Use a Blog to Publish Your Book

Blogs belong: I like blogs. They are cheap (read: free) and, with the addition of "pages," can function as websites. One use for a blog—and I've done this twice—is to enable potential customers to preview your book. To be honest, this is a form of publishing, but I don't want to scare you. In any case, previewing with a blog tests your draft and builds an initial audience.

Using a blog to publish your book is easy enough structurally, though you'll have to work around the blog's habit of showing posts in reverse (last shall be first) order.

• The simplest (seemingly) way is to post the chapters in reverse order, in which case your oldest chapter (e.g.: Chapter One) will appear at the top of the stream and the newest chapter (e.g.: Chapter Ten) will appear at the bottom. This is fine if you have all the chapters in hand and if you don't mind working backwards. A downside is that the neatness of the solution disappears if you decide to start posting comments that are not quotes from the book.
• A second approach is to direct followers who want to read the chapters in order to use the archive on the main page. Blogger archives default to order of appearance; in other words, your epilogue would appear before your prologue However, you can change the archive so that it lists the most recent post first. This approach has the same downside as the first one. It loses it's tidiness if you decide to add random posts that are not quoted from the book. 
• A third approach, the best in my opinion, is to create a Table of Contents page, where you list the chapter names in book order and link them to the relevant post/chapter. You just need to know the trick for identifying the URL of each post, which you get by clicking on the time link for a particular post. 

Whatever you decide, it's worth giving your followers some instructions. For example, the header for my murder mystery (Evil Speaking) instructs visitors to use the Table of Contents page to read the chapters in order.—The Publishing Pro