Words on a page

That’s the question (sort of) that this post over at Men with Pens. And for a lot of bloggers having a small number of readers does bother them. A lot.

But, as James Chartrand (the author of the post) writes:

I’d like to turn that line of thinking on its head and give it a good ass-kicking. It’s time to put stats into perspective.

The thrust of the post is that even if you have a small audience, you’re regularly reaching a lot of people. They’re coming to you to be entertained and to be informed. As Chartrand says:

Each post you write draws people to your stage, and readers come to enjoy your performance.

That’s pretty good situation to be in. Better than that, in fact.

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OK, the experiment wasn’t that great. At least, not in the cosmic scheme of things. But it was interesting.

A little background: if you know me, you probably know that I hold a lot of social media — things like Facebook, MySpace, and microblogging like Twitter — in some level of contempt. Not all social media, but a lot of it. In fact, I find Twitter to be kind of useless and at times narcissistic.

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Once again, I’ve dusted off the idea of turning a set of blog posts into an ebook. The inspirations for this resurrection were Wil Wheaton‘s recently-released book Sunken Treasure and a Web-to-book experiment done at the recent Tools of Change for Publishing conference.

I realized that the way in which I’ve been writing my blog posts for the last year or two — detailed here and here — makes converting those posts (which exist as files on my computer) to a format that I can compile into an ebook fairly easy.

As the second post I linked to in the previous paragraph explains, I write my posts in a text editor using a lightweight markup language called Markdown. I have a tool on my computer that will convert Markdown files to a typesetting format called LaTeX. From there, I just combine all of the LaTeX files into a document, and then use the typesetting software generate a PDF. It actually is that simple.

Assuming that I can actually find the time to do the job, what will these ebooks contain? Advice, opinion, tips, techniques, and how-tos. The content won’t simply be the blog posts as they exist now. I’m hoping to expand on some, combine a few, and add some padding material, and even include some work that has yet to be seen by eyes other than mine and my business partner’s.

So, all I have to do is:

1. Choose the posts to include

2. Find time to pull everything together and do the additional writing

3. Come up with a decent cover design

Watch this space for updates on this (somewhat mad) project.

I’ve been known to bang out decent (and better-than-decent) work in a hurry. Like what? I’ve written 1,200 word articles in 45 minutes, and have on several occasions plowed through a week’s worth of blog posts (for three blogs) in just over an hour.

But all that pales in comparision to what Laura Spencer recently did. Spencer blogs on the b5Media blog network and she and several other b5Media bloggers took part in a blogging marathon. Twenty-four posts in 24 hours. While I’m sure that the participants in this exercise weren’t blogging every hour on the hour, they did have to prepare a lot of posts in advance. And that can be a challenge at the best of times.

Spencer offers five tips on how to write a lot of blog posts quickly. You can easily apply the information in this piece to writing a bunch of short articles as well.

My favourite pieces of advice? Use a set structure and Keep the posts simple. Reminds me of the speed writing formats that I blogged about.

Like many of you, I don’t have a lot of time on my hands. By day, I’m a partner in a technical writing consultancy. By night, I’m a partner in a technical communications consultancy. And a husband. And a father. And a freelance writer. And someone who contributes to three blogs. And finding the time to write and blog is tough.

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