Prompt's TechBlog
Blogging no guarantee of book deal
23 February 2007
Posted by Fiona Campbell-HowesThe front page of this week's Sunday Times carried the news that 42 year old Judith O'Reilly has received a GBP70,000 advance from Viking Penguin for a book based on her fledgling blog, www.wifeinthenorth.com.
Two things stand out about this tale. Firstly, it's doubtful that Mrs O'Reilly's six-week-old blog would have received quite so much attention from agents, publishers and the Sunday Times if she had not been, until recently, Education correspondent on - you guessed it - the Sunday Times. Proof that even in the supposedly democratic world of Web 2.0, it's not what you can do, but who you know...
Secondly, it perpetuates the myth that blogging is a good way for wannabe writers to score a book deal. In truth, very few blogs have so far been turned into books. Notable exceptions include Girl With A One-Track Mind, whose no-holds-barred sexblog made a successful transition to dead-tree media last summer, and Random Acts of Reality, the fascinating and frequently harrowing blog of London ambulance driver 'Tom Reynolds', which was bookified last August by Friday Books.
While blogging remains a fantastic way for budding writers to practise their craft, raise their profile and make industry connections, the participatory web also offers quicker and surer routes to getting published. Take lulu.com, the self-proclaimed 'premier independent publishing marketplace for digital do-it-yourselfers'. Lulu lets you publish and sell your book yourself, by printing just the quantities you need.
It's vanity publishing and there's no quality control, but if selling your work is your goal, you could do worse than to publish through lulu and promote your book through your blog, rather than waiting for an agent or publisher to spot you.
tags: wifeinthenorth | book deals | lulu
Labels: web 2.0
Comments:
A couple of thoughts:
One, I think blogging may actually hurt wanna-be writers (myself included), as we direct vast amounts of our writing energy towards the blog and not towards manuscript pages. And a blog, if entertainingly written, may be turned into a book, but rarely, in my opinion, is it a book in whole cloth (or maybe "whole bits" is more appropriate). Rarely is not never, I'll concede, but most of us have not struck gold in the stock market, either.
Regarding self-publishing, the problems I have with it are that there is no editorial review (or really any proper editing), so you must be responsible for making that happen yourself; and that most people underestimate the work of both distribution and PR. You can hire a good distributor and you can hire good PR, but you can't ignore the problem, post a link on your blog, and expect to sell thousands of copies unless you're already famous.
That said, self-publishing has proven to be particularly effective for niche-market nonfiction. And probably just as effective as a publishing house for poetry, somewhat sad to say.
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