Blogging Tips

Many bloggers want to find new ways to market their site and services. Learning how to make an eBook from their WordPress blog is sometimes put on the backburner due to the enormity of such a project. No one looks forward to wading through hundreds or thousands of blog posts to organize it into a cohesive book project. Even if you hire someone to do it you are looking at a high price tag to put something together of this magnitude.

If you have ever wondered if there is a plugin for that, be assured that there is. Anthologize can be downloaded from WordPress.org and is a developer supported plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs only. The plugin site provides a user guide, FAQs and a forum to discuss using the plugin. Anthologize is the perfect tool for grabbing content from one or more blogs and organizing it for publication in print or digital formats.

Install Anthologize Plugin

In the Plugin profile area of your Dashboard in the left sidebar, select Add New. Then select Term in the search area and type in “Anthologize” in the text area. Click the Search Plugins button. Select the Details link to the left. Before installing any plugin check out the FYI feature area to the right to make sure your version of WordPress is compatible. Anthologize is compatible with WordPress 3.0 or higher with PHP 5. Before clicking the Install Now button review the necessary changes you will need to make to your php.ini file in the Other Notes tab.

Setting Up Anthologize

In the left-hand sidebar of your dashboard find the Anthologize panel and select Settings. If you are going to allow multi-users of a site to work on a number of projects select the minimum role allowed to create and edit projects. The default is Administrator but you can select Editor or Author.

Create a New Project

Select New Project, fill in the necessary information and save project. Visit the My Projects area and click on the name of your new project to start.

Building an eBook

To build your eBook project you will create Parts (chapters) and drag and drop posts to the parts. Posts are on the left side of the dashboard under the Items panel. You can filter your posts by Tag, Category, Date Range or Post Type (posts, pages, imported items, and other post types in custom themes). If you have more than one similarly themed blog or permission from another blogger who is providing content for the project, select Import Content, input the Feed URL and click the Go button. Then use the imported items filter to review content for inclusion in your project.

Editing Items

After adding the desired posts into parts you have the ability to Edit, Append, Preview or Remove each item. Selecting Edit brings up a page of content that is a replica of your post. You can make additions or edits as you see fit for your project. Append is useful if you’d like to combine a number of posts into one item.

Exporting Project

When you are ready to create a draft or publish your eBook, select Export Project. Provide the necessary copyright and author information and click the Next button. The next screen allows for you to write a Dedication and Acknowledgements and choose the Publishing Options. After you’ve made your selects click the Export button. If there are any errors visit the plugin site link that is posted on the WordPress.org download page.

Now don’t put off creating that eBook any longer!