Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book from one of the authors.

I’d never heard about BlogCast FM before, but when Srinivas Rao, co-author of Blog to Book Deal: How They Did It, contacted me to review his book, I got on the podcast right away and found a wealth of interviews from bloggers across the world who made a splash one way or the other.

The title of the book describes exactly the content of the book: “how they did it”. It’s not a how-to guide to getting a book deal. It’s not a step-by-step system to write posts that will get an agent’s attention. You might learn things, but it may not actually be about book deals.

The book is short and contains interviews from bloggers like Ramit Sethi, Chris Guillebeau and Jenny Blake, among others. But the two I found myself most interested by were Julien Smith and Jeff Goins, despite the fact that I didn’t really like either of their books.

Here are a few choice quotes from their interviews.

Julien Smith:

The content has to be not intellectually interesting, but emotionally compelling. That is probably, I guess, my edge.

Jeff Goins:

When you’re not willing to compromise and do whatever you really need to do and say what you really need to say–that’s when you really start to find your voice.

Most of the book was quite interesting to read because it’s about different bloggers’ experiences. It’s like a behind-the-scenes of successful Internet people. There’s a lot of talk about “how to be successful” in blogging, and despite the fact that reading this book won’t make you successful in blogging, it will certainly give you an idea of what people have done to become so.

The book fulfills its non-promise, and that’s something I can appreciate. Too often we get swayed by books that seem to have the secret to something, only to let you down by not delivering the promised content. This is a pitfall that Blog to Book Deal has avoided, and I really appreciate that. It sticks to what it knows: interviewing bloggers and getting to the heart of the topic.

If the blogging world interests you and you’re curious to know about how easy (or hard) it is to get a book deal from a blog, 7$ isn’t wasted on this book. It’s also full of little thoughts on blogging itself, or on voice, or on being extraordinary, a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.