Stealbelow reported on December 15th, 2005:
A few months ago a Brazilian blogger Raquel Pacheco landed a blook deal. It is the latest runaway best-seller in Brazil and is an autobiography of a young prostitute, a.k.a. Bruna the Surfer Girl. The blook is called The Sweet Venom of the Scorpion: The Diary of a Call Girl and it’s selling well:“In just over a month, it has sold some 30,000 copies and is already in its third edition — a huge success in a country where only a fraction of the population reads books. It also ranks third on Brazil’s bestseller list for nonfiction books, neck and neck with international hits like “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.” (Reuters)
The Author
"In many ways, Raquel Pacheco’s life was just like that of any other privileged Brazilian girl. She attended São Paulo’s best private schools, lingered at shopping malls with friends, and kept a steady diet of MTV and English classes. That is, until she turned 17.Unlike most of the semilliterate adolescent prostitutes in Brazil, she had a home computer and Internet access... ." (Foreignpolicy.com)
The New York Times has this quote from Pacheco:
"In the beginning, I just wanted to vent my feelings, and I didn't even put up my photograph or phone number," she said. "I wanted to show what goes on in the head of a program girl [prostitute], and I couldn't find anything on the Net like that. I thought that if I was curious about it, others would be too."
Two things: 1 - It's good advice to write about something no one else is doing or just do it better; 2 - Like News from Meat Street Pacheco's book is controversial, not just titillating. I suggest reading the entire New York Times article, "She Who Controls Her Body Can Upset Her Countrymen."
The Blog
According to The Daily Times (Pakistan), her blog was profiled in several Brazilian magazines and stil "gets about 20,000 hits a day. It was the blog that drew publishers to Pacheco, who had boasted on the site that she was writing a book. She rejected three offers to put her story in print before finally signing with a small publishing house called Panda Books, which hired a journalist to help her organise her ideas into a book. “Once I started reading the blog, I was hooked,” said Marcelo Duarte, the book’s publisher. “It had all the ingredients of a good soap opera — family drama, love stories and lots of sex.”
The Blook
The book was translated into English with the name The Diary of a Brazilian Call Girl: The Scorpion's Sweet Venom and published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2006. It was also translated into Spanish: El dulce veneno del escorpión: Diario íntimo de una prostituta by Bruna Surfistinha, Mario Gallicchio (Translator).
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