Writing a book is daunting. 

Whether you’re a writer or not, writing 20,000 words or more on a similar topic is challenging. But that’s only the creation process; there’s still the marketing of it.

Is there an easier way to write a book? Of course. 

The trick? Repurpose content.

Great news: This trick can be applied to any long content piece to ensure effectiveness.

Before I tell you the “how,” let me share an example to illustrate repurposing content into a larger content asset (book).

Have you ever exchanged a handful of emails with someone over a significantly important issue? It’s almost like writing small articles in each email trying to answer or debate succinctly.

I’ve had a few of these conversations with people like you in response to an email. I love them.

But, those emails are lost in Outlook inboxes and never see the light of day. Yes, they helped one or two people, but it was unable to help people at scale. And that’s a problem.

A problem two scientists ran into that turned into a full-blown book. One of the scientists was a physics teacher, while the other was a student he taught that graduated.

The student and the teacher drew close over months of emailing until one fateful question. The teacher, a Christian, asked the student what her beliefs were on God and life.

It was six months before she responded to this direct question. But after responding, they emailed back in forth over this topic for months before they realized they had a book sitting in their email.

Those emails turned into the book, Who is God Really? by Stephen Robinson and Victoria Lim.

They turned their emails (questions and responses) into a book that details Victoria’s (student) journey to faith through the emails.

This book would have drained both Stephen and Victoria’s time and willpower if they decided to write it from scratch. So instead, they leveraged the momentum as a jumping point to write the book.

How you can apply this: Working towards a course? A book? A lead-gen tool? Repurpose content that you’ve created and turn it into a more extensive content asset. OR, plan to write articles covering specific things that will be in your content asset, slowly building toward it.

A real-life example of this was how my team created a 20+ hour video course covering our newly released book Stop the Vanilla in Your Career and Life.

We used the structure and content from the book to build out the modules and scripts, which helped save time and validate the content we would cover.

Repurposing content doesn’t always work. But 90% of the time, it will increase reach and effectiveness.

Don’t be lazy. Repurpose content to save time and money.

🧠 // JO