LONDON: Read any good blooks recently? A guilty romp through a private memoir, perhaps, or a slow, greedy wallow in a cookery diary rich with flavours? Maybe just a quick glimpse at the working life of a paramedic? If you haven’t yet, you surely will, because blooks – books based on blogs or websites – are beginning to reap returns for publishers. From the moment the adventures of Belle de Jour jumped off the computer screen and on to the page, publishers saw the potential in dishing up our favourite on-screen pleasures in book format. And whether it’s the slightly grubby thrill of Girl With a One Track Mind (sales of more than 150,000) or a dip into Frank Warren’s PostSecret confessional postcard collection, readers seem happy to buy them.
That editors see the web as fertile ground in the hunt for new authors is not so surprising. According to the latest report from the search engine Technorati, 120,000 blogs are created every day and the blogosphere has doubled in size since last May, with 70m floating around in cyberspace. Even discounting the abandoned and forgotten, of which there are many, that still leaves millions of new voices clamouring for readers’ (and publishers’) attention – any one of which could be the next bestseller.
Most aren’t, of course. There is, after all, only so much that anyone wants to know about how grumpy your boss was today and what you ate. But among the uninspired, the untalented and the unimaginably dull come the undiscovered. “Blogs are a source of new talent but I tread very gingerly around them,” says Juliet Annan, publishing director of Penguin/Fig Tree. “Most blogs are fantastically boring. What is exciting is that you can find people who don’t realise what great writers they are.” But it isn’t the relative newness of the format that attracts publishers. “I’ve got no interest in just publishing someone because they are writing a blog,” adds Annan. “What matters is the quality of the writing – are they really a writer or are they just someone who is writing a diary?”
Annan was the publisher behind the well-received Julie and Julia (tag line: 365 days, 524 recipes, one tiny apartment kitchen), in which the author/blogger Julie Powell worked her way through a copy of the American cooking superstar Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Having won the first Lulu Blooker prize – awarded to a book based on a blog or website – Powell is casting her eye over this year's crop and is realistic about the genre. “My blog had an advantage because it was a project, so it had a beginning, a middle and a kind of end, but it was obvious to me from the beginning that I didn’t want to include everything I had written on the blog and put it on the page, because it would have been stiflingly dull,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be indulgent.”
While many agree that blogs are an interesting source of new voices, the material and format don’t always translate easily. “With blogging you are writing immediate emotions and reactions. You don’t have to join it all up. Writing a book is a very different exercise,” says Katy Follain, publisher at Penguin. “You are looking for bloggers who can distance themselves from the techniques they have been using and go beyond them.”
It sometimes seems as though the blog is nothing more than a shop window to attract traditional publishers. What is the difference between it and a huge slush pile of manuscripts in a publisher’s office? If you take out the technology, is there anything new?
Peter Freedman, founder of the Blooker prize, is unsurprisingly upbeat. “Blooks are changing the relationship between writer and reader – from a passive to a more interactive role,” he says. “Authors used to keep their work in progress in a notebook, but now they put them on a blog and readers will help shape the way the ideas are developed. Successful blogs are interesting to publishers because a lot of the research and development has been done already.”
Plenty of comments on the bottom of a post certainly suggest that readers are engaging with a blog, which alerts publishers to its potential (and that readers might be prepared to fork out GBP6.99 for a print version of it). Powell draws parallels between the traditional editing process and interaction between the blogger and blog reader. “My editor was great. She was really good about making me see what I did and didn’t need, and it was nice to have another eye, although at the same time my blog readers were sort of editors. I got the feeling for what they liked – and by getting the comments back and forth my tone developed.”
Structured blogs tend to make better blooks. “The main thing with a book is narrative,” says Jake Lingwood, publisher at Ebury, responsible for Girl With a One Track Mind. “The other blog (to book) we have is the Red Paper Clip – a guy who has managed to swap a paper clip for a house in a year. It has a very compelling narrative, which is what makes the book so fantastic.” —Dawn/ The Guardian News Service
