Publishing industry reporter Jane Friedman discusses her experience as an author and blogger, and shares how writers from either background can leverage their work into a book, or turn their book into shareable online content.

Jane Friedman's decades of editing, publishing, and consulting expertise inform her reporting on publishing industry news through her blog, JaneFriedman.com, and her newsletters, Electric Speed and The Hot Sheet.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Welcome to episode 89 of Published. Today we’re joined by Jane Friedman, whose decades of editing, publishing, and consulting expertise inform her reporting on publishing industry news through her blog, JaneFriedman.com, and her newsletters, Electric Speed and The Hot Sheet.

Intro: Some authors start their careers writing blogs, newsletters, articles, or podcasts, while others only foray into publishing short form content after writing a book. Today, Jane will discuss her experience as an author and blogger, and share how writers from either background can leverage their work into a book, or turn their book into shareable online content.

Now, let's dive into the interview.

Tanya: All right, Jane, welcome back to Published. It's so great to see you.

Jane: Thank you. Great to see you as well.

Tanya: Yeah, great. So let's jump right in and why don't you introduce yourself and tell folks what you do?

Jane: Well, my name is Jane Friedman and I've spent 25 years in the publishing or media industry. I started off in the traditional book publishing side of things. I was in magazine publishing for a while, literary journal publishing.

About 10 years ago, I went full-time freelance and I've been doing primarily online education for writers. That takes a lot of shapes and sizes, some of its classes. I've got a paid newsletter, I have a free blog, I do a lot of speaking.

That's it in a nutshell. So I generally focus on helping people with the business side of publishing.

Tanya: Great. And I know you've been blogging for quite some time. So how did you get started blogging and what did getting established look like for you?

Jane: I started while I was still employed at a traditional publishing house. So there was this period of time probably common across corporate America, where employees were encouraged to start blogging, to help bolster the media brand. And so at that time, I was working with Writers Digest, which still exists today.

And so I started a blog called There Are No Rules to try and emphasize this point with writers that even though I can give lots of principles and give you lots of advice, there's really no rules around writing and publishing. A lot of it just gets made up as you go along. So that's how I got started.

That was in spring of 2008. I remained employed in that job for another two and a half years or so. I continued doing it even when I wasn't employed because it was such a great platform by that point, which I'm sure we'll talk about those effects.

And but eventually I decided this is silly because they weren't paying me to do it. So I just kind of ripped off the band-aid and I continued that effort at my own site at janefriedman.com. So that was in summer of 2011.

So undeniably, even though in some sense, I started from scratch in 2011, I already had that visibility and some name recognition because of my association with Writers Digest. So that gave me a big boost.

Tanya: Yeah. And then the books came after the blog launched, right? And so how would you say the blog content and the audience that you gathered there influenced your books?

Jane: Well, honestly, I had no interest in doing a book. I very much like short form. Books are a pain in the ass.

Tanya: We all know it.

Jane: I say that as someone who acquired and published hundreds. So, you know, speaking from experience. But, you know, it became obvious in engaging with readers, in speaking, social media, as well, those conversations.

That even though I had written about all of this stuff on my blog, people certainly weren't reading every post. They weren't there from the beginning. They did not want to sort through hundreds of pieces to figure out what was applicable to them.

Obviously, it wasn't in any kind of structured order, something that would be a comfortable reading experience, you know, because blogs just go on and on and on. And I decided I need to create a book that is basically a best of, or it's a compilation of what I have done, what I have written. Most of it had been on the blog at one point or another.

A little bit of it was maybe repurposed from some other material I had written. But more or less that first book I published, it was called literally Publishing 101, was really just a compilation of blog posts. So it was done out of service to my readers, both new and old, who wanted everything kind of in a tidy package.

Tanya: I talk a lot about that in my own book in terms of taking inventory of the content that you already have. I think a lot of writers overlook that, and think they have to start from scratch. When I would say my book, probably a good third of it, by the time I created such a nerd, like this index of content on an Excel file, like those types of topics, the length it was, and let me hone in on what might be appropriate for the book, and then I really just had to rework those things a little bit.

But what a running head start you can get if you've got that stuff that you can repurpose.

Jane: Yeah.

Tanya: What would you say, now that you've got the experience of blogging and of writing the book, what are the benefits of being a successful blogger as an author? Do you think that blogging is a good option for every author?

Jane: So I think the visibility that it gives you, especially at that time, it also gives you something to talk about on social media because you can essentially kind of reiterate some of the main points from the blog post on social media. Obviously, you can link to the blog post. So it gives you some discussion, ways to talk about your interests.

I think it works really well for non-fiction, trying to position yourself or you are an expert in a particular field and authority if you have credentials that are respected on the topic that you're discussing. This is all great fodder. The things that you speak about, teach about, that you consult on, that you coach on, all of that's great fodder for blogging material.

And it's rare that I meet non-fiction authors who have no idea what to write about because they're so engaged with their communities and readership. Where it gets a little tougher is the novelists, sometimes memoirists, who they see the benefits of this activity, but they don't know what they themselves should write about. Am I posting my fiction?

Well, no, you probably shouldn't do that for lots of reasons. For memoirists, it's a similar issue. And also, I just know from working in the media industry that when you post fiction on websites, it just doesn't go anywhere.

Same is true for poetry. A lot of that is also true for personal essay, unless it's a really sensational clickbaity headline or topic. So you have to approach it slant if you're going to try blogging.

Often, you're looking at the themes in your work, the issues that you're passionate about that maybe have driven you to write and publish. If you have any sort of expertise or authority that's feeding into the book, if you're a lawyer writing a legal thriller, for example, those are things that might inform your blog. But as a general rule, as of today, I don't suggest that novelists or memoirists think about blogging as like a cornerstone of what they're doing.

But if you're a non-fiction writer, I think it's worth considering.

Tanya: And you kind of dropped a hint there at the beginning of your answer, that in general, the times have changed since 2011. And maybe this isn't where you would cancel someone to start period. So that leads me to ask, where would you tell them to start?

Jane: So a couple of things, well, more than a couple of things have changed since I started blogging. It was much easier to get search traffic to a blog when I started. So I was able over the years to build up a lot of authority through search engines like Google and to rank really well for the sorts of articles I was publishing.

So if you go looking today even for how to write a book proposal, a query letter, how to get published, these sorts of 101 questions, it's very likely you're going to see my site come up in search results like on the first page or even sometimes in the first three spots. Not ads, organic placement. That's getting really hard to do now today if you don't already have some sort of website authority.

And that's just a fancy word for Google recognizes your site as meaningful for the topic that someone is searching for. And obviously mainstream media, these are the sorts of sites that get a lot of the authority, major brands, recognizable things. So the average author website isn't necessarily going to rank right away.

And you would have to do a lot of what we call SEO driven content strategy, search engine optimized writing and posting in order to gain that authority. And that's not every writer's most favorite thing to consider. They don't want to produce content.

They just want to write what they want to write. I should also say, you know, at the time that I started blogging, too, it was more common that people would have bookmarks and places they would visit repeatedly through the week. And with social media, no one's doing that.

You know, social media tends to be the way that people end up visiting sites or they'll get an email reminding them there's some new content at this website. So that brings me to Substack. I think that's basically, if you were going to blog in 2008 or 2011 as I did, today I would probably be going to Substack.

That's where you're going to see that kind of activity. Substack looks like a blog. It acts like a blog and it happens to send email.

So it's also beneficially a way for writers to start to build an email newsletter list, which I consider pretty essential for career-long marketing and promotion.

Tanya: Got it. Okay. So can a blog be used like R&D, where if an author is maybe not sure what they should be focusing on in their writing?

With non-fiction, that is maybe not so much the point because they've got a career or some life of experience that's probably guiding that. But I personally have sometimes been surprised at the type of content that drives engagement versus not. I didn't realize people were going to dork out on that.

So is it fair to say that the blog can be a tool to experiment with that and really figure out what's resonating with your readers before you sit down and write the book?

Jane: Yeah, it can save you untold hours. It can save you a lot of frustration of doing a book that no one's really interested in what you've actually tackled. They really wish you would have gone in another direction.

If you're doing a blog of any kind or a Substack, let's just assume blog and substack are interchangeable at this point in the conversation. If you're going to be doing those sorts of activities, you're going to see more comments or more likes or more shares on the things that probably belong in your book or that deserve more attention, more discussion. When you hear success stories of people breaking out, really in any form, any medium, it could be TikTok, it could be a podcast.

You'll often hear about, well, in the early days, I was just kind of doing this weird thing off to the side, and then one day I posted something different and everyone paid attention. And so I started doing more of that. Now, for me, I had a similar moment where I realized people really paid attention when I talked about digital tools, future of publishing, how the business might be changing because of all of these really, like just transformational things were happening, like the advent of Kindle in 2007, ebooks taking off, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and the rise of the self-publishing and ebook market.

So I was also just starting to tackle those topics at a really rich time. And that's what I got the most feedback on.

Tanya: Yeah, it can definitely give you some interesting market research at your fingertips. Let's talk a little bit about some rights fun. I'm sure you counsel a lot in this area as you're working with writers.

And you touched on earlier with fiction, a different reason for not posting the fiction itself. But is there the potential for writer to get themselves in trouble if they are using content on their blog that they think they're later going to turn around, package up and sell as a book? Are there areas that they should sort of tread carefully in that regard as far as repurposing stuff or putting their best writing out on their blog and getting into trouble later if they're trying to roll it into a book?

Jane: There's generally nothing to be afraid of here. I think the fears greatly outweigh any actual harm that could ever occur. Of course, I just told the story of how I essentially repurposed my blog into a book.

Of course, I self-published it, but the book did really well, showing you that there's not cannibalization. Just because the content is free on your blog doesn't mean people aren't going to buy the book. Sometimes it's not the same audience, so you're broadening your audience often.

Other times, people just aren't going to catch everything on your blog or they want to have the book to preserve what they have learned. So it's not cannibalizing. And moreover, the book was so successful, a publisher wanted to pick it up.

But by that point, it's like, why would I do that? That wasn't the purpose. It's not going, I'll just earn less money if you take it.

So in that regard, the only thing a blog could do is bring you more visibility and more potential for a book deal, at least on the nonfiction side. The one area where I would be hesitant is if you're trying to place some of that material, say, in a literary journal. And here I'm talking about places like the Paris Review or newspapers or magazines that have either a print or online component, they can be really sensitive to you having already published that on your own turf, whether that's on your blog or in a newsletter.

Maybe you did a thread on social media. And it's just because they want to be usually the first to publish the material. They don't want previously published work.

But when I talk about this market, it tends to be a very literary market. And often you're not even getting paid for the material. And they don't even have often the kind of reach that you might have with your blog.

So it's just like, again, I think the fears here are often overblown. And publishers pick up books all of the time based on someone's strong platform developed from the blog. There was just one this last week, I found a guy who posts recipes on TikTok and Instagram. He self-published a book of the recipes he put on social media. And now the publisher wants to republish that book. I mean, it happens every single week.

So I don't know why. This is like a common fear, it's a common question. But no matter how much I address it, people still feel like they're shooting themselves in the foot if they put the material online. You are not.

Tanya: Good to hear. Yeah. We get that question a lot as well. I personally do when I'm talking with folks. The other question I get a lot is, hey, can you take a look at my blog and figure out if it can be a book?

Jane: Oh no.

Tanya: I know. Truth be told, I don't have nearly enough energy. Now, that's not to say that there couldn't be a structure within that content that somebody smarter than me could pull out, but I think all of us on the publishing side would far prefer for you to figure out what the arc is in your own content.

Jane: Right.

Tanya: Can you offer any guidance there? If somebody is like, I've got a wealth of blog material, how do you start to figure out how to weave it into a book? And is there any sort of rule of thumb of how much should be, I think you kind of answered this earlier, but how much should be original versus straight out of the blog? Do you just need to add a segue, or any guidance on that front?

Jane: Yeah, I mean, it could potentially be 100% repurposed. There's nothing, in my view, wrong with that. However, when you're repurposing the blog content, you do have to make a lot of revisions or edits or editorial decisions about how that material is going to fit together in a way that makes sense for a reading experience that's linear.

So I say that because this makes the assumption that someone is blogging in a way that I consider ideal, which is for online attention spans. It's probably going to include visuals, interactive elements, bulleted lists. There'll be stuff in the comments that may or may not be valuable.

There may be some really time-specific elements to it that aren't going to be relevant in book format. I'm not saying it's more work to repurpose a blog into a book, but I don't think it's necessarily any less work than doing it from scratch, because you want to be thoughtful and intentional about how you're putting this together. And if you've been blogging for a long time, like I have, just the amount of material you have, it takes a while to see, like you said, you need to create some sort of an arc or a journey or a process.

And so it takes time to figure out what that is and make the right selections. And then, depending on how far back you're going, you may need to update some of the material, because what you wrote three years ago or seven years ago, it's not keeping pace. And so that you can't just take it as is and plop it in.

Unfortunately, it does require a strong editorial hand.

Tanya: Agreed. And I think if you, for whatever reason, are going to just leave it as it is, in these sort of disconnected short entries. I personally, as a reader, would appreciate knowing that up front, because I hate the experience of sitting down to read something and realizing this is just like a bunch of blog posts.

They don't flow together. It's very disappointing and I feel all ripped off. So there's a way to frame that so your reader knows what they're getting on the front end.

Having that negative experience leaving you a bad review.

Jane: Yes.

Tanya: Now, what about the other way? So we have authors who have, bless them, toiled away for years writing their book. And as you know, they are thoroughly exhausted by the time that's finished. And then we're telling them, hey, you've got to support your book launch with more content.

I always tell them now there's plenty of content already within your book and you can pull some of that out, repurpose it, use it in social media, put excerpts as blog posts, and maybe find ways to connect it to the current events or something to make it timely. But other rules of thumb from you, in going the other way of going from book to pulling out blog posts from that book in an effort to build a platform?

Jane: I mean, so much depends on the nature of the book. Some books are easier to repurpose than others. But I would say sometimes it's more helpful to set the book aside and just list on a piece of paper or your digital notepad.

Like, what are the 10 to 20 ideas or lessons or secrets or points that you really want people to take away from this? Like in headline form. If you're not opposed to using AI, you could use ChatGPT to help you with this task.

You could feed it portions of your manuscript or certain chapters and say, would you pull out the most important point from this and put it in headline form if you're struggling with this exercise? And then think about, okay, for each of these headlines or big takeaway points, what can I draw from the book to really make this point? And if someone's writing what I would consider a conventional chapter, that's going to be too long for most blogs or for online consumption.

So you're probably going to be cutting it down just to like the really pithy part and featuring that. That's where I would start. But again, it really depends on the book, how you would approach this.

Tanya: That's very interesting to use ChatGPT to give you a little bit of a head start on this. Yeah, I like that. Okay, so you mentioned earlier some blogs that don't travel well, don't really go viral and become big hits, writes of fiction, personal essays, I'm sure memoir, if people are blogging memoirs.

Is there a type of blog content or are there genres that do seem to gain momentum faster than others to start building an audience and finding traction?

Jane: Anything that is about improving people's lives, helping them solve a problem, benefiting them in some way, helping them think about it issued differently. So think about when you walk into a bookstore, most of the shelving is actually for nonfiction, not fiction, at least in the bookstores I frequent. And so you've got yourself help section and relationships and health, parenting, history, crafts and art, political titles.

Society and culture. I could just go on and on and on. And so all of those topics are ripe for having a great blog based on it.

But you do have to get like, you have to figure out your niche. Like even for me, people think that writing advice or publishing advice, well, that's a niche. I consider it very broad though.

That's why I specifically say I'm about the business of writing. So I'm going to help you with the business side. I can't really tell you much about the craft side as far as what I personally write.

The more you narrow down who you're trying to help, the more effective the effort is going to be. The other areas that could work out just have to do with, are you really aware of a particular community's hot button issues, the conversation points, for better or worse, the hot button issues, the things that really get people riled up emotionally. I'm not saying that I do this.

In fact, I try to avoid this, but there are definitely people who write online who are looking to push those buttons, either for good or for ill. If you look on the sub stack, especially in political commentary or sociopolitical commentary, you're going to see people writing really significantly long essays, in my opinion, about what happened yesterday or last week in the headlines. They have a very particular take and they're delivering to their audience an interpretation of what's happening that fits with the world view of that community.

So that's another area you can look at. Personally, I avoid that like the plague. I think it's really stressful, but some people really thrive on it.

Tanya: Yeah. Now you dropped a great little nugget in there, which is bookstore shelf space. Because that is actually, people will often say to me, do real estate books sell or does this type of books sell?

And I'll tell them like any of them could, but to get a general feel, you can go into a bookstore and see how much space they've given. That topic. And that will tell you a lot.

And interestingly enough, not to go down a real estate rabbit hole, but that one changes with the market. Gets more shelf space when the market's good, it drops when it, but it's never a lot of shelf space. So it's not a very concrete answer.

But I'm sometimes surprised when I go into a bookstore and really studying what's getting shelved where. That's interesting. There's not a lot of space for that.

Jane: Anyone who's thinking about writing humor, go and look at the humor shelf in a bookstore.

Tanya: Yes. We talked about how there really isn't a lot of risk on the right side of publishing something online through your blog or elsewhere and then republishing it. Are there other conflicts or risks that people should be mindful of before they make a decision to go down that route?

Jane: I think the biggest risk is just spending a lot of time on it without very much in the way of a tangible reward. I find that people aren't particularly patient with the effort, especially if they're doing a conventional blog, something on their own author website or their own business website. You know, they may abandon the effort within just even three to six months.

And to me, that's not, you haven't given it long enough because it takes people so long to even recognize that you're blogging in the first place. And so you just have to give it enough runway. Plus, it's very likely, I'm sorry to say, that your first posts or efforts aren't going to be that good.

So you also need time to practice and learn what is going to resonate so that you can, you have to get over the learning curve. I don't assume that anyone's going to be able to knock it out of the park on blogging if they haven't really done it before, even if you've read lots of blogs. You have to get used to it.

So give it the time it deserves. I'm not saying forever, but don't bail just because you didn't go viral with your first post.

Tanya: Yes, definitely. And I think like anything author platform related, it takes a lot of front-end planning. If done right, be strategic, start early and be disciplined to keep at it.

Jane: I agree, a lot of people just throw in the towel. How many websites have we both seen? Author websites where the blog sits there with like six posts around the book launch and then nothing ever again.

Tanya: Right, exactly. At that point, just take it down. All right, so here comes the million-dollar question. What has been your experience translating blog followers to book sales, like converting them into people who are buying your book, which I know can be a little hard to track, or readers of the blog into followers of people who become active within your community. Have you been able to kind of get a pulse on that?

Jane: I would say, I mean, I'm better at estimating it for email subscribers. So if your blog has a component of email, like people subscribe to receive notice of new posts, then I think it's much easier to say you can maybe expect somewhere from 2 to 5 percent of those people will actually buy the book. That's a conservative estimate.

And I think the percentage gets bigger, actually the smaller the list, because usually the smaller your list, probably the more engaged and closer to you those people are. Because the bigger it gets, the more you get total strangers coming in the door. And they're less, they just have less connection and might be less likely to buy.

I'm trying to remember the sales figures for my self-published book. It's something that I honestly didn't keep really good track of. But I want to say in the end, it was maybe 15,000 to 20,000 copies. That's both print and e-book combined. And when I look at my web traffic during the time that I was really marketing and promoting that book, I'm not anymore. It's out of print.

My web traffic was around 150,000 to 200,000 per month. So that's not bad, I guess. It's more than I would expect, but I'm also looking at those sales over a period of like, that's lifetime sales. So the book came out in 2011, and then I took it off sale about two years ago.

Tanya: Okay. Had a pretty good run.

Jane: Yeah.

Tanya: So for someone to really get a semi-accurate read on that, they do need to have something like Substack where there's an email list component and try and, it sounds like, connect the dots that way.

Jane: I mean, that's what I would really recommend, especially today. It's just, I think you don't want to rely on people remembering to visit your blog. You really want to try and capture their email address if you can.

Tanya: Yeah, definitely. Well, you've been more than helpful today. As always, any parting thoughts for people who've come here for guidance on whether they should start blogging now or how to turn their blog into a book?

Jane: There are so many ways to succeed in writing and publishing. I would say if blogging appeals to you, it's not dead. You can still do it in a way that is going to help you.

It'll be a stepping stone to other things. It could even become the center of your online presence, which has happened with me. The only reason I keep doing it, the reason I have been doing it now for, it'll soon be 20 years, is because I genuinely enjoy it.

Like I still get excited when I have a new blog post coming out. So you're going to need that level of enthusiasm for whatever you're writing about or doing if you want to see it succeed.

Tanya: Yeah. Blog from the heart. Well, Jane, thank you so much for joining us today on Published. Really appreciate you.

Jane: My pleasure.

That's it for our episode with Jane. We hope you enjoyed learning about how blogging can be a tool for authors.

You can also find advice for writing, publishing, and promoting your work in my book, Ideas, Influence, and Income, which you can learn more about at ideasinfluenceandincome.com. A big thank you to Madison Johnson, who produces the published podcast, and to our five star reviewers. Thank you for your support and we will be back with another episode on the last Tuesday of next month.