If you are enough of an expert on a subject to be planning to write a book, you’ve probably done other writing on the subject already. Maybe you have your own blog; maybe you’ve written magazine articles in print or online; maybe you post articles regularly to LinkedIn — a good idea, by the way.

You’ve done all this work, so why waste it by using it only once? Instead, consider how you can repurpose it and use it a part of all of the content of your book. Now I use the word ‘repurpose’ intentionally, because you can’t just slap all the articles and posts together and put a cover on it and call it a book — well you could, but you’d end up with a lot of discontented readers and your reputation as an expert would suffer.

What you need to do is sort your materials into similar topics. Blog posts on topic A go with articles, FaceBook updates, Tweets, LinkedIn articles and even rough notes on topic A. Now you can go through them and pick out the parts that tell the best story about topic A. There will, of course, be repetition so you’ll need to eliminate that, and you may find there are gaps you need to fill. In the end, you’ll have a good meaty chapter on topic A. 

Now go through your materials and do the same for each topic in your book. Sort them into the most logical order and you have your Table of Contents and at least part of each chapter. That’s a great head start in writing the book.

You may have heard people talk about “blogging a book”, and that is a variation on this theme. Some people set out to write posts with the intention of curating them all into a book when there is enough material. My only problem with this method is it takes quite a bit of time to have enough posts to make a book. I would rather see you just get started right into the book by gathering your existing materials as I’ve described here.

Writing is hard work — make sure you squeeze the most value out of everything you’ve written.