Publish & Prosper
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Publish & Prosper
Books You Can Create Using Your Existing Content
In this episode, Lauren & Matt share ideas for repurposing your existing content. Hint: it's by turning that content into a book. We share ideas for both nonfiction and fiction book projects, including options that require little to no new writing.
Have a question about self-publishing, selling direct, Lulu, or any of the weird tangents Matt & Lauren like to meander through? Email us at podcast@lulu.com to submit your question for our upcoming AMA episode!
Dive Deeper
đź’ˇ Read These Blog Posts
- 6 Ways To Publish a Book Without Writing a Book
- From Blog To Book: How To Turn Your Content Into a Published Book
- How To Turn Your Video Content Into a Book
- How To Reach a New Audience With a Book Based on Your Podcast
- How To Create a Workbook: Tips To Enhance Your Online Course
- What Is Fanfiction and Why Does It Matter?
đź’ˇ Watch These Videos
- What Should I Publish? 10 Ideas Using Content You Already Have
- Lulu University playlist on Content Monetization
Sound Bites From This Episode
🎙️ [3:51] “One of the best ways to identify what aspect or which topic of your content would necessarily lend itself best to a book, or a book project, would be to just go back and look at your metrics, right? Figure out which of your blog posts or podcasts or YouTube videos or whatever got the most views and the most engagement.”
🎙️ [14:58] “Presentations can be very one-sided where it's literally just the speaker speaking at an audience of people… this is a great way to turn that one time event attendee into somebody who's going to continue to come back to you, continue to participate in the conversation and continue to think of you when they're thinking about the subject matter that you were presenting on."
🎙️ [25:55] “If you are a digital first fiction author and you're publishing your ebooks, whether it's on Kindle Unlimited, you're doing serial fiction on something like Kindle Vella, BookFunnel, whatever platform that you're using, why are you not selling print editions of your books? If you are, great, love you for it. If you're not, please do.”
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Lauren: Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. Today, Matt and I are going to be talking about how you can monetize your existing content by turning it into a book, which if you think about it is really just an excuse for me to talk about cool book ideas for a solid 45 minutes straight.
Matt: 45 minutes straight?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Why? You think it'll be longer or shorter?
Matt: I'm hoping it'll be shorter, but knowing us, it will probably be longer. So I'm going to go with the over, but because we haven't eaten lunch yet, I'm hoping that it falls under.
Lauren: We are actually racing the clock right now, which I think is a good way to do this.
Matt: We're not racing the clock. We're racing the DoorDash driver.
Lauren: Well, fair.
Matt: That being said, it's a fun topic. It's a topic that there's a lot of interest in on some of our other sites, and at events, we get asked this on occasion from creators who have, for example, years worth of blog content or YouTube content or things like that. And they don't know what to do with it or how to, how to turn it into a book that makes sense for their brand or their content.
Lauren: Yeah. So this is going to be something that, I mean, obviously this is a sample of project ideas - don't hold us to it. If you're like, wait, they didn't say this or they didn't come or I had this idea of wanting to do this. This is - we're just running through some ideas.
Also, full disclosure up at the top. We're splitting this in half into nonfiction and fiction projects. So if you are listening to this as a fiction author and you’re like what do you mean the first, the first two things that you're talking about are both nonfiction projects, is this going to be relevant to me at all? It is. Hang tight. Worst case scenario, skip ahead a little bit. I won't blame you. But also, Matt and I are hilarious. So why wouldn't you want to listen to the whole thing?
Matt: Well, we certainly crack each other up.
Lauren: I know.
Matt: I don't know about anybody on the other end of this thing, but hopefully they find this hilarious too.
Lauren: I don't remember what it was, but I was editing the last episode and there was something that, there was some exchange in there that I had to like, pause and get up and walk away because I was laughing so hard that I had to calm down. So at least we entertain ourselves.
Matt: I don't necessarily think that's hard to do though either.
Lauren: That’s true.
Matt: We have very similar interests for the most part. We'll see how everybody else feels about this one. I mean, my mom would say I'm hilarious. Does that count?
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: Or maybe she wouldn't. Maybe she's usually laughing at me instead of with me. That's a possibility.
Lauren: I think as long as you're entertaining her, then that's really what matters.
Matt: Good Lord, I've probably been doing that my whole life.
Lauren: Sorry, Matt's mom.
Matt: Yeah. Well, sorry, mom.
[3:08]
Matt: All right, let's jump into this.
Lauren: All right, let's go. Talking about nonfiction projects first.
Matt: My favorite.
Lauren: Obviously, there's going to be some bias going into this. Matt's going to like the nonfiction projects more. I'm going to like the fiction projects more, but I think there's still a lot of really fun things you can do in both of these content categories. And obviously, nonfiction is a much broader range of genres and subgenres that we're talking about. So we're going to be a little bit more vague about what your specific details are for your book. So you know, just kind of fill in the blanks where you hear them, whether we're talking about a business book, a how to book, a cookbook, even like a poetry collection, if that's your thing. Not either one of our things, I don't think but power to you if it's your thing.
Matt: Yeah. So one of the things we've talked about in the past, one of the best ways to identify what aspect or which topic of your content would necessarily lend itself best to a book, or a book project, would be to just go back and look at your metrics, right? Figure out which of your blog posts or podcasts or YouTube videos or whatever got the most views and the most engagement.
Typically both are great metrics, but nonetheless, you might want to measure off of engagement more than views or however that works. For us, like we said, for this episode alone, there was a lot of interest in it. There were a lot of questions asked. There's a lot of engagement around it. Doesn't necessarily mean that we get a lot of views around other content based on this topic, but there is a lot of questions and engagement. So we chose to make it a topic for this episode. You kind of do the same thing when choosing which pieces of your content would actually make a great book or book project. And you can also narrow that down by timeframe if you want to.
So if you wanted to say, I'm only going to look at my blog posts from the last six to eight months. And then from those, I'm going to choose the ones that had the highest engagement, the highest views. And then from there, you know, you might be staring at 27 different blog posts. Hopefully there's some sort of common theme that's woven between all of them or most of them, where you can turn that all into one particular book project, but sometimes you might have to connect the dots for your readers.
Lauren: And if you can't turn it all into one cohesive book project, we have some ideas for that too, don't worry. Um, but yeah, no, I, and what Matt said - I completely agree. It's also great if you're looking for ways to repeat your products every year. Like if you're doing this long-term, if you're going to be a content creator - if you've been creating content for years and you're going to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, publish a book every January that is the best content from the previous year.
And then you don't have to think about what specific parameters you're looking for. You're saying I'm publishing my best content from 2023. Here are my top 10 blog posts and my top five email newsletters in a book. It's something that your fans will appreciate because they know to expect it from you. And it's something that you don't have to go back to the drawing board from square one every single time over and over again.
Matt: Yeah, and if you think that your fans, followers, readers, whatever you refer to them as, would not be interested in having a book or volume of your content, think again. We've seen so many people successfully take a year's worth of newsletters, put it into a book, and then sell thousands of copies of them a great example is Lenny Rachitsky. He has an email newsletter. He took basically close to a year's worth of the newsletters put him into volume one, and did an amazing job of selling thousands of copies of it. Lots of people do that.
If your thing is newsletters now, and that's basically the content you create, a lot of your readers would love to have a volume of the previous year, 2023 newsletters, or 2024 newsletters that you come out with in 2025. It's a lot easier sometimes to just grab that book off their shelf and thumb through and find that piece of content that they know you wrote about, but they don't want to fish through their inbox for six months worth of emails -
Lauren: Oh yeah.
Matt: To try and find it or something like that, just by the sheer sake of convenience for some of your readers who really find value in your content. Having something like that as a reference manual or a point that they can go back to a lot faster and easier is oftentimes very helpful for them.
Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just think about, like, how completely awful it is trying to search your inbox for anything ever. Somebody on our team last week asked something about our official date of trademark, and I was like, oh, I think I have that in my email. Let me search and see if I can find it. And spoiler alert, an overwhelming number of emails include the word trademark in them because it's somewhere in the company's footer or legal disclaimer at the bottom of the email or something like that. So not always super helpful.
Another thing that you might want to do maybe is if you are offering any kind of paid subscription service or you have some content behind a paywall and you want to make that content available to the general public, obviously for a fee still, but that might be a great way to use it as a lead magnet to get people to subscribe to your subscription platform. Again, must be a better way to say this if I was typing it instead of saying it out loud. But I think that's a great way for you to kind of entice casual fans and say, hey, if you like the content that I published into this book, all of this content is available behind my paywall. Subscribe here to check it out and get content like this on a regular basis, could be great.
In general, this kind of content creation is great for using it as a lead magnet, creating a new revenue stream. And as always, we talk about how you can turn casual fans into true fans. This might be one of those ways.
If you are going to go about doing this, obviously there's no way for us to talk through every single, like, how you're going to turn this into a book for every single one of these. There will definitely be plenty of resources in the show notes to help you if you want to try to turn your content into a book. Just looking at high level, at least a little bit, something like this where you're compiling your existing content, you probably won't have to do too much writing, if any writing at all.
You're mostly going to be just trying to organize your content into some kind of coherent and linear order that makes sense within the book. You might need to do a little bit of like providing context as an introduction before certain sections or something like that, or maybe editing. If you start all of your blog posts with a time stamped introduction, that's very dated in a certain way. You might want to edit that a little bit, but for the most part, this is going to be a lot of editing and organizing and not a lot of writing.
Matt: Yeah. It's also a good opportunity to try out something like ChatGPT. If you haven't, sometimes you can dump all that content in there and say, hey, can you structure this in a way where all of these articles, documents, whatever flow together to form a book format and see what happens. I mean -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Some of these tools are pretty good at doing stuff like that now. You may get back something that is at least a great starting point for you where you only have to rearrange a few things. And then ChatGPT is also great at coming up with an outline for you and some of the other things you would need to finish off that book project.
[9:47]
Lauren: Yeah, I'm actually gonna go out of order from my own outline here because we kind of mentioned this already a little bit in there. We've talked in the past, even in the last episode we just did, we referenced the idea of an airplane book or an airport book or some kind of short, under a hundred pages, super niche content-focused book that is just three to five of your best articles on this very specific, very niche subject.
I think that's a great idea. I talked about it a lot. We can continue to talk about it. It's a great way to create multiple little projects instead of one big one. So instead of having one book, you've got five books.
But also, if you are trying to figure out how to make your top performing content, like Matt said earlier, if you're looking at your top performing content and you've got three very distinct topics here in these posts and you're not sure how to make them all connect together, this is how you make them connect together. You put them in three different books.
And then if you really want to create an omnibus set of all of them, and then that’s your complete works collection. So it's a good way to create multiple different products out of more or less the same content.
Matt: Yeah, I think the short book is becoming more and more common, not just in airport bookstores and other places like that, but even in some of the bigger retail chains and online, people are definitely creating smaller book projects. I think they're easily digestible. I think oftentimes the reader feels like they take away more actionable insights and things that they can put into place with their own sort of business or workflow or whatever it is you're trying to do, versus a much larger book that might take the reader a lot more time to read and get through. And in many cases with nonfiction, sometimes with a larger book, what you find happening is people will find one or two actionable takeaways in the first half of the book. They'll go off and try to implement those. And in many cases they don't get back to that book for a while, if at all.
I do like the trend of creating smaller book projects where you pack in several actionable insights and takeaways, and then you're onto the next one for the next topic or something like that. And creating that series.
Lauren: Yeah, for sure. I think it's also a good way, if you're looking for a way to use a book as a lead magnet, if you're looking for a way that you can use a book that you can give away to people. These smaller sample books that are just kind of showing off one element of your best work, they're going to be smaller, they're a lot less intimidating than you handing a stranger a 250 page book.
They're also going to be cheaper to produce because they're smaller. So if you only have so much of a budget to spend on collateral that you're going to be handing away to people, this is something that's going to cost you a lot less than a book that's two or three times the size of it.
And if you are working on this, if you want a pro tip on how to stylize it, make them all look the same. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Make them look like they're part of a series. Create one cover design and just publish each one in a different color with the same cover design on it. Or have them all be the same, but the title is different on each one of them and it's volume one, volume two, volume three, whatever. You don't have to reinvent the wheel on this.
Matt: Yeah, I like that idea.
Lauren: Thanks.
[12:58]
Lauren: So this is getting away a little bit from being able to publish a book without writing any new content, but using your content as like a jumping off point. So if you want to expand on a topic that you've talked about previously, if you have a blog post that is, it does extremely well. It's one of your most popular organic search result posts. It's constantly getting traffic. You might not even be sure why, but it's also a post that people ask you about frequently when you ask for questions or you get comments. Anytime you share it on social, somebody will ask you, can you talk more about this? Maybe if you've met somebody and they've said like, oh yeah, I'd love to see you do a presentation on this topic. Like I think you seem to know what you're talking about on this, anything like that. If you have some kind of content that you are frequently asked to expand upon, this is a great opportunity to write a book. And obviously you've got the original content already. You're starting, you're not starting from scratch. You're just expanding on it.
Matt: Yeah, it also makes sort of a great, the word I'm looking for is escape me, but it also makes for a great partner to, let's say you are giving a talk or a speech or a session at a conference or something like that, and you know there's a component of your session that really requires a deeper dive, but you don't necessarily have the time for it. Again, creating one of these really short books, something that is short, it's very inexpensive to produce like Lauren just said, is a great giveaway and also something to attract people to your session as something they'll get to leave with.
And having something like that where you can leave a copy on each of the seats in there or hand them out at the end or something like that as a lead magnet is really great. I've been in many sessions where there definitely was part of the session that just really required a lot more effort and a lot more explanation. And it just got glossed over and that was kind of it, you know? And there was no follow-up and I know other people also felt the same and it just seemed like a missed opportunity for something like that.
Lauren: Yeah, it's a great way to continue the conversation with people that have attended, or especially if you're giving a presentation, presentations can be very one-sided where it's literally just the speaker speaking at an audience of people and something that is like an expanded upon idea in a book is a great way for you to turn that into a conversation where you've now provided that book to the audience.
And I would absolutely recommend including in that book somewhere, some kind of way for them to get in touch with you after the fact. So whether they want to reach out to you with questions or they want to sign up for your mailing list or they want or you just tell them like, let me know one thing that you did to help your progress towards what you were doing here. Whatever the case is, this is a great way to turn that one time event attendee into somebody who's going to continue to come back to you, continue to participate in the conversation and continue to think of you when they're thinking about the subject matter that you were presenting on.
Matt: Yeah. And to play off of that, you could expand that. And I have been in sessions where there was a workbook or a visual aid that was given at the start of the session that included the entire session, all of the topics, almost like you would do a compendium or something that would accompany an online course, a workbook, which is great. And so that's also a great idea to put your session into a workbook, something that people can follow along with, but also take away from that can be a lead magnet after the fact, some way for them to reach back out to you to work with you further based on that presentation, or to have some other information in the back of that workbook whereby they could expand their relationship with you either through consulting, whatever it is you might actually be offering.
[16:31]
Lauren: Yeah, I'm actually gonna keep going right through that because that was one of my next content suggestions. So we're gonna jump ahead to that a little bit. Any kind of companion to your existing content, or your book that you've published, or your online courses, or whatever it is that you're doing with your content. So something like a workbook, workbooks are great. They are relatively easy to produce, especially if this is a topic that you know very well and you already have the content, you kind of know what you're doing there.
Guided journal, depending on what kind of content you're creating. If you're a life coach or you're working with people in a self-help capacity or something like that, and you want to create a guided journal that walks them through the different steps and different action items and prompts and all the different things that your book goes through. This is something that… not to sound crass, but it's a great way to get people to buy two things from you instead of one thing from you, because you're providing a workbook or a journal or notebook or whatever to go with the book.
But also it's a great way to kind of build that relationship further with people and have them say, like, I'm actually invested in what I'm doing. I didn't just buy this book that I'm never going to read, but it was an aspirational buy. Now that I've also bought the workbook and I'm following it along and I'm doing all this stuff and…
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Great thing to have.
Matt: The beauty of that though is you can apply that to anything.
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: Like at one point my wife and I, mostly my wife, had looked into getting some training, right, for our dogs, we have Frenchies, and they pretty much rule our house.
Lauren: That's true.
Matt: But getting some training for them, and so I think she paid for an hour of online time with this trainer, and he was going through all these things, and it was just like, by the time the call was over, it was like, it had a page of notes or so, but it was like, that was it. And now you're left to your own devices to try and train these unruly French bulldogs who, if you know anything about it, they don't want to be trained.
But if there had been a workbook that came with those hundreds of dollars we spent for that one hour or whatever it was, that we got in the mail where we could have all of that in the workbook, it probably would have felt like we got more for our money. We probably would have been able to apply some sort of structure to these, these wild animals that roam our house and basically control everything we do.
You can apply this to anything. literally anything, and it does help. It gives you that ability to potentially increase the price of whatever it is that you're selling, but if nothing else reinforces the value of what it is that you're offering.
Lauren: Absolutely. It is also something that, you know, we've talked in the past about how books are generally a one-time purchase. Books that you write in are not a one-time purchase because once you fill up the pages that you've used, you might need another copy depending on what you're doing with it, especially if it's something like a workbook. If it's something that you're doing, that you're saying this is we're going to walk you through publishing a book this year, we're going to have a three month goal, a six month goal, a nine month goal, and a twelve month goal. And I get through three and six and then I fall off the bandwagon. And now I want to start back over again at zero. I can't start back at the pages that I've already filled out. I need a new one. Not a terrible idea.
Also, um, something that I didn't want to overlook, but we can throw that out there too. You can create a calendar. We see people create calendars all the time that are sometimes just like fun ways to show off their content. If - especially if they're an artist or photographer or something like that. But also if you want a fun and unique way to keep your fans motivated, if that's something that you're doing. So you're doing a how to go from never running a day in your life to being able to run a marathon at the end of the year.
Matt: Oh, God.
Lauren: Here's a here's a twelve month wall calendar that you've added in goals and progress dates and and like little customized things in there that say like, today's the day you're gonna run ten miles! I don't know. I don't - I’m not a marathon runner.
Matt: Each month would just be a picture of me laying on the ground exhausted, covered in sweat.
Lauren: Okay, but hear me out, because one of my like, big bucket list things is to do RunDisney at some point.
Matt: Me too.
Lauren: So like a motivational calendar that is Disney landmarks every month, with progress and training and goals built into it. So it's motivating and it's something that I gotta check off. I don't know, I think that - that might be an idea.
Matt: That's always been a goal of mine too, is to run either the half or the full at Disney. And I signed up for some of the virtual ones they were doing during COVID, like during the lockdowns and even then still couldn't fully commit and make it through, but that's a good idea. Okay.
Lauren: I think it could be worth it.
Matt: I'll co-sign on that one.
Lauren: All right, if you want some ideas for different kinds of workbooks, notebooks, journals, first of all, we refer to them very often as no or low content books. So if you see that anywhere and you're confused by what that is, that's what we mean. But I did write a blog post a few years ago called six ways to publish a book without writing a book that is basically just different types of workbooks, notebooks, journals. So I'll link that in the show notes. You can go check it out.
[21:24]
Lauren: And - oh, no, I was gonna say that's all of our nonfiction. We're doing so well. It's not. One more idea, a lot of the stuff that we've just talked about right now is primarily for content creators that are writing or podcasting. But even then, you still have like a written transcript of the words that you were saying. If you are the kind of content creator who is creating YouTube videos or TikTok videos or photos on Instagram, you're an artist, you're a photographer or whatever, you are absolutely still eligible to create really cool book projects.
If you are somebody that creates how to videos, take screenshots of your videos and use your captions and publish that into a visual reference guide. Just like we were saying with the email newsletters, it's a lot easier to pull out a physical book that I have and say like, I know I saw this person make this recipe that looked really good and I don't remember what step six of it was. Let me pull out their cookbook instead of searching through all of their YouTube videos and then finding the correct timestamp within the video of exactly what I'm looking for.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: So, great way to provide content for your fans that they will be able to use and reference. Also, fans are nerds at collecting things, especially if you're an artist or a photographer and you've got beautiful projects and a lot of really, really gorgeous work on Instagram. What if Instagram goes down tomorrow and your fans don't have access to all of your gorgeous, gorgeous content anymore.
Matt: Yep, I like how you were able to build in, don't build on rented land right there.
Lauren: Oh, it's always in the back of my mind. I've listened to you enough that it lives rent free in my brain.
Matt: It's true though. I was reading something the other day too about somebody who, it was an Instagram creator, and somehow or another, their account had got suspended, I think through potentially a miscommunication or something like that. But then they had gone online on another channel and were complaining very heavily about the fact that Instagram was holding all of their content hostage. And unlike most social media rants where people tend to take the side of the person who's doing the ranting, I was amazed at how many people understood the concept and were firing back like, no, you got it wrong.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: That's their content. You posted it on their platform. You agreed to their terms. And I mean, if you don't get your account back, that really sucks, but that content's gone if you don't get your account back. That's it. All those followers, all that content, everything gone.
Lauren: Absolutely gone. Which also, for the record and I am NOT - I don't know the details about this, so I don't know if this person did this or not. But if you are not saving backup versions of everything that you post as a content creator, what are you doing? It can't all live in Instagram. You better have those files saved somewhere.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: Whether it’s -
Matt: Was that a hypothetical question? Because my answer would be you're effing up if you're not if you're not backing it all up somehow, but -
Lauren: Yeah, no, that's.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: That's totally fair. But yeah. Oof. that's - that gives me, that gives me anxiety. Sorry.
Matt: Well, this one was especially impactful because I wish I could remember the creators name, although I probably wouldn't put them on blast, but the content they created also was very mainstream and arbitrary. It was home improvement content or something like that. So I'm not sure what they violated at the time that Instagram or Instagram thought they violated, I have no idea, or Meta, whatever but yeah.
Unfortunately like, if you've got quite a bit of followers and quite a bit of content built up on any platform. Just know that's not yours.
Lauren: Ooh. All right. Don't make that mistake. Learn from other people.
[25:00]
Lauren: Anyway, let's talk about the more fun stuff.
Matt: Oh, your area.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Fiction. Okay.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: All right.
Lauren: I'm going to have a really hard time getting through this without revealing more in depth about the kind of books that I read, so.
Matt: That's all right.
Lauren: It’s okay.
Matt: We've all got it by now.
Lauren: That's true.
Matt: Cheesy romance.
Lauren: Yeah, pretty much.
Matt: Is that the category?
Lauren: Yeah, more or less.
Matt: Young adult and romance.
Lauren: I don't really read young adult at all anymore.
Matt: Really?
Lauren: I read like -
Matt: You've grown up is what you're saying?
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: To a full adult instead of a young adult.
Lauren: Yes.
Matt: I beg to differ.
Lauren: Yes. Well, thanks. Thanks. I am soon to be, I'm very soon to be in my late thirties. Actually, by the time this episode comes out, I will be in my late thirties.
Matt: Huh.
Lauren: So.
Matt: All right.
Lauren: Well, later thirties, later whatever, it's fine.
Matt: Let's just see if those reading habits have changed.
Lauren: They may have, it's fine. Anyway, first and foremost, we've talked about this, we'll continue to talk about this, but I think this is, if you're not doing this, I don't understand why you're not doing this. If you are a digital first fiction author and you're publishing your ebooks, whether it's on Kindle Unlimited, you're doing serial fiction on something like Kindle Vella, BookFunnel, whatever platform that you're using, why are you not selling print editions of your books?
If you are, great, love you for it. If you're not, please do.
I say this as somebody who reads a lot of digital first books. I want print editions of so many of the books that I read, and so rarely are they actually available. And every time I'm like, why? Why? You turned down an opportunity. I read this book for free, and now I'm trying to offer you money for the book that I read for free, and you are not giving me the opportunity to do so.
Matt: Yeah, I'll never quite understand that. I mean, I do know there's an element obviously of work involved in taking your digital content and turning that into print, but there are so many platforms and tools out there that make that a lot easier for you. And if you've gone through the trouble to have your book turned into an EPUB, or even if you didn't go that far and it's only a PDF, you can get that into print format fairly easily. And the content's already there. Why not?
Lauren: Yeah, I mean, considering this is an episode about specifically taking your existing content and monetizing it and finding new ways to monetize it. This is a new way to monetize your existing content without you having to write anything new. I mean, you might have the opportunity to do some editing, depending on… like what kind of comments - if anyone's ever been like, oh, hey, by the way, the typo on this page, or… I read a book over the weekend and the author, or one of the main characters in the book, referred to the band Fallout Boy, but they spelled Fallout as one word, F-A-L-L-O-U-T, and that would have taken about two seconds of Googling to find out that Fall Out Boy is three words. And it shouldn't have bothered me, but it did.
Matt: How did we get here?
Lauren: I ask myself that every day.
Matt: No, no, we were just talking about print versions and somehow we landed on somebody using Fall Out Boy grammatically incorrect.
Lauren: Right, right, right. I was saying that this is a great opportunity for you to edit any, any issues that your books have that anyone has ever pointed out in your ebooks before you put them in print. But other than…
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: Just having to reformat your interior files - and then you're probably going to have to have a cover redesigned because most ebook covers they only design the front cover - other than that it's not a whole lot of work going into this.
Matt: Well and you've already done all the hard work.
Lauren: Yeah you did the writing and the editing.
Matt: Yeah, even the cover the front of the cover is always the hardest part -
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: The back is much easier and the spine as well. So yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of excuses not to try it out other than it takes some time, but these days you could even hire somebody on Fiverr or 99Designs -
Lauren: Oh yeah.
Matt: Or wherever who's got design experience and has worked with books and they could probably crank those conversions out for you pretty quickly and inexpensively, depending on the size of your back catalog and whatever but your front list and your back catalog.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: But yeah I'll never understand that either, especially the ones that the authors out there that are selling just a ton of ebooks and I mean, you're excluding an entire print audience potentially, and even those who would like to have more permanent copies.
And I get it, you know, there's some genres where a lot of the audience doesn't want -
Lauren: Sure.
Matt: - a print copy sitting around their house because of the content itself, but you never know. And again, if it's something that just requires a little bit of effort, the content's already there, it's always worth a shot, so.
Lauren: I think in the grand scheme of things, it's worth it. Even if you don't sell as many copies as you were hoping to, if you sell any copies at all, it's worth having them as an option.
Matt: It's more money and it's more exposure.
Lauren: Right. Absolutely.
[29:36]
Lauren: And I'm once again going completely out of order on my outline now. I didn't really put much thought into the order these were in, I guess. But if you are saying, okay, I already am selling print books, like this isn't new. I'm already doing this. Are you selling or have you ever considered selling exclusive, collectors, or limited edition of your print books? Because these are great opportunities as well.
If you want to do, even if you just like you have your paperback additions already and you want to do a really nice hardcover that's celebrating the anniversary of the book being released for the first time, or it's because you're going to an event and you're going to be signing copies and signed hardcovers are that much nicer than signed paperbacks.
You can look into whether or not your publisher has any cool design elements that you could add to your book, like a ribbon bookmark or custom end papers or embossed covers, something fun like that. If you've had something - I've seen this happen a lot with authors that when they'll release a collector's edition or an exclusive edition, they will commission a fan that has created fan art for them already and they'll commission that fan to be like, hey, can you… you know, using that art that you already did for me, can you create a really cool title page that I can put in the future books? Or a new, like, a new cover design or something like that.
Or if you've got bonus content that you want to publish in there, you've got an exclusive epilogue that you only ever shared with your newsletter subscribers in the past, but now you're going to put it in this special edition of this book. It's a great way to just offer your fans a little something extra. You don't have to write any new content unless you want to write something like a bonus chapter or deleted scene or something like that. In general you don’t have to do any new writing, just maybe some reformatting and some new design elements, and then you'll have a new product.
[31:29]
Matt: Yeah, something that I really like that you also have noted in your outline is that I tend to read some comics and graphic novels, but only specific ones. But what I love is that, you know, oftentimes they'll take 30 issues of the comic books and combine them into one sort of anthology -
Lauren: Oh yeah.
Matt: Or, I can get the first 20 in one book. I would much rather have that. It looks better on my bookshelf. It's easier to read. I don't have to buy 30 individual, you know, books. And I think that that could easily be applied to other types of fiction, not just comic books and graphic novels. But again, a lot of the writers right now that are writing in romance and some of these other genres where the content lends itself to serialization very easily.
Taking a trilogy, combining it into one book and then offering that, you know, with a really cool cover variant or something really cool like that. Or there's all kinds of really cool things you could do with combining, like you said, the different pieces of a trilogy or something larger than a trilogy. I like that idea.
Lauren: Yeah, and I think that's also something, like when you're doing it with serialized fiction like that, that's a great opportunity to do it. But it's also something that you can do if you have a bunch of disconnected work that none of it is big enough to publish on its own, but you want to put it all together somewhere. I know I've referenced plenty of times in the past, authors that will do… like one of my favorite authors does an annual, like at the end of the year, she'll release bonus content to her email mailing list. Or as motivation to sign up for the mailing list, you'll get some exclusive, like a little short story.
I don't remember if I referenced this on air or not recently, but I recently read like a 20,000 word short by an author whose books I loved, who their friends all took a writing challenge where it was to take some of their original work and write a, like, scary story around Halloween using those characters. So she took these two characters that were athletes in a sports romance and instead turned them into ghost hunters. And it was just like an, like an AU of these ghost hunters.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And it was really fun. And it was really cute. And it was not something that was long enough to turn into a full published book.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: But if you had five or six of those different things together, and you published them all into an anthology of just all of your, like bonus content, novellas, whatever.
Matt: Yeah, short story.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Like Stephen King just released a book of short stories.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: So I'm assuming he, like many others when he's not writing full length, oftentimes you sit down and you just write something that's really short, you know, a short story, a novella, whatever you want to call it. I thought that was really nice to come across that. And I didn't realize it was coming out, but it's like I said, I enjoy reading a lot of times something a little bit shorter where I can do it in one sitting or on a plane ride. And so now having a bunch of new work from Stephen King that is not 400 pages per book.
Lauren: Yep.
Matt: I actually enjoy that. So I like the idea that, you know, on occasion you're releasing something that is again, not full scope, but smaller in size and you might want to combine five, six, seven, eight, ten short stories into one book. I think people really enjoy that.
Lauren: Yeah, it is. And it's also, if you're saying, I'm not really sure that I'm sold on the value of this, it can work as a lead magnet as well. I've definitely had this happen to me at least once where I bought a collection of short stories and novellas and bonus content from an author that I like.
And as I was going through, she would start each story, if it was connected to one of her existing books, like at the beginning of it, it would say, this is a bonus scene from whatever, or this is like an alternate ending to whatever. And as I was going through the collection, I came across a book that I had missed somehow. Like I thought I'd read all of her books, and that's how I landed on this collection. And I found a reference to a book that I'd completely missed. And I immediately went and ordered that book because I couldn't believe that I had somehow missed this one book.
So it can function as something… or I've been reading, I've been working my way through this extensive back catalog of these two authors lately, that all of their books are connected. They all exist in the same universe. I'm talking like, 25 books. And they're not necessarily connected in, like you can read them all as standalones, but somebody will make… somebody will be a sports agent in this sports romance. And I'm like, hmm, I bet there's a book where he's the main character. And sure enough, there is. He's just somebody's agent in this book. And then in another book, he is the main character and it is his story.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And if you've got something like that and you've got a way to say, like, I'm going to publish this collection of works that are not necessarily a series, but they're all connected in some way. It's a great way to put some of your work together.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: And introduce fans to things they might not have seen otherwise. This really is just me up on my soapbox now, isn't it?
Matt: Yes.
Lauren: It's fine. We're almost done.
[36:32]
Lauren: Going to go out of order again and jump down to, same way with nonfiction. We talked about how you can expand on your content by writing some new content or diving deeper into a particularly niche topic that you talked about that you get a lot of questions about.
Similarly for fiction you've got the opportunity to write some spin-off content. If your fans really loved a particular character, or they ask you a lot of questions about what happened to this guy at the end of the book, or what happened to this girl before that book started, great opportunity to explore that. You know your fans are interested in it. You've got the starting point.
So you're not writing completely from scratch because you've already got the characters built out and the world built out. Now you just gotta take it off in a direction and see where it goes.
Matt: Yeah, expand on it for sure.
Lauren: Exactly.
[37:18]
Lauren: And then the last real thing on here would be… just like for the nonfiction projects, you can create plenty of low and no content books that relate to your fiction books. Whether that's taking cool fan art, or your cover design, or something and just putting that on a lined notebook template. And now you've got a notebook that your fans can read. Can read - your notebook your fans can read. You're not. Oh my goodness.
Matt: That your fans can write in.
Lauren: This is what happens when we record before lunch. You've got a notebook that has your branding, your design, your characters, your cover on it that your fans can use as a notebook. You can also create something like a book club edition. Whether it's for solo readers or book clubs, if you want to put together a little notebook that says, you know, it's got discussion questions, prompts to get people to start thinking about this, and maybe some suggestions for like, oh, if you wanted to learn more about this, I read this book when I was researching, or this is the playlist I was listening to.
Matt: I think that is a cool idea.
Lauren: I think this is a cool idea.
Matt: Yeah, I didn't think about that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: That's a really cool idea.
Lauren: Yeah. So I think you could have a lot of fun with that or just create a dot grid journal that people can track the progress of reading your book in it. There's all kinds of different things you can do, I'm gonna reference that same blog post how you can create a notebook planner or journal and it could be a lot of fun. And it doesn't take a lot of writing.
Matt: Yeah, I like the book club edition. That's, that's interesting. I've never heard anybody talk about that before.
Lauren: Thanks, I'll take credit for that idea. That's fine. You can, you can make it as -
Matt: Copyright Lauren Vassallo, 2024.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: Okay.
Lauren: You can make it as a notebook or you can make it as bonus content within your actual print book itself.
Matt: Yeah, that could be the incentive to buy the print version.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah, I love that.
Lauren: There you go. My gift to all of you. Thanks for making it through 45 minutes of this episode. You can have that idea for free.
Matt: It is a good idea.
Lauren: Thanks.
Matt: Yeah…
[39:15]
Matt: I see you contemplating it. You could go through this one fairly quickly, even though it's your favorite genre.
Lauren: Okay, all right.
Matt: I have faith in you.
Lauren: We're going to, we're going to go real deep into this real fast. So, it’s okay.
Matt: I don’t know about all that.
Lauren: It's okay. We're going to be good. So in our last episode, I referenced the idea of turning your fanfiction into original fiction, if that's something that you want to do. And it's something that I just wanted to talk a little bit more about. Cause I wanted to make sure that I wasn't too like, blase about it in the last episode.
First of all, to be super clear, you cannot publish fanfiction as is. If it's fanfiction that is using the characters and the world and the plot of an existing published work, you cannot publish it. You cannot get print copies for your own personal bookshelf that you're gonna keep for yourself. I don't care if you wrote it or somebody else wrote it, you are not legally allowed to do so.
That being said, we do see very often lately authors that are turning fanfiction that they've written in the past into original published fiction. And it's doing very well. There are at least two books on the New York Times bestseller list right now that started as fanfiction. And I'm sure I could come up with a list a lot longer than that if I had like ten minutes.
If that is something that you're interested in doing, if you are somebody who's saying, I'm going to take my fanfiction that I've already written and turn it into a book that I can publish and sell, here are a few things that you’re going to want to do in order to do that.
First of all, you're probably gonna want to remove the original fic from wherever it's posted or wherever it's being hosted online. Plausible deniability at best, I guess. I don't know. I think that's something that traditional publishers require but I would just recommend doing it anyway.
You're gonna want to edit to remove any overt references to the original source material. So the characters can't have the same names. Obviously, character description is kind of unavoidable. Everybody knows that the male love interest in every Ali Hazelwood book is just Adam Driver. That's fine, sure.
Matt: I didn’t know that.
Lauren: Well you do now. But maybe don't have them have a scar across their face the way that Kylo Ren consistently does. You know, you got to have that like defining characteristic. You got to get rid of those things like that.
You're also gonna want to edit to remove any overt similarities in plot and world-building, especially if it's not our world, if it's a world that has any kind of unique elements to it that was written by that author, you're going to have to change things. You can't have it be exactly like that.
Obviously, you're not going to be able to make this content unrecognizable and you're not going to want to. I wouldn't be able to sit here and say that I can rattle off a list of traditionally published books right now that started as Reylo fanfiction if it wasn't like, obvious in some way where the source material was from. But you want to be able to at least have that like plausible deniability in there of like, no, those similarities are an accident or whatever.
And then the last tip that I'm going to give you is remember that in fanfiction, the readers are already familiar with and have affection for the characters that are in the original source material. So you don't really have to do any introductions at the beginning. You can kind of just jump right in, which is part of what makes it great.
In case you can't tell, I am very pro fanfiction, actually. So I'm like, take all of this with the understanding that like, I'm not knocking it. I'm fully supportive of it. I just want to make sure everyone covers their bases if they're going to be working with what was once fanfiction.
So just make sure that, you know, you go back through that work and see if you don't need to do a little bit more work at the beginning of your story to build those characters, turn them into real people and introduce them to your audience. But ultimately go for it.
Matt: That was pretty good. You did that in like two minutes.
Lauren: Thanks.
Matt: Roughly.
Lauren: Thanks. I'm motivated by the fact that the french fries are going to be cold if we take any longer.
Matt: I can appreciate that. But we've also gone on almost an hour now. So yeah, pretty much normal time.
Lauren: That's true.
Matt: And I think there's a lot of value in this episode, so -
Lauren: I hope so.
Matt: I'm happy with wrapping it up.
Lauren: So am I, so. If you have any questions about anything that we talked about today, feel free to shoot us an email, podcast@lulu.com. Also a reminder that we will be taking questions for a mailbag or ask us anything episode, so.
Matt: Oh yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Matt: Yeah.
Lauren: I haven't decided when that's going to be yet. So I'm just going to kind of leave that open call in there until we get around to doing the episode. But if you have any questions, comments, concerns, things you want to talk about, things you want to say, things you want us to talk about, podcast@lulu.com. Leave us a comment on Lulu social or YouTube, video episodes coming soon. You get to see our faces when we talk about all this weird stuff. And until then, thanks for listening.