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‘Vanity fair’? Should blog posts end up in books?
May 11, 2009 | 9:35 am
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By David Rothman
“…when it is this easy for writers to get their work straight to their audience through ‘one-click’ POD books and e-books, what does the future hold?” – Kate Lord Brown in the Bookseller, via Ron Charles, Washington Post book critic.
Charles’ thoughts: “Just became the technology exists to instantly turn your blog into a book, should you? (Answer: Please, no.).”
A different perspective: The Blooker Prize site. I don’t see a reference to 2008 winners. Will there be a Blooker this year? Perhaps, if the Contact Page information is up to date. Shown is Jules & Julia, a food-related book that won a Blooker in the past and is now an old-fashioned book.
My own take on this: Depends on the purpose and on your own writing habits. Kate Lord Brown (photo) was absolutely right to satisfy her fans’ demand for a POD book collecting popular posts. On the other hand, that’s different from blogging a novel as you go along. While Dickens thrived on serialization, not everyone can. What do you think?
By the way, I’m curious how many members of the TeleBlog community would shrug off the blook phenomenon, saying that an e-book would be a better way to collect fave posts.
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Comments:
In whatever form a book goes out into the world, I think the criterion is the same: quality. The usual knock against self-published books (blooks) is that they are of poor to mediocre quality. The same can be said of traditionally published books. It is only the tiny handful of truly excellent books that enter the public consciousness (I’m thinking of fiction here). No reason a blook couldn’t be one of these. It’s unlikely – but so is it for every book published, in every avenue.
As for your question, David, intuitively I would think a blog-to-book would fit nicely into an e-book format, especially if one wanted to include links between posts/chapters. It would take a pretty special book to be self-referential in this way and still work. I’m thinking on the level of Nabokov’s Pale Fire .
FYI: in the fall, I’ll be self-publishing an ebook titled (seriously) Noncrappy Things from my Blog.
Hmm, what’s the difference between a diary and a blog. Not to much. Anne Frank and Adrian Mole aren’t much different than a blog book. Another popular one would be Waiter Rant. In the top 50′s at amazon in several categories. I think it’s like any other type of book. Some like autobiographies, some like blogs. Also perfect for people that want “quickies” where they can read a short bit and put a book down.
In the fiction community I belong to, authors routinely serialize their novels through social networking blogs such as LiveJournal. Since all of these authors’ serializations appear on the reader’s Friends page (LiveJournal’s equivalent of an RSS reader), this allows readers to keep up with the writings of a number of authors at once. Some of these novels have subsequently appeared in print; by the time they do, there’s usually a waiting audience for them.
To my mind, this practice is simply the modern equivalent of the pulp-magazine serialization of science fiction novels. The novels would first be serialized, where they would attract attention because they could be read alongside better-known authors. Then, when they had proved their worth, they would be published in book form.
The quality issue mentioned above is important, of course, though keep in mind that a blook is not necessarily self-published. I just received a copy of a novel, published by a small press, that was originally serialized at LiveJournal. Because of reader feedback, the author was able to revise her novel before submitting it for publication; it then underwent further editing. In addition, in this particular fiction community, there are volunteer editors who are willing to critique the stories *before* they appear on blogs.