What do Look at this Fucking Hipster, Postcards from Yo Momma, Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, have in common (you know, aside being online sensations)?
Book deals.
Many bloggers, especially those with humor-related sites, are scoring book deals from publishers who are hoping to turn page views into dollars thanks to people who want a clever, hip book to display on their coffee table or commode.
The book deal has become a badge of honor among popular websites, even The New York Times has pointed to the book deal as a reason for people to start blogging in the first place.
But does this make sense? Why would the vanguard of a new movement seek the approval of the gatekeepers of old media?
The Brooklyn Rail‘s Sarah Hromack asks “How strangely anachronistic is it (and yet, extraordinarily telling) that those who participate in perhaps the most monumental democratic exercise ever—and who do so daily, often for a living—would seek to tame the great, unbridled, immaterial beast that is the Internet with some high-gloss stock and two binding boards?”
Why is it that “In Print We Trust“?
3 responses
Related aside: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/andrew-sullivan-why-i-blog
It’s not anachronistic; it’s eternal; it’s money.
Well, those examples are of a blog creator trying to cash in on a silly phenomenon before its golden moment evaporates.
But there are other reasons to seek to publish your blog entries on paper. I’m trying not to harp on Caleb Crain’s book-from-his-blog too much here, but his example does make me think that for certain writers (like him and also more well-known ones, like Waiter Rant) a book is also an opportunity to rescue good, relevant writing from archive oblivion on the blog. On many blogs, my own included, a lot of the best stuff on it is virtually unfindable for the casual reader (specific searches by keyword aside, of course). I would never have found the material for my next post here, which draws on a post that Crain made in 2003, without reading the book.
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