touch my ipad screen with my food-covered fingers.

Matt: Yeah. You know how I get around that? I don't cook.

Lauren: Okay, that's fair.

Matt: I just go out for Mexican every single night.

Lauren: Oh, man. Now I'm hungry. I should have gotten lunch first.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Whatever. Anyway, the point is –

Matt: Rookie mistakes.

Lauren: – there are a lot of – I know, I know. There are a lot of different reasons for you to try turning your content into a book. And for all of the different people that we talk to about why it would be cool for you to have a book for some reason or another, bloggers are perhaps the most qualified, not qualified, but like… you're already halfway there.

Matt: Well, yeah, like we said earlier at the top of this episode, I mean, there's a lot of different people who want to create books. Content creators, and maybe their current medium is video or even podcasting. And they're struggling to see how they could easily take that content and turn it into a book. Although it is a lot easier these days. But again, like we said, as a blogger, you're already halfway there. You already have it all in written form. It's just a matter of deciding what's going to go into the book, what areas you need to fill in the gaps, and then formatting it. And that's it.

Lauren: Yeah. So you want to talk about that a little bit? About how to decide what kind of content?

Matt: Yeah. Did we kind of cover, you know, all the different types of books? I think we did a pretty good job, right?

Lauren: I mean, we certainly can if you wanna.

Matt: No, I think it's just important for people to understand when we say book, we're not always talking about a 200 page business banger. Like sometimes we're talking about, you know, a workbook and – what are you laughing at?

Lauren: 200 page business banger.

Matt: You know what I mean. Like a good business book, man. You know, like one of those you pop open on the plane and before you know it, you're in London and you read the whole book.

Lauren: I'm going to need somebody listening to this podcast to write a book called Business Banger.

Matt: How do you know I'm not already?

Lauren: Well, then get a move on. You've got like two weeks before this episode comes out, so.

Matt: Oh, yeah. I'm going to trademark it now. Well, it's copyrighted the minute I start writing it.

Lauren: That's so true. We just finished learning about that.

Matt: That’s right, see?

Lauren: Yup.

Matt: But you can do notebooks, workbooks, planners. All kinds of different types of books. So again, don't pigeonhole yourself into thinking you have to write, as Lauren so eloquently put it, a 200 page business banger. It can be a lot of different things.

[21:17]

Matt: All right. How do you do it?

Lauren: That's a great question.

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: First step, I'm going to borrow again from our friend Joe over here. Find your tilt.

Matt: He's so generous to loan us all of his content and his euphemisms and his metaphors.

Lauren: I mean, when it's good stuff… right? Come on now.

Matt: That's true.

Lauren: Okay. But yeah. Find your tilt, I think, is some pretty sound advice, so.

Matt: What’s that mean?

Lauren: I think we start there.

Matt: I’m pretty sure that's similar to saying the niches are in the riches or the riches are in the niches.

Lauren: Well, I was maybe, perhaps, trying to avoid saying the word niche.

Matt: I knew - I knew you were.

Lauren: I knew it was going to come up. It's fine.

Matt: What do your bracelets say?

Lauren: That's what I'm going to do with my free time at some point is, I'm going to go through this podcast and like, pull every clip of us arguing about how to say niche.

Matt: What do your bracelets say?

Lauren: My bracelets say Epcot forever because I've been deeply in a Disney mood lately.

Matt: That’s a multiple repeat, isn't it?

Lauren: I know, but it's one of my favorite ones because the colors really stand out to me when I'm like, reaching into the bowl of them trying to pull one out. Electric Touch and A Long Time Coming. I know I'm feeling kind of bored of them lately. Like, I think I need to make a fresh batch.

Matt: If we start losing listeners because you're falling off on these bracelets, I'm going to be upset.

Lauren: Well, I am… to follow up on a conversation from three months ago. I did some writing this weekend. Not on my own book, so it doesn't count. But I did write like 6,000 words this weekend, which means I get to make six new bracelets according to the deal that we made –

Matt: Oh that’s right, yeah.

Lauren: – three months ago.

Matt: Yeah. But I thought the deal was specifically geared towards your book.

Lauren: Well.

Matt: All right.

Lauren: I think we should…it was fictional writing.

Matt: Whatever. Fine, fine.

Lauren: It was creative, fictional writing that just happens to not be publishable because it is fanfiction.

Matt: All right. Find your tilt –

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: – is finding your niche.

Lauren: Yes. Yes, it is. And there's a lot of different ways that you can go about doing that. You might want to just, very straightforward look at what your top performing content is. And there's different metrics that you can look at, maybe, to help you decide that. You might want to look at which posts are the most read on your blog, most visited. Maybe you want to look at which ones are, are highest ranking in search. Maybe you want to look at the ones that have the most comments on them, so they've sparked the most discussion –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – debate, something like that. If there's one that people ask you all the time, like, could you talk more about this? Could you do a part two on this one? Could you dive a little deeper? What about this, like?

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That could be a great kickoff point –

Matt: Yep.

Lauren: – for figuring that out. You can also ask your audience.

Matt: Yeah. But you know, I think that's in a way you've kind of already done that.

Lauren: True.

Matt: So again, if you've been creating content for a little while for your blog, you're going to have most of these metrics. You're going to be able to tell which of your blog articles, your posts have gotten the most traffic, most engagement, all of those things. So again, I would start there. because chances are you already have what you need, especially if you, if you get comments on your blog and you start digging into those. So I think that's a good start. And I think from there you can start to kind of piece together if there's any recurring themes. So you might blog about something that's broad, but your top performing articles might all belong to the same sort of threaded theme.

Like if you're a travel content creator, you might write broadly about travel across various different… whether that's flying to places, taking cruise ships, whatever, whatever. But you might find that your top performing blog articles from the last year or twelve months, six months, whatever, all maybe deal with Disney vacations, right? And so it's very clear that you should be writing something to do with Disney vacations. So take those, now that you know they’re your top performing, and then start digging in. Were there any comments? Did anybody ask any questions that I answered? You know, some of those other things. And I think that's where I would, I would go with that and find the theme. Then you can start moving towards building your outline.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And filling in the gaps.

Lauren: Well, and I think also not only can you find your theme in doing that, but it might also even kind of help you inform what type of book… To go back to Matt's earlier point about how there's like, different types of content that you can create from your blog. Following that same example, you're a travel blogger, and you do a lot of different types of travel content, and you go back and look through your posts and you realize that, you know, your top twenty performing posts from the last five years are every time that you've done some kind of like…here is an essential packing list for this type of trip. And maybe that's a cool book idea that you can take, that you put together twenty essential packing lists for all different types of vacations. Or like, theme them together, so Disney or theme park vacations, and cruises, and whatever. And then you mix that together with notebook content, now people have space to write their own packing list in there, too.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: That's not necessarily writing a book, but that is taking your informed awareness of your content, seeing what performed well, and figuring out a way to monetize that and make it something physical that people can buy from you.

Matt: That's right. Yeah.

[26:14]

Lauren: Yeah, then, you know, once you've got that figured out, whatever that may be, then you're going to want to look into organizing your content. There's a lot of different ways that you might want to go about doing it depending on what –

Matt: Only one way for me.

Lauren: What's that?

Matt: Well, I suck at doing outlines.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: Like terribly. I don't know why, ever since like, well really high school, but definitely college. I've just, I don't know. And it always, that's where I get stopped. Once I have an outline, I can start moving. So once ChatGPT was available, that's the first thing honestly that I tried.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: Like a lot of people went in and like asked it something dumb, like when's the end of the earth, you know, or the world going to happen or stuff like that. I just immediately was like all these things that I've wanted to write where I couldn’t get past the outline, create an outline for me based on this, this, this, and this. And boom, and I was like, oh. It's like when they open up the arc on Indiana Jones at the end, although nobody got melted, their faces didn't fall off. But… so, yeah, that's how I do outlines now.

Lauren: There's like the slight difference there, because you said that. And before you did say that, my my brain went da-na-nah-naaah – the treasure chest opening noise from Legend of Zelda. So, a slight age difference.

Matt: Another good one.

Lauren: Also a great one. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. Actually, that is probably what I use ChatGPT for most too, is helping me draft outlines –

Matt: Yeah

Lauren: – and then using that as like a skeleton jumping off point.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: So that is for sure something you can do, is you can, once you have your list of these are the 25 posts that I want to include, upload that list to ChatGPT and say, hey, organize this into some kind of outline for me. But in so far as how you want to organize that, there's probably a lot of different ways you might want to do it thematically. You might want to do it, you know, if you're doing a book on social media and you want to break it down into five sections, and each section is one different platform and you're putting in five blog posts in each of those sections.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: You know? Or you're putting together a cookbook and you're not just going to put your recipes in there in alphabetical order. You're going to have your breakfast recipes and your appetizers and your main courses and your desserts.

Matt: Well, yeah. Now you get into formatting too though, so just so everybody understands like, you can also sort of chop your book up into parts.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Right? So themes can also be parts for your book. So if you're doing a social media book, you can have part one that focuses on certain types of social media channels or whatever that might be. And then part two is another theme. And then you have, you know, your blog articles that have been condensed into that section as chapters. But I would look at blog articles themselves as potentially chapters and the themes as parts of the book. But again, that's formatting nerd stuff, but.

Lauren: No, but I think you're right. And I think that is an important part of considering this, and in figuring out how you want to lay out your content like that. Because one of the other things that I'm going to say is very important for you to do at this stage is when you have those laid out and you have that awareness of what blog content you want to include, how you want to include it in there, you might notice some gaps.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And that is something important that you have to consider. Unless you are choosing to go the route of: I am just publishing an exact replica of all of my blog content from January 2024 to December 2024. In chronological order, and that is what it is like, okay, then it's just an exact reproduction of that. But if you are trying to organize it into some kind of cohesive book…

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: You're probably going to realize that there are some content gaps that you're going to need to fill. Which isn't a bad thing, because from a marketing perspective, that's a nice way to be able to say like this book has all of my greatest hits from my blog and it, also some brand new never before seen content that you can't get on the blog.

Matt: Content and context, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like it could have been a blog article you wrote eight months ago, but now you have a slightly different level of context that you might want to add to it…

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Or some updates or things. So yeah, definitely.

[30:05]

Lauren: Yeah. Which is going to get us into that next step of the process that I'm going to call the edit and rewrite step. Because that is absolutely something that you're probably going to do. And especially if you're – eight months, I would say, maybe, is even newer content than some people are including in their books. Some people might be going back years.

Matt: Not if you're writing about social media.

Lauren: Well, trust, I know. But you might have to, to go through your blog posts depending on how far back you're reaching. You might not have realized it, but just over time, your style has changed a little bit. Your voice has changed a little bit. You might've realized some point over time that you, in the beginning, you were writing in that, I'm never going to say I in a blog post, but I'm not really writing in first person or second person or third person, either. So I'm just kind of being like, vague and ambiguous. One might think, perhaps. And then, you know, three years down the road, you were like…No.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I, I, me, me, whatever.

Matt: Find and replace – or whatever. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. So you might want to just go through and say like, oh, you know, back in the day, I was writing…I was writing these blogs in third person and now I'm writing them in first person. So let me go through and kind of make them all match.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So they're all the same. Or maybe I realized halfway through writing my blog, I stopped writing ebook with a capital B and now I write it with a lowercase B – as you should because ebook with a capital B is stupid.

Matt: Wow. What a crazy thing to take a hard stand.

Lauren: It is a thing. It's actually, it is something – all of those things. I hate all of the like, iphone with a capital P, like anything where we've done the E or the I as the lowercase letter at the beginning I think is just asinine. I have a lot of opinions on that.

Matt: I see.

Lauren: It's fine.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: But that's the kind of thing you're going to want to do. You're gonna want to go through, you might have some dated references. I know I'm so guilty of this. I go through blog posts that I wrote for Lulu four or five years ago. And I look at them and I'm like, I don't even, I don't even remember what this reference is about. And I'm the one that wrote it, like. There might be some things that you want to update. There also might be some things in your blog that don't work as well in a book format. So maybe you link out to something. Maybe you took some screenshots of a website that you were explaining how to use the website or whatever, and they might be outdated, first of all. You might also not have permission to use them. Remember that copyright in graphics is the thing that we just talked about. Just saying. I just finished editing that episode. So, top of mind right now. There's a lot of things that you're just going to want to go through. If there are graphics that you do want to use, same note, you're going to want to make sure that you have permission to use them and that you have the right format to use them because the type of graphic that looks good on a blog is not necessarily the same file that's going to look good in a printed book.

Matt: Yeah, actually.

Lauren: So it's the little minutia and the cleanup and things like that that you're going to want to go through and do.

Matt: Yeah. And if you're able to, and you can afford it, you could always just hire somebody to do that.

Lauren: Sure. Yeah.

Matt: Because nothing sounds worse than pouring over a hundred pages of stuff where you're literally just looking for those types of things. Oh, I'm going to replace first person narrative on everything. Like, oh, God, nothing sounds worse. If you could pay somebody to do it, I would.

Lauren: Well, wait until we get into the formatting part.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: One of the things that you have to do when you're formatting your book is you're going to have to remove all existing formatting. So if you are again, guilty for sure of this, if you are somebody who overuses italics –

Matt: Yes you do.

Lauren: Yes I do. And your blog posts are full of italicized words and phrases, you have to copy that over into a doc as a clean, unformatted version. So do you really want to manually go through and have to re-italicize everything that you've done? Might be a good time to break yourself of the italics habit.

Matt: Maybe.

Lauren: But also might be a good time to hire somebody to do the formatting for you.

Matt: Or find and replace. Actually, I don't know if you can do that with formatting, can you?

Lauren: I don't think you can. I mean, you can batch unformat everything, but I don't think that you can go through and be like –

Matt: Yeah, single out.

Lauren: – find everything that's italicized in this doc.

Matt: I'm really bad about ellipses. I put those all the time.

Lauren: Yeah you do.

Matt: I don't know. I don't know how I ever got into that habit, but yeah, I don't know.

Lauren: We both talk like that too though.

Matt: I’m worse about it when I'm texting people. I'm really bad about using ellipses. I don't know. Periods just seem so like, final.

Lauren: But we both talk that way.

Matt: That's true.

Lauren: And that's something that I've noticed in writing up transcripts for these episodes is how often we trail off instead of a hard period. There's a lot of ellipses use in our transcripts of these episodes.

Matt: Yeah...

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Kay.

Lauren: All right. Couple of other notes about formatting your book and then we'll get to the more fun part like the tips and tools and how to get these things done. Just remember that we have a bunch of resources available for you on the Lulu website. Our blog is very thorough with formatting stuff. We also have a webinar that Chelsea and I referenced in the last episode that we recorded, the Fun With Formatting webinar that I still reference all the time. Every time that I'm creating a book project for Lulu, I reference that webinar. So we've got a ton of resources for you if it is something that you want to try doing on your own.

Matt: Yeah.

[35:19]

Lauren: And if not, there are plenty of ways that you can hire a freelance editor, designer or something to help you out with that. And there are some really cool tools that you can use.

Matt: You sound very excited about these tools.

Lauren: I'm trying to be better about not doing everything manually by hand. As somebody who is both a very analog person and a very like, I don't trust that anyone or anything is going to do as good a job on this as I will, I'm trying to be better about relying on technology and tools that are available to me when they have been proven to be valuable assets.

Matt: Yeah, that I understand. I'm in my era now – maybe it's an age thing – where I look for anything and everything that I could just pay somebody to do.

Lauren: Fair.

Matt: I think I'm out of that era where I want to do everything myself or I have a natural curiosity that leads me down that path. Now I'm at the point where I physically have to stop myself and just say you don't have time for this. Like, you could be doing this other thing, or hanging out with your family or doing whatever. And so now I'm like, oh is there somebody or some service I can pay to do this?

Lauren: See, maybe it's not an age thing as much as it is for me, well, I have X amount of money in my bank account right now. Do I want to spend it on hiring somebody to format this book for me or do I want to spend it on two extra nights at the Beach Club?

Matt: Understood.

Lauren: So

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And I'm gonna choose the Beach Club ten out of ten times.

Matt: Yeah, well, yeah in that scenario I would do the same. Fortunately, there are times where I can just do both.

Lauren: And that's –

Matt: So.

Lauren: – very fortunate.

Matt: Yeah. If I can't afford to pay somebody to do something that I need done then that's when I'll go for one of these tools. For writing and editing – and formatting, really – for writing editing specifically, most people are writing in Word or Google Docs and that's okay. That's fine.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Scrivener is another one. For editing you can use a separate tool. You can use things like Grammarly or Hemingway. I don't know. You have ChatGPT on here. I don't know if I would use ChatGPT for editing or not. I've not actually tried it, so I don't want to necessarily downplay it, if it's done a good job for other people. But the problem with ChatGPT, and really any of the generative AI tools right now, is they're all getting better and better, right? The version you use today is the dumbest version that'll ever exist. I love that quote, but I don't know. There's just something about even now, whatever I get as output from ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity or whatever, I still find myself going back through and double checking every bit of it. So in that instance for me, it just feels like extra work to ask ChatGPT to do something that I feel a level of accuracy is needed. Because I just know I'm going to go back through it again. And so I'm really wasting time in my brain. So I don't know if I would – now, if you've used ChatGPT for editing or know something that has, and it did a great job, great. I just, I haven't tried it yet. So I'm hesitant to suggest it.

Lauren: So my inclusion of ChatGPT on here is definitely more as a tool that is good to use while you are writing, not as a large batch editor. Like, I would not suggest uploading a whole chapter or a whole blog post or a whole section of your book and uploading it to ChatGPT and saying can you spell check and grammar check and…

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Suggest edits. That I would not use it for. My sister works in LLM training.

Matt: I saw she got a new job recently.

Lauren: Yes. And she does –

Matt: Congratulations, by the way.

Lauren: I will pass that on to her.

Matt: Yup.

Lauren: She doesn't listen to this podcast.

Matt: What?

Lauren: I know.

Matt: Nevermind. No congratulations. You got lucky.

Lauren: Perfect. Yep, that's fair.

Matt: I don’t know how you landed that job when you don't listen to Publish & Prosper.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: And support your sister.

Lauren: I know.

Matt: Terrible.

Lauren: I’m just sneak into her apartment –

Matt: Terrible.

Lauren: – and play it on Spotify when she's not looking. It's fine. But she always makes the point to remember that all of these different tools, ChatGPT, Gemini, Co-Pilot, whatever it is, they are inherently people pleasers. So they will try to give you an answer even if they can't. And if you argue with them, they might shift their stance and agree with you.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So that is always something that you kind of have to keep in mind. But I will use ChatGPT when I'm writing as a gut check for myself. I literally have a chat pinned in ChatGPT that's called grammar Gut Check. And I will, when I'm sitting there and I'm writing something and I get hung up on the like, oh, man, like which version of this word is the right one to use? Or did I phrase this incorrectly? Or this looks weird and I can't put my finger on what it is? And it's the thing that I know is going to start building that writer's block that I'm not going to be able to get over because I'm stuck on finishing the sentence.

Matt: Like passed and past?

Lauren: Exactly like passed and past, I'm so glad you remember that.

Matt: Who could forget it.

Lauren: Thanks. That's the point where I will open up ChatGPT and say, hey, just gut check me on this one. Is it passed or past here? And then I'll keep going.

Matt: Yeah I – I still don’t know if I would trust it.

Lauren: So I wouldn't use it as like, a large editing tool.

Matt: Okay.

Lauren: Okay.

Matt: I mean that's fair. Somebody else out there listening could be like, you guys are crazy. I use it all the time and it's always spot on.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: So if that's the case, great. But again, for writing, it's fine to use Word. It's fine to use Google Docs, Scrivener, some of these others. What I would do personally and what I do is I use the same tool for writing and formatting.

Lauren: Yeah?

Matt: I use Atticus. There is a little bit of a learning curve there, but it's not bad at all. There are others. You can use Vellum. There's Atticus, there's Vellum. There's several others that you can use that are… They're probably more formatting tools than anything else. I think most of them still offer the ability to just write in the tool as well.

Lauren: Yeah. I think most of the word process –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – or the formatting software that we've talked about is also a word processor.

Matt: Yeah. Now some of them might lack some of that grammar guidance and other things. So that might be why some people choose to still write… Like even the grammar guidance and punctuation guidance in Google Docs is better than nothing. And, I would argue, is probably better than ChatGPT.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: But again, I've not really used ChatGPT for grammar and things like that. But anyways, I like Atticus, especially after I really sort of understood how to use it for formatting. Writing in it's easy, but formatting, there's a little bit of a learning curve depending on what kind of content you're creating, but it's a great tool. Vellum, heard a lot of great things about them. Although isn’t Vellum the one that's not available on MacBook?

Lauren: Vellum is Mac only.

Matt: Mac only. Yeah, right.

Lauren: We did actually do. So we did an episode a while back that was five tools to help you draft publish and sell your book.

Matt: Oh cool.

Lauren: And we did talk – you were there. We talked about Vellum and Atticus in that episode, so.

Matt: Got it.

Lauren: And a couple other things too. So if you want to go listen to that one. We also – Paul, our…what's his title now?

Matt: Senior Content Manager, or something?

Lauren: Perfect. Paul, the person who is the captain of this ship and keeps us afloat –

Matt: Captain of the content boat?

Lauren: Yep, and is also our, our blog writer.

Matt: Probably captain of more than that actually –

Lauren: For sure.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: But he has done a bunch of different software reviews for these different softwares that we're talking about.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: I will link a couple of them in the show notes, but if there's any that you're interested in learning more about, that would be my recommendation, would be go check out the blog. And he never does – they're never sponsored. Like, he always does them just –

Matt: That’s right. Yeah.

Lauren: – out of interest as a writer himself, as somebody who's worked in publishing –

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: – for a long time himself. Like, he's just interested in this type of tool and software and stuff.

Matt: Yeah, anything you find –

Lauren: So go check those out for sure.

Matt: – by the way, on the Lulu blog like that. It's never sponsored or paid. We don't do that. We don't offer anything like that. There's no paid advertising on Lulu. There's no paid sponsored content. If we review a product or a service or anything, that's being done because we wanted to.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And so you can bet it's going to be an honest review.

Lauren: And in this podcast too, anything that we talk about that we're like, oh, this is a tool that we think is useful or a company that we like or whatever. That's just because we're nerds –

Matt: Well yeah.

Lauren: – and we actually like this stuff.

Matt: And the beauty of it is we don't have to take any sponsor money.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: There's no ads. There's no sponsors here. We just talk about what we want to talk about.

Lauren: Yeah. If you're ever curious how genuine any of these recommendations are, we truly do mean them.

Matt: Lastly, for design, if you are brave enough to want to design your own cover, there's a couple of tools that are specific to doing book covers. Obviously Adobe InDesign. There's a tool called Publisher by a brand called Affinity. So Affinity Publisher. It's basically a carbon copy of InDesign to a degree. Some say it's a little easier to use. Some say it's no different, but nonetheless, it is way cheaper.

Lauren: Yeah, that's the more important part. It's way cheaper.

Matt: A lot of people use Canva. I would almost caution you on using Canva. For ebook covers – boo – it's fine. It can be a little tricky to use Canva and then bring that over to your publishing platform of choice and make it work. Because what they call book covers and sizes in Canva isn't actually correct. So if you're savvy enough to download a template, like from Lulu, for example, and then take that into Canva and you're good enough at design to be able to set those bleeds, margins and gutters appropriately, then it's probably fine. Otherwise, you're probably actually better off if you're a Canva person, just going into the Lulu cover tool generator. It's been completely revamped in the last year, year and a half. I would argue it's a great tool for creating covers.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: If you're just a Canva wizard though and you want to have a go at it, do it. But just make sure you bring in the right specs for the cover, the bleeds and the gutters, because Canva's not very good at that for print covers.

Lauren: Right. Which is all information that you can find on Lulu's website if you are publishing your book for Lulu.

Matt: That's right.

Lauren: Which obviously you should be.

Matt: Or the blog.

Lauren: Yes, you can find all that on the blog as well. But you can download custom templates that are sized exactly to fit the book cover based on the specs that you choose. Also, depending on what kind of blog creator you are, what kind of blog you have, you might have way better options already available to you. You know, if part of your blog content includes you're a food blogger or a travel blogger or some kind of blogger that also takes photos of the things that you're talking about, use your own photos. Don't reinvent the wheel here.

[45:22]

Lauren: I'm going to recommend just in general that you try to stick with your brand's existing aesthetic. If I had a blog, if I've been spending the last five years blogging about Disney and my whole blog is pink and sparkly and gold glitter and very Disney princess aesthetic, and then I published a book with black skulls all over the cover. I mean, yes, both of those things fit my personal aesthetic. But would my fans and followers of my blog recognize that this content was my content when it's so out there from what they're used to seeing from me? If you've spent the time to create a brand, which you should, we've talked about that in other episodes, that you should have some kind of branding for your content, don't stretch too far outside of that box with your book content as well.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: And I would say the same maybe goes for title too.

Matt: Definitely for title.

Lauren: You want your title to be something that's familiar to your audience. I don't know necessarily that I would name your book the exact same thing as what your blog is called.

Matt: Well, yeah, I mean, it just depends, right? If you were able to niche down, find a theme that is slightly separate from your blog title, for example, then yeah, give the book a different title or… but I don't think there's anything wrong with titling your book, the same as your blog. It just depends. If your blog is just called like, anti-hero, don't name your book anti-hero.

Lauren: Right. Right.

Matt: Maybe call it the ramblings of an anti-hero.

Lauren: Yeah. Something related. Something –

Matt: Or the anti-hero chronicles.

Lauren: Oh, I like that.

Matt: Or lessons from an anti-hero.

Lauren: I like that too.

Matt: Something like that, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Like you can incorporate your blog title in there, but.

Lauren: Well also, what happens if you're… two years from now, you decide it's time to put out another book.

Matt: Yes.

Lauren: And you've already used the title.

Matt: Which you should.

Lauren: Which you absolutely should.

Matt: Right?

Lauren: That's going to be probably my last point on here. But like, you don't want to back yourself into a position where you can't reuse the title that you’ve already –

Matt: Or everything has to be a volume.

Lauren: Right.

Matt: Volume Two, Volume Three, Volume Four.

Lauren: Which, okay. Gets old.

Matt: Although I will tell you, this is another great use of ChatGPT, Claude is titles, right? So things where you need to come up with like, subject line for an email, title for a book or blog article, ask it literally. Say give me ten different titles for this content, and give it the content

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Or give it the summary of the content. And it'll spit out ten. And every single one of them will be slightly off in one way or the other, but nine times out of ten you can mash two of them together or pull from two or three of them and make a really cool title

Lauren: Sure.

Matt: Then drop that in there and say hey I really like this one but can you give me eight other variations of it so I can make my final decision. And you'll get to a point where you get some really cool titles and subject lines and things out of those tools, so.

Lauren: Yeah. That's how this episode title is going to come to be. It's already given me, I've got a list of five at the bottom of this outline doc that were suggestions from ChatGPT. And we're going to workshop those together later once the episode is done being edited.

Matt: Yay.

Lauren: Yep. And by that, I mean me and ChatGPT.

Matt: Oh good, okay.

Lauren: Not me and you. Yeah, you're off the hook.

Matt: Got it.

Lauren: Don't you worry. But yeah, just want to reiterate that last point really quickly. Why stop at just one book? Especially if you've done this work to kind of organize your content and you already see it. Maybe you had all this – because you don't, I would not recommend using all of your content, all of your existing content in one book. I would not recommend that you do that. But let's say that you picked twenty-five blog posts, but you had ten additional ones that almost made the cut, but they weren't quite as connected to the other ones. Or they were a little bit more advanced than the other ones, or they were about a different topic, or whatever it was. That's your start for your next book. And that's also, that's your content calendar for the next six months.

Matt: That's true.

Lauren: Figure out what missing pieces you need to create that content into a book, write that content over the next year. And now it's time for another book.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. So this is in theory, the gift that keeps on giving for as long as you're still creating blog content. Couple last thoughts on this, and then we probably got to wrap it up because I am ready to eat my own arm off, so.

Matt: Wow.

Lauren: Look.

Matt: Good thing this is a video podcast.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: Or bad thing, I should say.

Lauren: Well, I'm not going to, don't worry.

Matt: Well, most of these are other episodes. So really, all you were going to mention was a little bit about marketing this stuff.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: And quite frankly, there are other episodes for that. But I think there's some valid quick little points here.

Lauren: Yep.

Matt: One is yes, letting your audience know this is coming. So again, we say this all the time. Don't start your book marketing on the day of launch. One of the benefits of blog to book is, like we talked about earlier – I think Lauren mentioned this, is that you can continue to create new content on your blog with the knowledge being freely expressed to your audience that this is going to go into the book. So that's a way for you to go ahead and start teasing a book project out of the gate. But waiting until you're close to launch to start talking about your book is one of the biggest mistakes that I think most first time and even some multiple time authors make, so start talking about it quickly. Soon.

Lauren: Yeah.

Matt: Start your pre-launch marketing early. Don't wait. Looks like you have noted here episode 10 you can get a deep dive into pre-launch and post-launch marketing. And Episode 57 on how to deal with preorder campaigns.

Lauren: Yes. Yeah.

Matt: What else?

Lauren: So those are both episodes that I would recommend for this, just because it is something that I think that is very different from what you might be used to as a blogger.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: The other thing that – again, we've done plenty of episodes on this. If you are a blogger, you already have everything you need to sell your book direct to your audience. This is a great opportunity for you to be selling direct, for you to be connecting with the people already on your subscriber list, or your email newsletter list, or add new people to that. This is a great way for you to be getting revenue directly, keeping people on your website, not sending people away from your blog. That defeats the purpose of creating this lead magnet.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So this is a prime opportunity for you to be selling direct. You are absolutely ready for that, especially if your blog is hosted on WordPress. We have a plugin for that. We have a WooCommerce Lulu Direct plugin for that, and a couple other different options too. So if you are deciding to go the route of publishing a book from your blog, make sure that you look into selling direct for that, because you are perfectly primed for it already and it would be a wasted opportunity to not go that route.

Matt: Yeah, agreed.

Lauren: So, you know, go do it.

Matt: Go team.

Lauren: Go do it. I don't know what I was, what kind of mindset I was in when I was writing this outline, but I – literally the last bullet on this outline is go forth and publish, or create a Lulu account, whatever. And I think those are great parting words to leave us on. As always, or maybe not as always, but as we have been doing recently, this is one of those topics that Matt and I absolutely love the challenge of: I'm not sure how my content would lead itself to a book, do you guys have any fun and creative ideas for how to do that? The answer is yes. Absolutely. The answer is yes.

Matt: Yeah.

Lauren: So feel free to challenge us. Send us your ideas. Send us a link to your blog. Pitch something at us. Not physically, but verbally. Digitally, perhaps. We'll see what we can come up with, because I love that challenge and I think it'd be really fun. And if you are doing something cool where you are creating a book from your blog, please let us know. We'd love to see it.

Matt: Yeah, for sure.

Lauren: Anything else?

Matt: Nope, that's it.

Lauren: All right. Well, thanks for listening, everyone. Follow us on Lulu's social media. If you listened to last week's episode, you heard me and Chelsea repeatedly make the point that we will be the ones answering you. So you can literally say hi to us. It's not a bot answering you. It's quite literally going to be us. You can shoot us an email podcast@lulu.com. I'll make sure Matt's the one to answer those so you get a chance to talk to him too. You can like and subscribe and watch these episodes on YouTube and leave us comments there and you can tune in next week to hear another new episode.

Matt: Later.

Lauren: Thanks for listening everyone.