How to turn a blog into an eBook – tips from Sam Squire

Meet Sam Stephen Martin or Sam Squire as he is known in the blogosphere. A teenager from Lincolnshire, Sam started #1YearOfSquire, a men’s fashion blog that has, in a year, made its mark in the fashion industry and more recently on TV and publishing. Having already worked with major brands and fashion houses, Sam decided to document his successful blogging journey in an eBook, Access All Squire: The Good, The Bad and The Blogly.  Here’s what it takes:

I started as a men’s fashion blogger but since then my little old website has become so much more, with reviews, giveaways and exclusives, I have become a recognised blogger in the fashion industry and more recently on TV. I now have close relationships and affiliations with some of the worlds biggest brands and work on promoting their products and brand services. I’ve also had a top selling book all about my first year as a blogger – it was meant to be experimental but ended up being so much more than I ever imagined! Just search Sam Squire in your native eBook store.

I’d definitely recommend publishing a book about your blog, even if it is just a simple self publish on the Kindle store. Readers love to know more about the person behind a blog they follow. The one thing that always stuck in my head when I began writing my eBook was that I didn’t want to bore the readers, didn’t want to put in too much unnecessary text – so I actually made mine a short book, it’s about 50 pages maximum. I did this because I have never written a book for publishing so I had no idea how well it would go down. I didn’t want to write a huge book that would then fall at the first hurdle.

Writing a short narrative is a great way to get into books – it’ll take about a week to write after that, you can monitor the success and if it did good and you enjoyed writing it, you can go ahead and write a longer one which is what I am currently in the process of doing. Writing this will obviously take more time but since you have already established yourself in this space, people may be more inclined to read.

An important tip is to always get it proof read. If you’re self publishing, be it digital or in print, you must get someone with good literary abilities to read it over, check for spelling and punctuation errors. There’s nothing more embarrassing for a writer than someone picking up on spelling errors. If you’re working directly with a publisher they’ll do all of it for you. But in self publishing a bit more work goes into it, maybe more than some people may like.

The main part of publishing an e-book is to enjoy it. If it’s a memoir, you get to reflect back on all the things that have happened to you in life, both good and bad. If you think you’ve got a keen reader base who enjoys reading your blogs then heck go for an e-book!