For a couple of years now I’ve been telling you to harvest your blog posts, white papers and newsletters into a book. Could it be that Mark Cuban has been listening all along?

Until he says otherwise, I’m taking credit.

Cuban’s book, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It” is admittedly harvested from years of blog posts and sells for $2.99. Here’s a guy whose blog readership hits between 50k-1m readers and he’s trying to sell what’s already out there in an ebook? Yep, and So Should You! The WSJ notes that Cuban “refocused” the work and doesn’t expect readers to take it in like a literary masterpiece.  “Don’t feel you have to read it like a book,” he writes in the book’s foreword. “Use it as a way to get fired up. A way to get motivated.” Cuban’s book is about 30k words but I say you can go to market with half that.

 Here’s how to start writing a book:

• Do you read newspaper opinion columns? They average 700 words, so if you’ve written 22 pieces of that length, you could compile them into a book.
• Most blog posts average 300+ words, so 50 posts would total 15,000 words. Count the average words in your blog posts and do the math.
• How many speeches or presentations have you delivered?  Those add up, too.  If standard speech without long pauses runs 150 – 170 words per minute, a 20-minute speech is 3,000 to 3,400 words.  If you’ve delivered five 20-minute speeches on your subject, you’re ready to roll.
• Your old newsletter articles are good book fodder.

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