Four Places to Find Content to Repurpose for Your Book

I get a lot of questions about how to get started writing books. How do you get moving when you are stuck at that beginning phase of writing?

If you're a business owner looking to publish a book, you likely don't need to reinvent the wheel and start completely from scratch. You have probably come up with content that you can use and repurpose to provide some of the content for your book or give you a start. The following are four places to begin.

Podcasts

Your podcast is a great place to start getting content for your book. I've had a few authors take their podcasts and get their shows transcribed to feed content into their book. You could do the same. Even if you look back at topics to get chapter titles and sections for your book, it's a good place to start.

Videos

If you create a video similar to this one on YouTube, Instagram or any other type of platform, just like the podcast, you can use that content to feed content into your book. Look back at some of your video topics and at some of the things you discussed. You can get some of those videos transcribed to start with some content you have and begin to compile your book without having to start again from scratch.

Blogs

A blog is one of the best content sources because your blog is already in a format written to be read, unlike your podcasts and videos. Blog posts are much easier to work with than podcasts or videos, which are more conversational. To write my first book, Making Love in the Microwave, I pulled a lot of the content from my blog and added to it. It got me a long way from having to write a book starting from zero.  

Presentations and Training Materials

If you've ever done a presentation or pitch related to your business, which many business owners have, look there to start gathering content. If you've held courses and have course materials, worksheets, or checklists, these are also great places to begin. Most of those things are not going to take up a whole book, but if you use them as a starting point, you can begin to get clear on topics that are interesting to your audience. You can start to get your wheels turning and at least begin to spark some ideas.  

When you start to compile content from your different platforms, you'll start to see that you probably have more than you think you do to get started.