Turning Your Blog into a Book

There is an amazing amount of useful, free information available on tech blogs for fledgling tech entrepreneurs (this list is a great place to start). I think sometimes we techies forget that this wealth of content is unknown to the non-startup world. I was reminded of this recently when I met a first-time entrepreneur who said when he was first starting out he tried finding books on Amazon, Googling for stuff etc. He described it as an epiphany the first time he stumbled upon Fred Wilson’s blog, which then led him to Brad Feld, Mark Suster, Eric Ries, Venture Hacks, etc.

So this weekend I thought I’d try an experiment. I took about 100 of my blog posts (the ones that I thought were most “evergreen”), bundled them as a PDF and submitted them to the Kindle Store. The Kindle submission process was surprisingly easy. You give your book a name and upload the PDF and then choose pricing. They force you to charge a minimum of $0.99. Also, strangely, if you charge less than $2.99, Amazon takes 70% of the revenue, but if you charge between $2.99-$10 they only keep 30%.

I decided to price my book at $2.99 and donate all of the proceeds (~$2 book) to HackNY, a non-profit that “keeps the kids off the Street” (encourages college students to join/start tech startups instead of working on Wall Street). All of the content in the book is available for free on cdixon.org. The only reason to buy the book is to get this blog in a different format and to support a good charity. It is available in the Kindle Store here.

I don’t expect many people to buy the book but maybe some first-time entrepreneurs will stumble on it and from there discover more tech blogs. Think of it as “Kindle SEO” for tech blogs.

Finally, I am having trouble getting the links to work on the Kindle version. I’m not sure if this is an Amazon policy or if I am just doing something wrong (the links work fine in the PDF I uploaded to Amazon). So here is an alternative version on Scribd that has working links.

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