“Slurping” a Blog into a Book

For an author starting a new book project and desiring to use a blog as a title / readership development strategy, here is one way to structure your blog as a book.

This format is probably most suitable for non-fiction works.  I will discuss potential blog formats for novels in future posts.

Using some intentional structuring helps the conversion process.  One of the interesting tools available to pull content from a blog and convert it into a book format is the Blog Slurper from Blurb.  Blurb is a self publishing service that provides tools to help authors easily create books for publication.   The tool imports and maps blog text, images, comments, and links into a book template, in real time.  It currently supports Blogger, LiveJournal.com, TypePad, and WordPress.com blogs. 

I tried it out on one of my old blogs.  I didn’t take advantage of all the various formatting options the tool provides, but the basic layout I chose produced a very attractive draft book in a matter of minutes.   This type of technology can do a lot to accelerate the blog to book strategy, especially for authors who are publishing independently.