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Alison Flood

Alison Flood is The Bookseller's news editor.

Books from blogs - do they work?

08.05.08

Hi all

I'm writing a feature for The Bookseller about the trend for creating books from blogs, and would really welcome thoughts about what works, what doesn't, etc.

What are the best/worst books from blogs you can think of? There are obviously some that have done really well - Belle de Jour for example. Then there are some bloggers who have won huge advances - Wife in the North and La Petite Anglaise.

Are there particular genres that work best as blooks (nasty word)?

Did The Friday Project collapse because the model just wasn't viable?

It seems to me that there is an awful lot of rubbish out there on the web,and it should be a publisher's job to sift through and find what works, just as they would do for a more traditional book.

Any blogs that should be made into books out there?

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By Philip

'Intimate Adventures' was helped by some ITV/Billie Piper 'exposure' (excuse the pun), and the success of Abby Lee's 'Girl With a One-Track Mind' makes me think the blog-to-book transition may only work with 'posh porn' memoirs. However, Anya Peters' 'Abandoned' has been one of the biggest 'misery memoirs' in recent memory and it all started as an online diary, so that has certainly worked V well. Also, Colby Buzzell's 'My War: Killing Time in Iraq' and Salam Pax's 'The Baghdad Blog' (which, to my mind, was the first blog-to-book to start it all) are two of my recent favourites and both certainly appeal to that 'modern military memoir' book-buying demographic. Blog-to-book is an interesting idea in itself - Livejournal, MySpace, BlogSpot are all free, so why turn it into a £7.99 paperback? Well, for the same reason e-readers won't spell the end for the printed work. Blogs-to-books certainly work. But with so many out there, and with so many terrible (not to mention libelous!), I imagine one has to be pretty unique to make the transition. I own a blog. I read a number of others run by friends and colleagues. Many of which are hilarious, and I'm sure thousands of people would also find them humorous. But will it persuade any of them to part with £7.99 for a memoir by a complete unknown when one of James Patterson's ten-novels-a-year is a face-out on in the Fiction department.... I doubt it! Having said that, in my opinion, Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" would/should/will prove profitable. But I'd be interested to know if any of the big names on 'YouTube' like 'Whatthebuck', 'Smosh' and, (yikes) 'Chris Crocker' have been approached... might be worth a punt, for a US publisher in particular - hundreds of thousand of subscribers and millions of video views should generate some sales!

08 May 08 13:49

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By simon

'It seems to me that there is an awful lot of rubbish out there on the web,and it should be a publisher's job to sift through and find what works, just as they would do for a more traditional book.' I see that you've set your stall out straight away. If you're a news editor as your title suggests , you should bring us news and not your opinion. Otherwise we might think that you're trying to lead us to an opinion, and heaven forbid that you'd try and do that. However, even though it's pretty obvious that this feature is being written purely because the Friday Project failed, it is an interesting article. In my opinion, the model is viable, and I also think that the FP were pioneers in a way. They failed, because they tried to run before they could walk (and they didn't have someone to curb their spending). There's no doubt that the blog to book model will work but the publishers of these things need to be patient. The FP published far too much in a short space of time, some which was great, and some which was v v poor. This was their downfall (again, in my opinion). I hate that people lost money and I hate that there is such bad feeling. But as a concept, the blog to book idea is great.

08 May 08 20:42

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By RobC

Consider the Internet as an endless slush pile that's accessible to everyone.

09 May 08 08:47

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By alison.bone@bookseller.co.uk

Hi Simon. I'm actually trying to start some debate around the issue, and while of course I would keep my own opinion out of the news we run, and out of the features I write (as much as possible - I'm not a machine!), I thought the platform of a blog would be a good place to air it. That said, it also seems a fairly straightforward point - are you arguing that the blogosphere in its entirety should make it as a book? I agree with you that the model is a viable one, and I also thought TFP did some really interesting books. The article I'm writing, although prompted by TFP's demise, isn't at all going to be an attack on the blog-to-book model - how could it be? Lots of books from blogs have actually worked. It's more an exploration of what does, what doesn't, etc. It would be good to hear from you why you think the model will work and why you think it's a great idea.

09 May 08 09:11

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By Tobias Gould

Check out myspace.com/sas_hermit for a book being blogged.

09 May 08 11:18

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By June Austin

I had thought about publishing my one ! http://juneaustin.blogspot.com/

09 May 08 11:28

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By Ollie

In my experience as someone who reads a lot of blogs (over 1,000 posts per week), this can work well, but often doesn't.  I read Wil Wheatons 'Just a Geek'.  Which was little more than an expanded selection of posts from his website.  I was a concerned by reading the book having already read much of the blog, but the selection provided a good narrative of a period of the authors life, and was a delight to read.  However, more interesting is the author's take on the publishing process, and their marketing of the book (http://tiny.cc/3xRE5).  They (apparently) judged the market based on Wil's childhood acting experience in Star Trek rather than his prolific online writing - Wil's blog is apparently one of the oldest on the internet. I'm also looking forward to getting my hands on Wil Wheaton's (self-published?) book 'The Happiest Days of Our Lives' and Heather Armstrong's 'Things I learnt about my Dad (In Therapy)' (http://tiny.cc/gGJPH) both of which may be written by bloggers, but are not lifted directly from their blogs and are instead written as books by bloggers not books of their blogs.  Bloggers are starting to realise that they can't just lift posts from their blog and turn them into a book, since the majority of their readership have already read most of the content.  They already have a market, and finding ways of making a living out of that market, like writing a new book, enables them to make blogging/writing a full time job, and provides their fans with fresh content. Thinking about this makes me question what a blogger is, and a blogger is a writer who self publishes.  So mainstream publishers, should be actively looking for very popular blogs, that have already created a market for the content.  Whether or not the blogger writes fresh content, would depend on a case by case basis.

12 May 08 12:23

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