Blogs to books

[Nick Radcliffe]

Hey Greg

I think most of this is great advice. But I don't think #2 is: or at least, not starting with a book might be, but I don't think starting with blog posts is. Have you ever written (or tried to write) a book that way? I have, several times, and it's always been a disaster. Whereas I've co-written a couple of books, and am half-way through another, linearly, forwards, and that's worked much better.

I think the trouble with writing a bunch of blog posts is that they will almost always be stand-alone things but the temptation will be to glue them together, somehow, with some editing, to make the book. And I think that almost never works. Sure, if you regard the blog posts as exercises, and and a way of forming ideas, and possibly examples, that's fine. But when you come to write the book, I think it will almost always need a complete, essentially from-scratch rewrite in order to have any kind of flow or coherence; and I think the existence of all that text in the posts tends to make people shy away from that.

The only time I can see this not being the case is if the book is really a collection of independent or very loosely connected chapters. I know you've edited a lot of books like that, and that's obviously fine; but I struggle to believe any of the good technical books I've read started (or could really have started) as a sequence of blog posts or similar.

I'm slightly unsure about the bit about audience too; but I'll raise a separate issue for that.

Hope this is useful.

Nick