Is it time to write a book?

There are probably a lot of online writers who were members of Helium, the revenue sharing site that has recently announced its demise.  Helium was a fairly good place to write and earn passive income from ad revenue for many years, but Google's Panda brought the revenue stream down to a trickle for most Helium writers.  The revamping of the site last year did nothing to help, in fact, it caused revenues to go down even further.  At some point, Helium decided to call it a day.

The bright side of Helium's failure is that I can now remove all of my articles from the site and  re-purpose them.  Some may work well as blog posts, or be eligible to be posted on other writing sites - once they have been de-indexed by Google.  I did take the opportunity to download all my articles and have them sitting in a neat file on Dropbox.

Today I decided to see how difficult it would be to strip the html from the article files.  I found a neat little tool online that was free and plugged in the text from a Flash Fiction story.  It worked very well, leaving me only a few formatting chores - paragraphs, quotations marks, etc.

But I hadn't even remembered writing this story and so it was really fun reading it all over again.  Then, as I thought about it more, I realized that even though this story was stripped down and compact (flash fiction had to be 400 words or less on Helium) that it implied a lot more going on behind the scenes, and a much bigger story was potentially waiting to be written.

In fact, it seemed like a good foundation for a novel.  And I wondered if I would be making a mistake to republish this short fiction, when it could be turned into something much more substantial.

So, the question for me this morning is:  is it time to write a book?

I am going to try to flesh out the setting, the characters and the plot and see if I can muster the discipline to give it a go.

You may also have something that you've written that has the potential to be more.  Think about your stories, your ideas and see if there is one that has the potential to be more than you've written thus far.  Ask yourself if it is time to write a book.  Can you do it?  Why not?