Did you create a series of related blog posts that were a huge hit on your blog? The good news is that your content can have a second life beyond filling space on your blog’s editorial calendar. You can use it as the foundation for an ebook. Ebooks have exploded as a popular publishing platform in recent years. Writing an ebook is the perfect way to tap into a whole new audience and becoming an ebook writer or ebook ghostwriter can be as simple as turning past articles and blog posts into something bigger and better. What steps should you take to turn old articles or blog posts into an ebook?
Identify big ideas
Browse through existing content to identify ideas that deserve to be expanded. You want to choose ideas that are natural fit for ebook-length content. Avoid topics within a too narrowly defined niche. An article focused on best pet toys for summer months might be too limited in scope to work well as an ebook. Expanding a series of blog posts on raising small pets, on the other hand, might provide enough material to write an ebook. Think bigger and write bigger.
Incorporate unused notes
Writing a blog post or an article means dealing with word limits. An average blog post is around 300 to 400 words. An average article will be around 500 to 600 words. This does not leave much space to go into detail on certain points. Ebooks remove this restriction. You can go back through unused notes from when you created your original content and use them as a jumping off point for exploring your topic in greater depth. Ebooks are the perfect platform for exploring those tangents left on the cutting room floor in your original content.
Update your research
Expanding content into an ebook usually requires making some updates. If you quote statistics, draw on surveys or have other types of research in your content, you need to bring it all up-to-date. Nothing will kill the credibility of your ebook faster than peppering it with research that is dated. Infusing it with recent research, on the other hand, gives your ebook a stamp of authority and credibility.
Secure the publishing rights
If you do not own the rights to your original content, that can stop any plans for an ebook cold. It’s always important to make sure you own reprint rights to any content you wish to adapt into an ebook. If a client owns the rights to that material through a work-for-hire arrangement, you can contact them and negotiate with them to reclaim the rights. Do everything you can to make sure you have full ownership over the content you want to use.
John C is a professional writer and editor who has written articles and blog posts dozens of websites and publications for more than a decade. His current goal this summer is to branch out into the exciting world of fiction writing.
