A blog is essentially a reverse chronological publishing tool. You can publish your book chapters as long-form blog posts and organize your blog posts as book chapters.
This guide explains how to publish chapters as blog posts and display them on the front page with links to each chapter.
In this guide
We’re using Index and Chapter for page names because they’re most commonly found in books, but you can name the pages whatever you want!
- Create a new page from Pages → Add new page called Index, then publish.
- Create a new page from Pages → Add new page called Chapters, then publish.
When we’re done, your new Index page will be used to display links to the chapters of your book, while your Chapters page will display a rich view (with excerpts and images if you want) of each chapter of your book.
If you want the Index page to be your site’s home page, these steps will show you how to set a static page as your home page.
Set up your Chapters Page to display your latest posts (which is how we’ll publish chapters) using a Query Loop block. The Query Loop block will automatically display your blog posts (chapters) when you publish them. It also has a setting in the Block Settings to display your posts from oldest to newest. This way, when you publish chapter 1 first, it will always show up at the top of your chapters page.
Create a new post from Posts → Add new post. This post will be your book’s first chapter. Add the chapter content, and publish the post.
Repeat this step and publish a new blog post for each chapter of your book.
On the book’s index (or table of contents) page, you can write an introduction and include a subscribe block if you want folks to be notified when you publish new chapters. Then, add the Latest Posts block to display the titles of each of your chapters. The Latest Posts block also has the option to sort from oldest to newest so that your chapters display in order.
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You can also use pages for your chapters instead of posts, and display them on your Index page with the Page List block.
Several “blog-to-book” services, like FastPencil and BlogBooker, let you import your WordPress blog and turn it into a printed book.
