With my years of blogs, I have a book. Not yet you don’t.

Recently, I found an author with a book they had made from the blogs they had written over the years.

The blogs are a treasure trove of stories, insights and lessons they had learned. You could dive in anywhere and come up with something valuable.

But a collection of blogs pushed together is not a book.

A book is a cohesive whole.

A book has a theme, a core idea, an arc, an argument. At least the books that make people make a difference do. Of course, there are collections of stories and essays, but those aren’t the books that really make people reevaluate the world. To make an impact, an author has to design, craft and shape a book.

Authors need to start books from scratch.

That doesn’t mean that your treasure trove of blogs will go to waste.

Your posts can still play a massive part in developing the book. But treat them as a collection of historical papers, much like a biographer would. You have been handed the writings of a thinker, a doer, and you must piece through everything to make sense of it and make it a coherent package. The difference is the biographer may have the documents of some long-dead figure. The blog post collection is yours and you still have to do the same work on it.

Use your blogs as a rich source.

Take snippets, quotes, perhaps passages and occasionally almost whole posts. But mostly the cache is there for reference, fact-checking and inspiration.

You, as the author, even after all those years of writing, still have to do the hard graft of producing a book.