Turning Your Blog Into A Book
Let me tell you about Blurb, a service I'm really looking forward to trying. I spoke about it in this past week's podcast and thought I'd flush some thoughts out on this as well. Quite simply Blurb allows you to create a book from your blog. Using a tool / application they call BookSmart you import content from your blog (i.e., pictures, blog post, etc.) and then you can create a real hardcover book from that. You end up creating a BlogBook. I'm still waiting for an invite to this service so I can't tell you how effectively it works, but I do have some thoughts on why I find this very interesting.
To me its twofold. First, it allows you to extend the intellectual capital you've created by bringing it into the offline world. I see it as a nice compliment to what gets created online. Secondly, I think it's a powerful and effective way to to extend the conversation so to speak. Yeah I know...I'm talking a lot about conversations...Scoble and Israel got it totally right.
Take for example this scenario that I told a few people I know who are creating blogs. I said, "Imagine a year from now, you use Blurb and create a book from all the intellectual capital you've created over the past year. Then you take that book and you give it to your clients. " Hmmm....now the wheels are turning right? You see, when I was still consulting a number of my clients read my blog (and they still do...they're just not clients anymore since I'm not consulting anymore). But the reality was that most of my clients didn't read my blog. Can the CIO of a large company really spend time reading blogs? I agree he or she should but they don't. And that's where a BlogBook from Blurb would be awesome. You could drop it off to that CIO and say, "Here are some things I've written and thought about in the past year." That is value. That builds credibility. More importantly it extends the conversation.
This of course gets to the ever important and often repeated mantra I recite when talking about all things from the iPod, to the xBox to blogs, to podcasts - CONTENT IS KING. So if you don't have a lot of unique or insightful content on your blog, then your BlogBook will become nothing more than a collection of "stuff that happened" as opposed to giving you "stuff to think about".
So if anyone from Blurb is reading this - please hurry up and send me an invite already. I want to create a book and then write about the experience. You can email me an invite at mip@mipinnovations.com.
Have you viewed their cost for publishing? You can easily turn your blog into a book with a pdf creator and publish for less.
Posted by: Rose | October 09, 2006 at 12:44 PM