DISCLOSURE: If you buy through affiliate links, I may earn a small commission. (disclosures)
Source: Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year
I recently read this post and it got me thinking about my own writing habits and inspired me to build a simple stats page for my blog.
Good blogging habits yield a book each year
The author makes the case that the average book is ~80k words. So if you write a 1k word post twice each week for 50 of the 52 weeks each year, you get 100k words which is basically a book each year.
The author published 3 books (so far) and mentions they're often aligned with the blog posts they've been writing.
They also make a distinction between blog posts and books:
- Blogs - less edited, more fun, often more readership
- Books - more edited, more work, some monetary gains via sales
My personal blogging stats
For the past couples years I've been writing >100 posts at around 1k words per post netting me a cool ~100k words per year. (see site stats)
Productionalizing blog posts to books
I've not yet written a book but it certainly seems like I'm pumping out enough words to do so. I've had the idea of writing minibooks in the back of my head for the past few years but never actually executed.
Minibooks are like atomic books - focused on a very specific, typically non-fiction subject. When people say "that book could've been 100 pages shorter", minibooks try to be that length - just the length you need to get the idea across.
Typically this can be done in 100 pages or less which is ab 50k words at 500 words per page. This number isn't a hard limit as length doesn't really matter, it's however long it takes to get across that one idea.
For more on minibooks, I liked Mini Book Model by Chris Stanley.
So at 50k words per minibook, I'm currently writing ~2 of them but my blog post writing doesn't directly align to creating a book - there's lots of different subjects I write about, many of which wouldn't make sense in the same book.
So I've been considering a strategy to more align these ideas - blogging and book writing.
My current theoretical strategy is:
- Have a few themes / areas I'm interested in and people want - typically technical themes I'm into like Ansible self hosting, functional C#, and F#
- Write blog posts in those areas
- Outline minibooks with each chapter being a ~post
- Eventually compile those posts into a minibook
I haven't done this yet but it seems workable. Just probably requires a bit more discipline on my part for posting schedules and themes to post around.
Next
If you've got a course / book / content area you'd like to see covered, let me know.
If you liked this post you might also like: