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How to 10x the Value of Your Writing · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to the Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: One of my email subscribers, Connie, asked a question that made me almost slap myself upside the head in embarrassment.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: She asked me this how do you take an article, podcast, or book content and repurpose it into another medium?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now I say that I'm embarrassed because this is an important topic for writers, and I have never thought to address it before in one of my daily emails or podcasts.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, Connie, thank you so much.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: This is a great topic, and I appreciate you asking about it.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Repurposing your content is a fantastic way to get more bang for your buck when it comes to your writing.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I believe that you can easily 10x the value of what you've already created by reusing it in a different medium.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you a couple of basic principles around this, and then I'll show you some examples of how I have repurposed my own content.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the first principle almost any nonfiction writing can be condensed or expanded into another form.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, fiction is a whole other thing.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not talking about fiction when I'm talking about how I repurpose stuff.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I have honestly zero experience in repurposing fiction.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, screenwriters do this all the time when they are adapting novels or stories for movies and TV shows.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But again, that's not my expertise.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I will leave it to the fiction writers to explain their principles for how they do that.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: But the basic idea here that I'm sharing is that if you write any type of nonfiction, you can shrink it or you can expand it to fit into another format.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: For example, a long book chapter can become a much shorter blog post, which can become a much shorter social media post, and vice versa.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the first principle is almost any nonfiction writing can be condensed or expanded into another form.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the second principle.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: When repurposing your writing, it has to be adapted properly to the new form.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: So what this means is that you can't just chop a section out of a book chapter or use it for a blog post or article.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: The basic ingredients might be the same, but you're making a brand new dish.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So hopefully that makes sense.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just take something from one format and dump it into another format without adapting it to that new format.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let me give you some examples.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: How many do examples do I have here?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've got five or six examples.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let me go through these.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And this will give you kind of an overview or a bird's eye view of some different ways to do this.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Example number one.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: My second book called The Artist Suitcase has 26 short chapters.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: If you look in the print version of this book, each of those chapters are probably three or four pages long or so.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And about half of those book chapters actually started off as blog posts, and the other half were original to the book.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: But when adapting the blog posts for the book, I had to rewrite those blog posts so they flowed more smoothly and they matched the overall tone of the book.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, the blog posts were kind of a first draft, and I wrote those kind of quick, but they had to be smoothed out, and sometimes I would change the intro or the ending of that blog post so it really fit into the format of a book.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Example number two, let's talk about these daily emails and this podcast, which you're listening to right now.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: My daily emails are adapted into this daily podcast.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, I'm not just sitting here riffing on something, I'm actually reading uh a very slightly adapted form of the email that I change a few things in for the podcast.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading this off of my screen right now as I record it.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it's mostly the same, but again, it's two different mediums.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I do is I add a different intro to the email material because the podcast is has a different intro that the email doesn't have, and I add an outro that usually isn't present in the email and so forth.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Example number three, let's talk about client books for a second.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: When I write my client books, sometimes they add a service that I perform for them where I repurpose their book content into LinkedIn posts and articles.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: For one recent client, for example, I wrote 12 posts and three longer articles.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: The articles were, I think the art the blog post or the blog posts, the LinkedIn posts, haven't had enough caffeine yet today.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the LinkedIn posts were two to three hundred words each or so.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: And the articles were around 1200 words each or so, if I recall.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't just take that book material and dump it into those posts or to the articles.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I actually rewrote the material super extensively.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So much so, in fact, that you probably wouldn't even recognize the book as being the source of those articles and posts.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Here's example number four.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: When I'm a guest on somebody's podcast, I take the recording and I run it through transcription and then I pull out my best ideas and I use those in various places.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: For example, perhaps my own books or these emails or maybe a talk that I'm doing or whatever it is.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Example number five, my new book called The Ghost Powered Author, comes out in a few days, and you will definitely be hearing more about that soon.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you follow me on LinkedIn, by the way, you'll be seeing some of the material from the book repurposed into LinkedIn posts and probably my emails and podcasts and other kinds of things.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now keep in mind, though, that my daily writer audience, so daily writers, the overall brand, if you will, for this podcast and my emails, those are that's a different audience than the audience for my ghostwriting book, which I wrote for prospective clients.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really kind of two different things, but there's a lot of stuff actually in the book that I can repurpose with just a little bit of effort for this audience, my daily writer audience.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of wrote the book intentionally for that, uh, so that I could take out pieces and adapt it for other formats.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, in other words, my point with example number five here is that I will repurpose some of that material from my own book into LinkedIn posts.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then finally, example number six, let's continue on with this theme of my ghostwriting book.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: The way that I started writing the first draft of the ghost-powered author was that I revisited some teaching and coaching sessions that I had done for aspiring ghostwriters.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I have all that material, and so I would look back through that and go, well, that's good, that's good, that's good, that's not so good, or that's not going to fit into this book.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it gave me some good raw material to start out with.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I wrote a chapter on my perspective on ghostwriting for another author's book anthology a year or two ago.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that chapter was on ghostwriting, and that was a really, really good resource for me just to have some bones of the material that I would use for the book.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I used that material for a starting point and what I wanted to say about ghostwriting for my own book.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I could go on and on with this, but you get the idea.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime that you're writing for the purpose of teaching or inspiring somebody, which is nonfiction, that material can almost always be used in another format or medium.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: However, then this is really important.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: One of the big mistakes that I see people making when they're doing this is they fail to keep in mind that every medium is going to need a different style.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: So a book, a blog post or an article, social media posts, those are all different things and they each require a different style of communication.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: For example, books are designed to sustain more in-depth thinking, whereas blog posts and articles are meant to take one single idea and expand on it and give you a quicker hit than obviously a book is going to do.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And social media posts, in my opinion, should be kind of like a little light tap on the shoulder.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: They're just going to give you a little something.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And even on social media, there's different levels of that.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you get on threads or X, I'm actually not on X at all, but if you get on threads, which I spend a lot of time on, you know, the most effective things there are just a couple sentences or a paragraph, typically.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: But LinkedIn posts are longer, typically.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: So even among social media posts, there's different levels of uh, there's different styles and different uh links of writing that is appropriate for those forms.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: At least this is all my take on repurposing.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: If you ask 10 writers for their approach on repurposing, you're probably going to get 10 answers.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: But again, this is my take, and I hope this is helpful.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, before I wrap up this episode, and this has been kind of a long episode, some of my favorite daily writer emails and podcasts begin as a reader question.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if you'd like me to consider your question in a future email or podcast, shoot me an email at Kent at KentSanders.net, and I would love to hear from you.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening today.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Keep writing and keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.