There are many roads leading to writing a successful book

By Dennis Mellersh

In your desire to learn how to write a book, you might want to expand your thinking beyond the traditional process of slaving away at a single manuscript with a completed book as your destination.

Particularly with the advent of self-publishing through electronic media book publishing platforms such as offered by Amazon, you can create a book as a collection of articles with one theme.

With the strong emergence of highly targeted markets in electronic self-publishing today, a whole new group of potential readers has opened up for topics you can write that could appeal to people who share your interests. And, you can not only write your special interest book, you can publish it yourself.

Moreover, these days, with emergence of electronic book self-publishing, books no longer are restricted to a certain length, or page-count, or word-count. You can write a very short book and price it accordingly, or write a much longer one and charge according to the additional time a longer work will entail.

One concept you could look at for creating your book using this approach is to start a blog on one of the free blogging platforms, such as blogger.com or wordpress.com on a subject you want to write about. In addition to writing copy for regular or hierarchical/static websites, I also have blogs utilizing wordpress.org with paid hosting, and on both the free platforms offered by blogger and WordPress.

Except for the amount of time available to you for your writing, you will never be limited in the number of books you can write, so for the topic or theme of your blog, pick one of the subjects that you would like to write a book about, starting today.

You can even run your writing parallel with blogs on a number of topics that you would like to publish books about.

A key point to keep in mind in this blog-to-book approach is that the chances of success will be much better if you write the blog with the purpose of turning some or all of your blog posts into a book.

Otherwise, if you write your blog on an ad hoc basis with no overall connecting theme and jump around from reporting news to writing “timeless” pieces, it will be difficult to turn it into a book that you are happy with. And if you aren’t happy, it is not likely that the book would have appeal to the reading public, even if they are interested in the subject you are writing about.

You should start thinking now about how long your planned book will be and give some thought to the various chapters or topics you will cover, all relating to your central theme.
 
And yes, people will buy such books, even though they could search through all the posts of your blog and read them online. However, readers today will pay for the convenience of you doing the work of a book publisher and presenting them with a fully-formed book on subjects that interest them.

So, why not give this a try right now by going to blogger.com or wordpress.com and starting your blog-to-be-a book. Don’t announce your book-writing intention on the blog however.

Instead you might want to start a blog as a journal of your day-to day experiences of your journey as an aspiring book writer. It might surprise you to see how your efforts interest people.