Create a Book from Your Columns or Articles!

If you've been sitting around for the last ten years, struggling to come up with an idea for a book, you might have missed out on the most obvious solution. Most writers supplement their income by selling columns or articles to newspapers and magazines. They might have a dream to write a full-length book, but such a task requires time, and everyone has to pay the bills. If this sounds like your situation, have you considered creating a book from your columns or articles?

In 2006, Janet Evanovich (author of the Stephanie Plum mysteries, among others) wrote a book called How I Write. The ingenious part, however, was that she didn't really write the book at all. Instead, she compiled a list of questions and answers from her Web site and put them together in a manuscript. She added a few pointers in sidebar boxes and such, but the majority of the work was already completed.

You can create a book from your columns and articles on any subject as long as they are written about similar topics. You wouldn't want to create a book that contains articles on gardening, parenting and the stock market because you wouldn't have a definable audience. However, you could combine all of your gardening articles together and make a nice book for those with a green thumb.

The most difficult part of creating a book from your columns of articles is deciding how to organize each piece. The most obvious method of organization is chronological---using the order in which they were published---but this doesn't work for all books. For example, if you were creating a book out of your gardening articles, you might want to organize them by subject matter. Everything falls under the umbrella of gardening, but you might want to have different schedules for flowers, plants, soil cultivation and so on.

Another way to organize a book from your columns and articles is by season or region. For example, you could organize gardening articles according to the types of plants that thrive in the spring, summer, fall and winter. On the other hand, you could separate them by region of your state or even the entire United States. Plans that grow in Nevada would probably not do well in Florida.

Once you've determined how to organize your book, you'll need to decide what else you need to write in order to bring your articles or columns together. Most collections won't necessarily hold together well on their own and they might need "transitional" articles to help round out the finished product. For this purpose, you'll need to examine your articles in their cohesive whole and decide if they blend well together.

Depending on the popularity of your columns or articles in their original published format, you will have varying degrees of success with marketing your new book idea. Traditionally speaking, most published collections contain work from a variety of authors and are rarely composed of just one person's work. In many cases, small publishers are more likely to look at books of columns or articles, particularly if they are regionally based.

Creating a book from your articles or columns shouldn't be considered a shortcut to publication. You still have quite a bit of work ahead of you; even though the framework is complete, polishing is required for a book-worthy project to emerge.