62 Blog Posts to Overcome Blogger’s Block — Review

I didn’t know quite what to expect from Marcie Hill’s book 62 Blog Posts to Overcome Blogger’s Block. Although I’m featured in the book (thanks, Marcie), that’s the only section I saw prior to publication, so I was interested to know what the book as a whole would be like.

As the name suggests, 62 Blog Posts to Overcome Blogger’s Block aims to help bloggers who have temporarily lost their creative mojo by providing inspiration and advice. Now, I’m sure that just like me you have read posts about creativity, inspiration and writer’s block before, so what does this book bring to the table?

Overcoming Blogger’s Block — What’s Inside

Marcie’s book has 167 pages divided into 11 sections with 62 different types of posts to spark content ideas. While the post examples in part 1 are familiar types (including list posts and others), the subsequent sections cover multimedia posts, honoring others, engagement, expertise, serving as a resource, humor, news, hot topics, roundups and other posts, so there’s a wealth of material there. If you are feeling fresh out of ideas, then you then skimming through this book will probably give you some fresh inspiration. I would have liked the table of contents to be more detailed so that I could go to each individual post type that interested me rather than just the main sections, but that’s an individual choice — and it probably wouldn’t bother anyone else.

Creative Inspiration

Once you navigate to an individual post type, you get an introduction, an explanation of the advantages of the type of post and a brief discussion of other considerations relating to the post type. This is followed by a hand-picked example of a good post in the category, with a short introduction and a screenshot. Overall, each post type takes up an average of two pages, which is short enough for you to read it quickly. I particularly liked the inclusion of a sample post, which meant I could check out the post online, see what response it got and get even more ideas that way. I write blog posts all the time, but sometimes you forget how many types of posts you can write. That’s where this book is useful.

Price Tag

The only question mark in my mind is the hefty price tag. Other blogging books, such as the Problogger book, sell for around $25–30. 62 Blog Posts to Overcome Blogger’s Block is on sale for $99. There’s a workbook available for another $39 — or you can save a bit and buy them both for $125. Here’s Marcie’s own explanation of why the book is worth it — see what you think. There’s good news, though. In January you will have the chance to buy individual sub-sections at an estimated price of $19 apiece.

One thing that can’t hurt is to check out the short sample available on Marcie’s site and see if 62 Posts to Overcome Blogger’s Block is for you. Who knows? It may spark some ideas. And if you do decide to go for it, I’d be interested to hear what you think.