“Small is the New Big,” by Seth Godin, started out as a collection of blog articles. “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte started out as a collection of articles that he wrote for Wired magazine over a few years. Did they know that these articles were going to become books one day? I’m not sure. But it hardly matters.

Books are hard for one person to write, as I’ve discovered over the past several months. As I have advised every budding author I’ve met, you can’t write a book in a vacuum. It will never get done. It’s nearly impossible to maintain the degree of motivation and discipline necessary to finish the whole thing. And even if you do, you’ll most likely end up with something you can’t sell. You’re just putting too many eggs into one basket with this approach. Thomas Edison learned this lesson the hard way when he invented his automatic vote-counting machine. (He found out that politicians didn’t want accurate vote counting. Isn’t that a shock?)

They say you can eat an elephant if you do it one small bite at a time. Writing is no exception to this. But here’s the advantage to writing articles first: you can find out what the response is to each article. You can put each article out there, and see what people come back with. But more importantly, each article you complete is a finished product.

You’re not putting a whole lot of skin in the game by publishing an article. You may think that your idea is the best thing since sliced bread, and you may be surprised to discover that the rest of the world doesn’t agree. This is an easy lesson to learn with an article. Writing a book, on the other hand, only to discover that you’ve written something no one wants to read, makes for a difficult pill to swallow.

Finally, articles are easy to organize. Books are complicated. Writing one article at a time takes the sweat out of compiling materials. It gives you a higher degree of freedom, since you don’t have to worry about how the puzzle pieces will fit together. When you’ve finally generated enough quantity of material to compile into a book, you can just throw away the unwanted pieces.

The moral of the story: if you’re thinking of writing a book, but don’t know where to start, start by writing some articles.