Four Pitfalls of Repurposing Content for your Book

In the last post, I shared some ways to find content to repurpose for your book. Today. I want to talk about some challenges that come with repurposing content to write your book.

To recap, repurposing content is taking content from some other platform to put into your book, like a podcast, a video, training materials or a blog. Sometimes I've seen authors repurpose content but not have it work the way they thought that it would. One of the pitfalls I see is that aspiring authors tend to think they can essentially transfer over everything from the other platform and create a book, which is never true.

The following are four challenges or pitfalls of repurposing content for your book.

Language

Conversational language is not book language. You do not talk the way that a book is written, even if you're very well-spoken. The words that you're saying out of your mouth don't necessarily translate to a page in a way that's going to work for your readers. Often people think that their podcast episodes are going to translate into the written word. Most of the time, they don't translate as well as you think that they would. You can use them for big-picture content and ideas, but they're not always going to come over in a readable way.  

Repetition

You repeat yourself a lot in conversation, even if you don't think you do. If you have a podcast, videos, even blog posts, you're probably saying some things over and over again without even realizing it. Aspiring authors think may they have a lot more content than they have. You might have 50 podcast episodes, but you also might spend a certain number of minutes out of each episode repeating what you've said in a previous episode.

 Lack of Content

You're going to need a lot more content than you think. Don't think that because you have 12 episodes of a podcast, it equates to 12 chapters in a book because you have 12 different topics. Again, you likely have a lot of repetition, and you're likely saying a lot of stuff that doesn't translate to the page. Your transcribed content from your other platform will have to be edited and cut down significantly, so you're going to need a lot of it to create your book. These other platforms can feed your content, but they're not going to provide all of your content. 

Perceived Value

Finally, you're still going to need to bring additional value to your book. Even if you're using something like a blog post that's well written, if your audience has already seen everything that you're putting into your book for free, they're going to be annoyed that they're having to now pay for something that was already free. You might have some readers that have never heard of you, but you also have readers that have been following you and have been a part of your community for a long time. If your book consists of all of your other stuff thrown together into one document, they're not going to appreciate it. Your book that people are paying for needs to bring more value to the table than what you give away for free.