From Blogger to Author

It is becoming a common theme in the publishing industry. Bloggers who have a strong following online publish a book and become an instant success.

The formula makes sense. After all, as a blogger, you already have the content; and you already have the name recognition. Even better, you have hundreds, or even thousands of potential buyers coming across your website every day.

For a successful blogger, self publishing can be a great option. This is because one of the primary reasons many authors work with large publishing companies is to leverage their marketing capabilities.

But as a blogger, you already have access to your market. Why not monetize the site traffic, and keep all the profit?

There are plenty of examples of bloggers publishing books, and making huge money. Here are a few:

Marshall Brain began by writing informative articles on his website www.howstuffworks.com. The content from the website was later published into a book, and today the business generates over $20 million per year.

Christian Lander created a blog called StuffWhitePeopleLike.com. The site stats show over 33 million hits - which got Christian a $350,000 book deal from Random House this year. This kind of deal is something that anyone would like, no matter what color your skin happens to be.

And in 2003, Robert Lanham published "The Hipster's Handbook" and sold over 40,000 copies.

The trick, of course, is to get a huge following online. You'll need the traffic to sell the book. You also need to come up with a compelling reason for people to buy the book. After all, they are already reading your blog for free - why should they buy a paper book? Answer that question, and you could make millions.

You can learn more about self publishing books at http://www.wwaow.com/.