Shelley Hitz explains how authors can repurpose content they've already written—especially when self-publishing—by extracting sections from one book and publishing them separately. She gives a concrete example: material from the coauthored book Forgiveness Formula was separated into a standalone title, Trusting God When Bad Things Happen, which sold well. She notes rights differ when working with traditional publishers.
Chapters
A great way to reuse content that you've already written in a book is to repurpose it. And so you are able. Once you've written that content, you can use it in any way that you want. And we've done this many times. So one of the first books we wrote was called Forgiveness Formula. And it's a combination of my husband and I. I wrote some of it, he wrote some of it. And there was an entire section in that book called Trusting God When Bad Things Happen, or I don't know if that was the exact title I gave it in that book, but it was a whole section. And I. I typically would give that information in a separate presentation from the forgiveness stuff, but it flowed really well in that book. But then what I did is I took that content and I separated it from the forgiveness formula and I published it as a separate book. And that book's called Trusting God When Bad Things Happen. That little book has sold so well. And I think it's because sometimes people feel resistant to forgiveness. Let's just admit it, right? Sometimes we're just like. But people were really interested in the Trusting God when bad Things Happen, you know, when they see that topic and they see that. So anytime you have content, like if you want to write a book and then include some of that content in a memoir later, you totally can. And when you self publish, you have the rights to use that information any. In any way. Now if you're working with a publisher, then that may be different and you would need to communicate with your publisher. But we done that many times where we take, you know, information and we use it in multiple ways. And so hopefully that was helpful to you.