Marketing Director Ellen Gerstein attended the Blog to Book and Back Again session at the recent BlogHer conference and asked me to share my thoughts on some of the questions raised there.
1. Can blog content be put right into a book? Should it?
I’m probably going to answer this one the long way around. With more than nearly 200,000 books published each year, getting a book noticed is becoming harder than ever. Publishers only have so much money and resources set aside for publicity and marketing, so increasingly we rely on author platform. In my opinion, a blog is the foundation for any author platform and therefore can provide a good basis for supporting a book.
Having said that, not every blog makes for a great book.
As a publisher, I am going to ask a few questions of my own before decide if a blog should be the basis for a book:
- How niche is the blog? Does it provide content that is unique? Niche is a good thing.
- What is the current readership of the blog? What is my built-in market?
- How active is the readership? Are they engaged – will they talk about your book?
- Is the blog part of a larger network – are there other blogs that can be leveraged for marketing and promotion?
Now to more directly answer the question about content – yes, I believe there are situations where blog content can be poured directly into a book. For certain types of blogs, having a more portable printed version makes a lot of sense. However, I don’t think that is necessarily the best model. (See question #3)
2. Are there rights issues? Legal issues between who owns what content?
The publisher is going to need to secure certain rights to help sell your book in a variety of channels and formats. As part of the contract, you warrant that the rights are yours to grant, so you had better be sure you actually own them. If you are a blogger for hire, or you write for someone else’s blog or blog network you may not own the rights to your work – so you may need to research your agreements to be sure.
In addition, if you publish your blog under certain Creative Commons licenses, you may not own the exclusive rights to your blog content. Seth Godin found this out the hard way when a publisher legally published a paper version of one of his ebooks.
If you plan to publish reader comments as part of your book, be sure you own the rights to those as well. IANAL, but this issue has come up with a book project recently and we felt the area was a bit to gray to include them as part of this blog-based book.
All of these situations can complicate the contract process, but your publisher should be willing to work with you to write a publishing agreement that secures the necessary rights to publish the book, while respecting the nature of the content on your blog. Often the answer lies in the publisher acquiring non-exclusive rights for content that is previously published on your blog.
In addition, be aware of other contract issues like the non-compete that may hamper your ability to continue blogging if they are not written properly.
3. Do publishers want to see unique content in a book, and if so, how much?
Yes, we do. And here is where I think the real value lies. My personal opinion is the best situation is to publish a book based on a blog – but to provide unique content in the book that you won’t find on the blog. That provides additional reasons for readers of your blog to buy the book.
However, books can get stale quickly, while your blog is alive. Tie the content of your book back to your blog to help minimize the stale factor. Make each a part of the other.
I hope these thoughts prove insightful and add to the discussion. I’d love to hear from more BlogHer attendees and prospective authors, so feel free to contact me.
Wiley colleague Jim Minatel also provides his thoughts on these questions.
Photo credit smiling_da_vinci
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