"Build Your Own PC"

By JingleBerry, I'm getting good at this ferreting-for-blooks business!

Okay, so I made a tiny mistake. Morris Rosenthal sent this correction:
"The first book I sold to McGraw-Hill was The Hand-Me-Down PC, which is long since out of print. Taught me quite a bit about titling. I insisted on "Hand-Me-Down" but it turned out to be unattractive to bookstore browsers vs specific competing titles like "Repairing Your PC", "Upgrading Your PC", etc.. The title "Build Your Own PC" was the second book I sold them, sold over 100,000 copies so far, translated to a half dozen languages, and also started with a draft published online.

3 More Blooks from Malaysia

I waiting to hear back from Razima Shahira, the reader who volunteered to do some research for me. She was quick with the info on the blooks but I want to give credit where credit is due -- I asked her to tell us a little bit about herself and if she has URLs I want to link to her.

Here's the comment that started the quest: "Saya nak promote blook saya "bukan dugong biasa". I followed it and found myself faced with a language that looked like Malay but I wasn't sure. I went from there to two more blogs! So while we're waiting... here's what Shahira had to say regarding the comment left on my blog. My comments are in square brackets.

****

okay, they're in Malay language, malaysian is our nationality.
It's Malaysian Malay, which is diff from Indonesian Malay... i'm kinda suprised u recognised the difference... cheers for you! [ed., It was dumb luck]

next, there are 3 books. Yes, all of them are real blooks, blogs published into books.

d first add, http://www.dugongsenyum.blogspot.com/ :

Book title: Bukan Dugong Biasa (Not Your Average Dugong) [ed., what's a Dugong?]
Writer: DugongSenyum (SmilingDugong)
ISBN: 978-983-42734-5-3
Mediator: Rudy Bluehikari
Published early this month.

It's his only blook on his blogs. Q, why do you need a mediator for a blook? [ed., Beats me! Good question]

anyways, next add, http://tanahseberang.blogspot.com/ :

Book title: Tanah Seberang (literally means the other part of the world).
Writer/Project Coordinator: DugongSenyum

still in the making, compilation of blogs of other bloggers about their experience overseas. be it studying, working, travelling, etc... motivational stuff.
Entries shuld b emailed to: basri.normohdPADAM@gmail.com

Right now he's posting artwork proposals for the cover.

And the last add, http://masukbarisan.blogspot.com/ :

Title: Masuk Barisan (Military call when u want them to get in line, how does it go? can't remember... sorry) that's why the cover has a pic of men in slacks lining up. [ed., Fall in?]

Editors: Jigo, Attokz dan Basri ( i reckon Basri is DugongSenyum himself) [ed., Why?]
Publisher : Mak Itam Network Enterprise
ISBN : 9834273436
First print: 2006
The book's project blog: http://jiwakacau.blogdrive.com

its a collection of short stories frm d internet, here's the list of contributrs:

Amanitium http://amanitium.blogspot.com
Aqil http://aqildotcom.blogspot.com
Attokz
Azhan http://azhan.blogspot.com
Bluehikari
Book http://bukhariramli.blogspot.com [ed., What does "book" mean?]
El-Maaniq http://delimasakti.blogspot.com
Esis http://sukaatiaku.blogspot.com
Kelambu http://kelambu.blogspot.com
Kemat http://liepan.blogspot.com
Kingbinjai http://kingbinjai.blogdrive.com
Mat Jan http://www.kroni.biz/jj
Ms D' http://gurisanintaglio.blogspot.com
Naimisa Yusof http://naimisa.blogspot.com
Op & Mulan http://fikirandalamkembara.blogdrive.com
Puteri Elaira Eliza http://www.elaira.net
Rima Nilzah http://rimanilzah.cjb.net
Rulan Awan http://awanputih.blogspot.com
Sam Ahmad http://zulfikarsamsuri.blogspot.com
Si Dugong http://dugongsenyum.blogdrive.com
Sinaganaga http://sinaganaga.blogspot.com
Superdiman http://oksigen.blogdrive.com
Tok Rimau
Tuan Tanah http://tanahpusaka.blogspot.com

so, hope that's sufficient info. Mail me if there's anything else : )

Razima

****

The lady is nothing if not thorough! The kindness is much appreciated.

Query Letter for Selling Your Blog

Sometimes I think this whole blog about blooks depends on flukes. Case in point - yesterday I began a correspondence with a gentleman about doing a guest post. There was some confusion over what made for a blook. He wrote:

"Took me a minute to figure out what a blook was. I almost published a hundred posts as a book from my blog a year or so ago, got as far as having the proofs in my hand and sending copies to the LOC for copyright, but decided against it at the last moment. I didn't like the lack of focus. Two hundred posts later, I gave it to my editor to see if she could find a book in there :-)"

I told him that I used the Blooker Prize competition definition:

"A blook is a book with content that was developed in a significant way from material originally presented on a blog, webcomic or other website."

Imagine my surprise when he wrote back: "In that case I'm a pioneer:-) I published my first website to be a book in 1995, used the website traffic to sell it to McGraw-Hill."

Wow! The blook is called Build Your Own PC -- now in its 4th Edition The Hand-Me-Down PC -- and was written by Morris Rosenthal. I did a little more research and found a post from July 18, 2005:

Sample Query Letter Example for Selling Out

"I searched through my old documents and found the original query letter I used to sell out. The actual chain of events was that I sent out eight copies of this query letter, got four responses within a week saying, "send us what you have," and spent the next month finishing the book. I also sent out more copies of the sample query letter below (to the very top publishers this time), and got more interest, but at the end of the day, decided to self publish. About a week after I started selling the book on my website without any way to process credit cards, I gave up and put the whole book online. The traffic kept growing and the next year I sold out to McGraw-Hill."

Yes, you can go to the site and see the actual letter along with Rosenthal's critique:-)

"Print is Dead"

I picked up the nod on Jeff Gomez's blook, Print is Dead, from Joe Wikert. I headed over to Gomez's blog and learned this:
"Gomez is the author of four novels, including the cult favorite Our Noise, which was published by Scribner Paperback fiction in America and Penguin in the UK. He is currently the Senior Director of Online Consumer Sales and Marketing for Penguin Group USA. Jeff has been involved in electronic books and the world of digital reading since the industry’s beginning in 1999, and he has also been a featured speaker and panelist at publishing industry events throughout America."

His post announcing the publication of Print is Dead was a bit ambiguous as to its blookhood:

"I’m happy to say that Print is Dead is now available for purchase in both print and electronic formats. I would say that it’s been a long road to get to this day, but it really hasn’t been; I wrote the book in a couple of fevered months late last year and early this year (as well as another bout of composition in May and June). ... Of course, just because it went by so fast doesn’t mean that it was easy; it’s been a long year of writing and researching, in addition to working my regular job, moving, teaching a class, and trying do a few other creative things to retain my sanity."

Not wanting to mislead you, dear Blook Folk, I wrote to the author to get a definitive declaration. Gomez replied:

"Yes, to some degree Print is Dead is a blook since, after the first draft, I went and adapted some blog postings I had written into material that later made its way into the final edit of the book. The original point of the blog was to comment and monitor on the day-to-day events that occur in the general 'future of the book' discussion, but I've found that --- over time --- some of the things I would write about, or comment on, had a real worth in terms of the overall point of the book I was writing, and so that material would get included. At the time I was writing, I wouldn't get too many comments on the blog, so that didn't shape the writing very much, but I could really see how getting feedback from a blog would have a really great effect on the final product."

Oh, and in case you're like his friends and relatives who "hope [his] predictions for the demise of books doesn’t come true," Gomez has this to say: "I guess they think I’m predicting that print’s going to die, but what I’m really saying is that print’s already dead."

2nd Sulekha & Penguin Blook

Information on the second blook from Sulekha and Penguin was a bit scarce. However, there was this paragraph and a list of winners:

"The India Smiles Contest saw some very stiff competition. More than a thousand entries were received, much more than we planned or were prepared for. The final selection of winners was based on a combination of the following: reviews of the eminent panel of judges, reviews by Penguin and Sulekha Editors and user response and comments on Sulekha."

And the Winners are...	Prizes	Prize Winning Entry
Manjul Bajaj	1st Prize $2000	Ruminations of the Teenager Formerly Known as Achint
S Narayan	1st Runner-up $200	All In The Genes
Madhulika Liddle	2nd Runner-up $100	A Suitor For Saraswati
Deepanjali Pandey	2nd Runner-up $100	Memories, Mammaries & Monita Rajpal

1st Blook from Sulekha & Penguin

The first blook from Sulekha and Penguin, Sulekha Select, is a collection of 42 pieces (256 pages!). This is how Sulekha says the blook came to be:

"Sulekha Select was born of the long-standing demand of its loyal (and sometimes vociferous) readers for a print compilation of the most popular articles. True to the spirit of the Sulekha site itself, the 42 articles in the book were chosen from a pool of over 200 nominated articles, which readers selected from the over 1200 articles and columns published on Sulekha since 1998."

There's a full page of reviews that I'd recommend reading if you want to discover the pros and cons of anthologies. Here's just a few:

PRO

• What emerges in all these writings is that elusive but all pervading
  character of 'Indian-ness' which goes beyond ethnicity, religion, language,
  behavior, lifestyle ... .
• There are heartfelt musings, embarrassing confessions, hilarious escapades,
  painful autobiographies and plenty of parodies of that condition peculiar to the
  global Indian community known as desiness.

CON

• "The literary quality of these pieces is doubtless uneven."
• "In fact, with authors from all walks of life hailing from different corners
  of the globe, the book is an interesting study of various styles and
  spellings."
• "True to what the editors have informed us (or warn), the collection of
  pieces is extremely varied. The sophistication of the submissions chosen range
  from the angst-ridden pieces that might be found in a high school literary
  journal to some rather well-crafted compositions ... ."

Sulekha Announces Competition

Okay, so I'm a little late with this (it started in August!) but it's not over yet. The six-month long competition sponsored by Sulekha and Penguin ends January 31st. And for those of you wondering why I'm passing the info on, the end result of the contest will be a blook :-)

Here's the announcement:

"Sulekha.com takes great pride in announcing "BLOGPRINT" in association with Penguin Books. Over the next 6 months, 25 selected posts from our bloggers will be published in a Penguin book! You have the opportunity to go down in history as one of the best bloggers on Sulekha.com. This comes on the back of our two previous successful publications in 'India Smiles' and 'Sulekha Select'.
"The contest runs from the 1st of August, 2007 to the 31st of January, 2008. Two posts will be selected every week for the contest by the Team Sulekha.com. Of the 52 posts selected (2 posts per week for 26 weeks), a panel of eminent judges from the literary field will shortlist 25 select pieces of writing which will appear in the book."

What sort of posts are they looking for?

"The parameters which will be used to select a post and shortlist it to 52 will be on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative measures. Quantitative will include parameters such as the number of page views, comments and recommendations your blog post gets while qualitative will be on various factors including grammatical correctness, style of writing and flourish."

These are really the same sorts of things that publishers are looking at when they go searching for blookable blogs! Not that I haven't mentioned that many times before :-)

When All Else Fails

So the other day this fella left a comment on my blog in a foreign language. The only word I recognized was blook, big surprise. I followed the link to his blog where, sure enough, I saw a picture of a book cover. I would be more than happy to post about it -- and the two others that it apppears he has written -- if only I could decipher what his blog had to say.

I tried posting at blogs where the folks are bilingual. I even tried emailing two people in search of someone who could at the very least tell me if the language is Malaysian [it looks like that's what it is, but really, I haven't a clue]. So far no response.

Here's your chance to help me and I hope you're not offended that you're my last resort. If you or someone you know speaks Malay, would you leave a comment so I can contact you? I'm also open to suggestions on how to find someone.

I found this handy-dandy Malay to English dictionary so I can go word-by-word (a lot like Babelfish, see GoingLikeSixty's post) if I could just be sure the darn blog was in Malay. Thanks.

Zero to Superhero

Zero to Superhero - Get Stronger, Faster, Leaner, Smarter by Jason S. Comely began as an experiment, not a book draft! According to a book review at "That's News":

"Divorced, injured, bankrupt and overweight in the cold months of 2001, Jason Comely was tired of being a loser. He set out on a fact-finding mission to improve his health and his life, and eventually shed 80 lbs of body fat.

"Meanwhile, Jason documented his findings and successes on-line. Soon others began losing weight with his diet strategies. Zero to Superhero is the end results of the author’s formal studies, exhaustive research, and self-experimentation.

"Originally, Jason's experiments in self enhancement weren't meant to be a book."

Prompted by readers of his blog, he began writing:

The book’s concept expanded in breadth and depth when Jason went to college for an education in personal training and fitness theory. That foundation of knowledge, coupled with anecdotal records from his own intense weight training and insatiable appetite for the inside angle, ultimately defined what is now a successful selling e-book cum paperback release.

You can do that, not the weight loss thingy, okay, maybe you can, after all that's the premise of the blook. What I meant was that you can release an "e-book cum paperback" using Lulu, which is what Comely did. You can also, if you're technically adept, or maybe you don't have to be, enhance your paperback with a video on YouTube. That's what the hype at Comely's website says, that the book is enhanced. But darned if I can find a link to YouTube! [Lest you think that I'm a total Luddite, I did cobble together a trailer for my novel, PARK RIDGE.]

Can I Sit with You?

The description of the blook at Lulu calls Can I Sit with You an "on-going book and blog project." It comes from Shannon Des Roches Rosa and Jennifer Byde Myers at the blog of the same name.

On September 24, 2007, the authors wrote:

"[W]e are asking you to send us your most memorable stories about surviving, succeeding, or sucking it up while dealing with the other kids at school. We're going to post one of your stories on this blog every week day, starting October 1st. We'll keep posting as long as the stories keep coming.

Once we've got at least twenty good stories, we'll compile them into a book, which will be called (duh) "Can I Sit With You?" You'll be able to buy the book via Lulu.com in mid-November, at which point you can crow to your friends and relatives about your success as a published writer. (And convince everyone you've ever known to buy one as a holiday gift.)"

I don't know how many stories they eventually included but the blook is 150 pages! No doubt sequels are planned. As with many - really! - blooks the proceeds are being donated: "the books' proceeds will directly benefit our local, income-challenged special needs PTA, SEPTAR. (Here's where we mention that we're both parents of special needs as well as typical kids, and on the board of said PTA.)"

Blog Novels

A while back I enjoyed a post by Julia Glassman, Girl Detective, in response to J.M. Tyree's article "Here's To the Death of the "Death of" Article: The future of the short story in a digital age."

Here's a taste of Tyree on the blog novel:

"The great American blog novel — yet to be written as far as I know — will not be a novel written on a blog but instead be the blog of a compelling fictional character, or a community of interacting invented literary personas, the online equivalent of the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, who invented poets from various schools with clashing manifestoes. This approach would take fiction back to one its sources in the 17th century, the “jest biography,” such as The Life of Long Meg of Westminster. Somebody wonderful has already done this in comic form with the “blog” of the Incredible Hulk." [ed., site is still available but not being updated]

Here's Girl Detective's comment:

"As we’ve seen with Lonely Girl 16, an online journal can be a fascinating way to blend reality and fiction through serialized narrative. And what better forum than the Internet, with its enabling of cyborg personalities and anonymous roleplay, to explore the potential of narrative that blurs the line between real and imaginary?"

Both posts are must reads for folks working with fiction on the net.

Blook has been around a while, folks!

Humpf! Go figure how it is that in the last two days I've stumbled across two folks who think that they've invented the word blook. Yesterday it was Mr. Josefowicz who has since posted that a Google search for blook netted 246,000 hits! He's decided to go with bluuk instead.

Today a person who calls himself pok at "sculpture lecturer's blog" writes:

"Today I have strengthened my resolve, not only to edit the entire Blog, but also to REVERSE its chronolgy so that the reader can see its narrative unfolding like a novel.

"I will call it the world's first 'BLOOK', being a Book made of a Blog."

For a word that made the top of ten of most hated words related to the internet (see The Guardian's post), it just can't be all that offensive if people are still trying to claim its origin! And just to be sure we keep our stories straight, it was Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine that coined the word ... in 2002.

"Blooks are Bullshit"

Michael Josefowicz at "Communication Ecology" posted an unusual definition of blook, one I had never seen before. According to him:

"A blook is meant to describe a codex format that is filled with content that started it's life on a blog. But the issue is specificially not the technology used, nor the number of copies produced, nor the details of the particular codex form that was chosen.
"The distinguishing characteristic is that the content contained in a blook is the product of a relatively small amount of reflection and a mechanical detailing of the form."

I'm not all that comfortable with that word codex ["A manuscript volume, especially of a classic work or of the Scriptures"] because I can't find a definition that fits how I think of a blog. I, for sure, have no idea what a codex-format is. [Are you surprised at my ignorance?]

Josefowicz maintains that a book is similar to a blook but differing in the amount of reflection that went into producing the content. Can that be right? Did he really write that?

He also says: "To be clear, either form can still be worthless to any particular reader. But a blook is much more likely to be bullshit. Note that bullshit is taken in this context in the philosophical sense of content that should not be evaluated by whether or not it corresponds to the real world."

Needless to say I strongly disagree with this cavalier attitude toward blog content and blooks. Ironically, Mr. Josefowicz lays claim to a blook! [Maybe it's not ironic at all.] Luckily for me Google cached a page from the Language of Communication Ecology wiki and I can pass on to you what Josefowicz posted there:

"What you are holding in your hand is information delivered through the form of a book. The information presented here is not a "book" in the sense of being the product of disciplined considered thought. It's somewhere between a blog and a series of published columns. The words strung together here started their life as the result of many conversations. They then migrated to a series of columns ... . In their present incarnation, they appear in a book form produced for the PIA/GATF, Variable Data and Personalization Conference held Nov 3-6, 2007 in Phoenix, AZ. The present digital home of these words are on my wiki [Private]. Given how often I tinker with them, they are truly variable data."

"Today, the effort and cost of production was acceptable. It took about 40 people hours to transform the words - in the form of data stored at OnDemandJournal.com and other ideas still in my head, and transform them into this physical codex form. The 40 people hours were spent over a two week period, in the midst of real life - between day jobs and being with family. I am lucky enough to have access to a skilled graphic designer who agreed to put the words into an appropriate form as a favor. The out of pocket dollar cost was negligible. The investment in time was acceptable. The only hardware/software required was a computer with web access and a document creation program, in this case Quark, to create the document. No other purchased software."

While I grant you that it's entirely possible to dump a blog into print via Blurb or SharedBook to create a blook, the vast majority of blooks that I've looked at here have always been something more. Just this week we saw how much work Ryan Zeinart put into his blook, 65 Poor Life Decisions! Or what about something like Blogs From The Liberal Standpoint: 2004-2005 by Lawrence R. Velvel? I think Mr. Josefowicz has made a distinction which doesn't bear scrutiny.