How to Write a Book with Content from Your Website and Get it Read

Gotta make sure I’m showing you guys the right page. Oh, I know. I’m recording this so I can put it on the forum for people who don’t live here in the area.

And so the topic tonight is how to write a book and get it read. Right? Is that why y’all here?

That’s not why you’re here. You’re in the wrong room. It’s going to sound like a rant, because that’s what I sound like usually.

I didn’t say nothing. You got a question already?

You said forums or forum?

Forum, forum, F o r u m.build.com and so it’s going to sound a lot like a ramp rant. But how to write a book using your blog content is where I’m starting from, right? You want to use your blog.

If you’re writing a blog, and that’s all you’re doing is writing a blog, someone talk to your spouse or your significant other, your boyfriend, girlfriend or kids or somebody. If all you’re doing is writing a blog, ask somebody very close to you to get out a black pen and write a big S on your head and call you stupid. Because it doesn’t make sense anymore to just write a blog.

Everything you do on your blog is a contribution to what can eventually become a book. And how do you know what goes in the book? Well, you go to your Google Analytics and find out what’s most popular and put that in there.

Well, that just makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m going to give you an example. I’m going to hop back and forth.

This is recording between. Look at that. You can’t see that very well.

There’s a book. Gee, I wish I had been drinking at the time. There it is on Amazon.com.

oh, look, it’s written by Whimsy Blue. I know him. He’s like, cool.

Gee, I wish I had been drinking at the time. The name of the book and the subtitles, 101 reasons why you never hear people say that. Gee, I wish I was drinking when I did that.

We don’t hear that. Except Colin. I’m glad I was drinking, right?

And so for about a year, what I did every day, I created a website. I called it wispid. W I S P I D Wispid.

And it means the wisdom you gain from the stupid things people do. You know, we learn a lot from the stupid things that people do, right? And so I created the website.

I called it wispid.com and I just read through the web looking for stupid things people do. And invariably the stupid things people do is link to being drunk. It’s incredibly how stupid people can be when they’re drunk.

You know, it starts off funny, that’s funny. Then you don’t laugh and then you shake your head and then you just say, look how you’re going to hurt yourself and you, for crying out loud. But you stop before you hurt somebody else.

This kind of gets in degrees of severity. And so over the course of the year, I just put all these anecdotes up on my website to find out which ones people really thought were stupid and which ones that weren’t. And I ended up with more than 900 of them in the course of a year.

Well, there was a girl, 26 year old girl, like a Priyanka girl, right? She got mad at her boyfriend, took the baby, they had a four month old baby between them, took the baby, you can see what’s going by the feet. And swung it at her boyfriend and cracked the baby’s head by hitting her boyfriend and.

Exactly. It made me so mad that I decided I’m going to put the book out there. I don’t care if anybody reads it or not, at least I’m going to try.

Gee, I wish. So I took the 101 most read blog posts anecdotes that I had put up on there. This guy did this, this girl did that, and I knew which ones were the most read.

Why? Because I had analytics and I’ve been putting it out for you. So I had the 101 most popular and I put them all together.

I got Illustrator’s son, you met him last week, to draw me a bunch of pictures, put them in a book and there it is. And all came out of a, you know, now I’m a published author, I’ve got a book and it’s been read 100,000 times. It hasn’t been bought that much, but it’s been read.

And I can prove this is actually my number two son, my oldest son had him physically sit on the commode for about six hours while he painted him. Then we put this together, we call this a toilet reader, which is what it is. You get the book to sit on, you know, we do that, we sit on the throne and read things.

Right. But it’s a book that came out of a blog, right? It was nothing more than a blog I had written for a year.

Are you going to tell us how you got it published?

Self published? Yeah, I’m heading and self published person. I did it.

Well, this one here, there was a small private publisher, dude, in Palo Alto. So I had a couple people kind of compete for it and do good books. It was the name of the place.

And they’re out of business now. So where’s my money? But they went through, did all the leg work to get it up there.

Did you have 5,000 copies in my garage?

No, no. Print on demand. I had about 30 in my garage, but I got in.

I got rid of all them. So I go speak to somewhere. I take my book with me.

They don’t want to give me 12 bucks for it. You’re too cheap. No, I can give it away.

Books. I’ll get to the point where books don’t make money. They’re calling cards now.

I’ll come back to that. Books aren’t money makers. They’re calling cards.

But this.