Day Seventeen: Repurposing Old Blog Posts for your Book #BYBin30

If you are writing a non-fiction book, an easy way to gain material for your book is to repurpose old blog posts. This will only work if you have been writing blog posts on the topic of your book for longer than you have been writing your book.

Go through your old blog posts. Is there anything there that will fit within the chapters of your book? Is the post something that your readers enjoyed? Did you get good feedback on the post? Maybe your blog didn't get very much attention, but there was a post on it which you wished had been seen by more people. Does it fit with the content of your book?

After you find a post that you would like to repurpose for your book, your next step is to update the information in the post. The older your blog post is, the more likely it has some outdated information.

Once the information in the post is all current, you will need to rewrite the entire thing. The reason for this is because, if a lot of time has passed, your writing style and your writing ability will have changed and grown since you originally wrote the blog post. Rewriting it will bring your new voice, the same voice and style you are using in the rest of your book, to the blog post you will be repurposing to your book. It might sound like a lot of work, but don't worry; it is less work than writing a chapter by scratch because you have already done the research and you can use the original blog post as a sort of outline for your rewrite.

Once your chapter has been written, you need to look at your book's outline and see where this chapter is going to fit. You can't just place it anywhere in the book without paying attention to the chapters around it. The more organized the chapters of your book are, the easier it will be for your readers to gain the knowledge they are seeking from your book.

If you are writing a fiction novel, you might want to look at old stories you have written. Sometimes, you can generate new ideas from them, find a paragraph here or there that, with tweaking, will work within a scene of your current story or even a character trait form one of your old characters that would enhance a character in your current story. You might even be able to recycle supporting characters, but always with plenty of tweaking to make sure everything fits within the new story.