For many of you, penning marketing campaigns, plotting social media strategies, and formulating promo plans probably means you’ve written more words in your time than most full-time fiction authors or ghostwriters have. However, despite content creators working with words on a daily basis, the crossover into the literary world is often fraught with pitfalls. While there are many marketing gurus who have released self-help guides and reference books, there are far fewer who’ve been able to tell a compelling story and nab a trade fiction deal. The world of trade publishing is renowned as being a particularly difficult one to crack, with the odds stacked against people from marketing backgrounds, who are routinely overlooked for not being of a high enough literary caliber.
However, there is plenty of inspiration out there for people without a classically trained literary background to get published. Some examples include poker pro, Qui Nguyen who used his experiences playing the game to write From Vietnam to Vegas!, Maria Sharapova who penned her book Unstoppable, and businesswoman, Otegha Uwagba who detailed her tips for women in the workplace, entitled Little Black Book. Even if your name doesn’t ring out quite as some of these do, these helpful tips should make the process seem less of a gamble.
Read More
After a full eight hours of scouring a screen with your beady eyes often the last thing you feel like doing is picking up a book or an e-reader. However, staying on top of your reading is essential, to not only develop your own writing style but to keep abreast of positive trends in the book industry.
Studies have shown that reading before you go to sleep is an excellent way to relax your brain and help you slumber deeply, so why not set aside an hour or two every night to enjoy your chosen tome.
Write Often
Just as it’s important to read often, it’s equally important to switch from marketing writer mode to prose writing mode as much as you can. As with anything in life, practice makes perfect and where writing is concerned that is certainly the case. Set yourself a minimum of 500 words a day and see how many consecutive days you can rack up. You’ll surprise yourself with what you can create in just a few months!
Plan the Story You Were Born to Tell
There’s no set way to approach writing a novel or work of non-fiction. Some authors dismiss the idea of planning altogether, preferring to write whatever comes to mind at the time, leaving the organization of potential chapters to later stages of the editing process.
That said, for most people new to the practice, it pays dividends to plan before you start writing, even if your story is set in stone in your head. Work out what your protagonist wants or desires and how they plan to go about obtaining it. Plot your story, pinpointing where your call to action, midpoint, and finale will all occur. When it’s all set out before you, set out into your first draft, safe in the knowledge you know you’ll not get tied in knots.
Use A Writing App
For people who struggle with planning, or using the unreliable search function on Word, there are some excellent writing apps available that aid you to compartmentalize not just your chapters, but character outlines and settings to boot. The most well known is Scrivener, although there are others available as well, all with slightly different functionality and strengths.
Enter Competitions and Seek Feedback
The most daunting part of the writing process for many people is showing what you’ve created to readers. A good way to start is to find like-minded sensitive readers and writers who may be able to give you useful feedback and pick up on things you’d previously overlooked.
There are also a whole host of novel and short story competitions you can enter your work in, many of which will provide professional feedback in exchange for a slightly inflated entry fee.
Good luck and get writing!
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The Gap Between Content Skills and Book Structure: Where Writers Go Wrong
I've worked with dozens of writers who came to me thinking their content marketing background would translate seamlessly into writing a book. It doesn't. Not without a deliberate shift in mindset. Here's what I see happen time and again: a skilled content creator finishes her first draft and it reads like 80 loosely connected blog posts strung together. There's no narrative arc, no sustained argument, and readers feel whiplash jumping between topics.
The core issue is pace and dependency. Blog posts are designed to stand alone. Each one must hook the reader in the first sentence, deliver value, and wrap up cleanly. Your blog audience has no obligation to read post two. But a book reader has paid money and invested time. She expects you to build something. She wants to feel progression, not just repetition with new examples.
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Here's where your content skills become an asset instead of a liability: you already understand how to make complex ideas digestible. You know how to use short sentences, active voice, and specific examples instead of vague claims. What you need to do differently is layer these skills across a longer spine.
One practical fix I recommend: before you write your book, create a narrative skeleton that looks nothing like your content calendar. Don't list topics. Instead, map the reader's journey. Where does she start (emotionally, knowledge-wise)? What does she need to believe, understand, or feel at point B before she can accept point C? What specific transformation happens by the end? This isn't filler. This is your book's immune system.
When you have this skeleton, your content skills kick in . Now when you're writing chapter three, you're not asking "what else should I teach about customer psychology?" You're asking "what does this reader need to know right now to follow my argument?" Completely different question. The second one produces better chapters because it respects the reader's cognitive load and the book's internal logic.
Another common mistake: writers with content backgrounds often make their books too feature-dense. They pile in extra frameworks, bonus case studies, sidebar tactics. In a blog post, that's clever. In a book, it's noise. Readers lose the main thread. Your job is to be more brutal about what stays and what goes. Every section must earn its place by moving the reader closer to transformation, not just adding information.
I worked with a LinkedIn strategist who had written 200+ posts on personal branding. Her book outline was 15,000 words of notes before we even drafted. We cut 60% of it. What remained was tighter, less obvious, and stronger. The book became about how to build a distinctive presence under constraints, not a greatest-hits collection. That required her to kill content she'd already written and tested. That hurt. But it mattered.
- Start with a narrative skeleton before drafting chapters
- Let content skills handle clarity and accessibility, not structure
- Cut features that don't drive the reader toward transformation
- Test your argument on someone unfamiliar with your work
More questions
Can I turn a series of blog posts directly into book chapters?
Rarely without major restructuring. Blog posts are optimised for isolation. They assume the reader has no context and won't read related posts. A book assumes accumulating knowledge. You'll need to rewrite sections for flow, cut redundancy, and add transitions that explain how each chapter connects to the previous one. Expect to rewrite 40-60% of the prose.
What content marketing skill transfers most directly to book writing?
The ability to explain technical or abstract ideas in plain language without oversimplifying. That's gold in a book. What doesn't transfer well is the "one idea per post" constraint. Books require you to develop ideas across thousands of words, return to concepts multiple times, and build cumulative understanding. That's the hard part for most content creators.
How do I know if my book is still just a collection of posts?
Read it aloud and ask: if someone started at chapter five, would they feel lost? If yes, you have a collection. A real book has narrative dependence. Each chapter refers back, builds on previous chapters, and the reader feels the line of argument tightening as they progress. If someone could read chapters out of order without confusion, you're still thinking in blog mode.
Bottom line: The same skills that make you good at writing blog posts, social captions, and email newsletters translate directly into writing a book. Structure, consistency, and knowing your audience matter more than having some special "author gene." If you can plan and finish content week after week, you can plan and finish a book.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a different skill set to write a book compared to blog content?
Not really. The core skills overlap: outlining ideas, writing in a clear voice, editing for readability, and sticking to a schedule. A book simply asks you to sustain those same habits over a longer stretch and organize more material into chapters instead of individual posts.
How can I turn existing blog posts into a book?
Group posts by theme, look for natural chapter groupings, and fill in the gaps between them with new material that connects the ideas. You will likely need to rewrite transitions and update outdated points, but the bulk of your research and thinking is often already done.
How long does it take a content creator to write a book?
Timelines vary widely, but many people who already write regularly can produce a first draft in three to six months by treating it like a content calendar: a set word count or number of pages each week, with editing and revisions after the full draft is done.
What is the biggest mistake content writers make when starting a book?
Trying to write it perfectly in order from chapter one onward. Content creators who succeed usually draft messily, out of sequence, and revise later, the same way they might write a rough post and polish it before publishing.
