Twenty Major's blook

Found this at The Independent, tucked away in an article on the Bloscars (annual Irish Blog Awards):

"The acerbic Twenty Major has been the big winner for the past two years, claiming back-to-back wins in the Best Overall Blog category. Twenty -- whose identity remains hidden behind that pseudonym -- admits that the awards upped his profile considerably.

He even landed a publishing deal for a "blook" (a book based on a blog) -- the first of its kind in Ireland -- entitled The Order of the Phoenix Park, which is due out in a matter of weeks. "The awards have played a really big part in making blogging more mainstream in Ireland and moving it away from the perception that it was something for techies and nerds," Twenty explains.

There's an odd justification for migrating blog characters to print to be found in the Synopsis at Amazon:

"For three years Twenty Major has written a daily blog. Now though comes a tale so bizarre and abominable that mere words on a computer screen wouldn't have been able to do it justice. These words need to be on paper ..."

So much for why the need for a dead tree version :-)

Inquiring minds might be interested in a review of the blook. Crime Always Pays has republished The Dubliner magazine's review by Bridget Hourican. A couple of hints as to what you might learn:

• "daily musings average 50 comments" and one post received 481;
• "has not just re-worked old blog material into a book" - although same characters;
• "doesn't feel like a compilation of musings awkwardly soldered together."

One Woman's Story

Diane MacEachern has written to share the story of how her blook came into being. Thanks, Diane!

***

My story is pretty straightforward. After the 2004 elections, I became convinced that the greatest opportunities to protect the environment existed in the marketplace. So much pollution, climate change and
wilderness destruction are driven by manufacturing of goods and services people buy; it seemed reasonable to encourage people to buy products that minimized their environmental impact.

I created the Big Green Purse website (www.biggreenpurse.com) first. Consumers, especially women, were telling me that they wanted to do the right thing, but couldn't find the information they were looking
for. I developed the website to make it easy for women to get their questions answered with up-to-date information and easy-to-follow lifestyle suggestions.

The blog is an attempt to offer some editorial perspective on day-to-day issues and news that crop up. It gives me a chance to link to other terrific sources of information, and to get feedback from Big Green Purse readers.

The book expands greatly on the information provided both on the website and in my blog. The book, in fact, is far more detailed - it's over 400 pages of tips, product suggestions and background information. That's way too much information to include in either a website or a blog, but perfect for someone who wants as many ideas as possible.

The book includes much of the information that's on the website or that has appeared on my blog, plus additional details, resource lists, and more. I'm actually going back now and enhancing the website with
information that I found during the book research. Just as well, I'm using the blog and website to update information that exists in the book. So the book, blog and website will all work hand-in-hand to help
consumers make the most environmentally-friendly decisions possible.

As for the mechanics of all this, I developed a book proposal while I was preparing to launch my website and blog. This is my fourth book, so I have a track record as an author. Working with my book agent, I
was able to secure a book contract with the Avery imprint of Penguin/Viking just as I was launching the website (whose content had served as some of the fodder for the proposal) and the blog.

It definitely helped create my overall "author's platform" to have a blog and website up before I wrote the book. I never would have had time to work on them once I got the book contract. Also, having the website and blog create very good marketing opportunities for the book.

I hope this explains the relationship between my blog and book satisfactorily.

Sincerely,

Diane MacEachern
Founder & CEO
Big Green Purse
www.biggreenpurse.com

Big Green Purse

February's issue of MORE magazine had a page called "Women of the Blogosphere" and wouldn't you know, one of the blogs has just been turned into a blook! The book is Big Green Purse from the blog Diane's Big Green Purse run by Diane MacEachern. According to MORE, MacEachern is getting 3,500 hits a month. She also maintains a companion site, "The World Women Want."

I regret that I haven't been able to find out anything about how the book was put together since the blog doesn't appear to be searachable. I did send her an email, though :-) so we may hear from MacEachern. Wonder if she knows about the Blooker competition coming up?

Andrew Keen's Cult of the Amateur

Publishers Marketplace announced the following deal on 28 April, 2006:

Digital media critic and tech-industry veteran Andrew Keen's THE GREAT SEDUCTION: Silicon Valley's Assault on Our Culture and Values, expanding on ideas from his blog (www.thegreatseduction.com) and recent piece for The Weekly Standard criticizing the ideology and cultural consequences of the Web 2.0 movement, to Roger Scholl at Currency/Doubleday, in a pre-empt, by Stephen Hanselman at LevelFiveMedia [literary agency].

I discovered at Amazon, that the working title had been transformed into The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. I also learned that it had been published in the UK by Nicholas Brealey Publishing.

Normally I would spend my time trying to establish the relationship between the blog and blook and see if I could pull together snippets from the blog and elsewhere to determine how the blook was fashioned. Unfortunately I couldn't find a search function on Keen's blog. [And to tell the truth, my recent illness has left me too tired to care much :-(] I did want to point out that Nicholas Brealey looks like fertile ground for ferreting blooks. After all, where there's one, there just might be another! The first title I'm going to check into is Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs (She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse)
by Paul Carter.

Adrian Mole: The Lost Years

I've just finished reading Adrian Mole: The Lost Years.. The inside flap of the dust jacket says: "Sue Townsend is the author of the immensely popular Adrian Mole diaries, ostensibly penned by young Master Mole, which broke sales records in England. Translated into twenty-seven languages, these private reflections gained a cultish following that numbered in the millions."

No, it's not a blook. But Adrian Mole has his own website now. Back in 1982 when the first in the series appeared, blogs were but a blip-to-be on the horizon. I hesitated to mention the book here, since it was not a blook, but there's a couple of things that can be gleaned from it since it reads very much like a blog plunked on paper.

First, I found it difficult reading. I'm reminded of a reader's criticism of Kristin Espinasse's Words In a French Life, which made the shortlist for the 2007 Blooker Prize. Andrew S. Rogers wrote at Amazon: "Unfortunately, despite several attempts to make good progress moving from cover to cover, I couldn't bring myself to do it. I have to conclude that what works very well in a blog just doesn't translate (so to speak) very well to a book." He blamed the difficulty on the tiny sections. "I suppose my attempt might have succeeded better had I tried to read this the way I read her blog: one small section at a time, with a day or so in between samples." By contrast, Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia, did a masterful job of creating a blook from her posts, supplying the necessary transitional material that never made her blog. [She also eliminated dates and anything else that sounded bloggy - creating a real tale.]

Second, one-liners and slick anecdotes [one reader's opinion -- don't shoot!] don't make for compelling reading. I found nothing to savor or to reflect on. By contrast Irma Bombeck's books were also humorous but had bits which stung or pricked, stuff that made you think -- at least occasionally. I basically ended up plowing through Mole's diary. I'll grant you it was funny but I'm really glad I didn't purchase it.

Lastly, a word of praise. There are two handfuls of characters which are actually fleshed out enough to be recognizable with foibles and personalities of their own. I would have thought that to be a difficult thing using the diary approach.

So if you're considering converting your blog to dead tree format, I'd suggest 1) that you ask yourself if the entries are too uniform to be read one after another in one sitting; 2) that you check to see if there's substance tucked away that could be brought forward a bit; and 3) see if the salient characters can be eliminated or whether they need to be rounded into real contributors.

Good News about Feeling Good

Congratulations to Pip Wilson who left an announcement in the comments that demands elevation to a post.

"My book, The FeelGood Manual, was done first in my Wilson's Almanac ezine, then put online, then made into a Lulu book. In November, 2007, a publisher found it online, approached me and we signed a publication contract in December. (It will be out in June.) I was surprised, as it's 'Faces in the Street' I've been trying to sell to a publisher!"

Be encouraged, Blook Folk! In case you missed them, here's a link to a letter Wilson wrote me about Faces in the Street and my post about The FeelGood Manual.

Caucus for Corruption

While it is sometimes true that blogs have been turned into blooks, it is, perhaps, more often the case that blogs provide the genesis, the impetus, rather than specific content. In September of 2006 Publishers Marketplace announced the following book deal:

5 September, 2006
"Blogs for Bush" founder Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan's CAUCUS FOR CORRUPTION, detailing corruption in the Democratic Party, to Eric Jackson at World Ahead, for publication in spring 2007.

Margolis blogs at Blogs for Victory, Noonan at GOP Bloggers. The hype for the book gives us this - "When Democrats made "ethics" the centerpiece of their 2006 campaign, [the authors] knew the public wasn't getting the whole story." The story of how they got together to tell "the whole story" is told in part in the About the Authors at Amazon:

"When Matt Margolis launched Blogs For Bush (www.blogsforbush.com) in 2003, Mark Noonan became a regular contributor. It became one of the top blogs of the 2004 presidential campaign season. Margolis was among the first bloggers to receive media credentials to cover the Republican National Convention. As popular bloggers, Margolis and Noonan have appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and BBC Radio."

How they managed the actual collaboration comes from an interview at Psycmeister's Ice Palace.

LEO: To borrow a term from the liberal lexicon, the two of you come from geographically-diverse locations. What were some of the logistical difficulties encountered in your collaboration efforts?

MARK: Well, we're pretty much on different sides of the country, Matt lives in Massachusetts, and I live in Nevada. So, not only was there an issue with geography, but also a 3-hour time difference. Much of the research was done individually, and we shared it via email and such, but, Matt also came out to Las Vegas twice last year (a week in March, and a week in November), and spent that time working together, adding more material, writing and rewriting...

Note that I'm not calling this a blook, although I'm pretty sure a case could be made for it. [I've got an email in to the authors to see what they have to say.] Caucus for Corruption is the first in a three-book deal according to Margolis's blog.