Blogs and Book Contracts

Thought you all might like this, excerpted from today's Publisher's Lunch (the free part of the ever-useful Publishers Marketplace - you can sign up for it anytime). Love their wicked wit regarding all those critics and pundits. And note that Blogger talked about Salam Pax on its home page ages ago, and Publishers Marketplace is well aware of him, but the New Yorker seems curiously in the dark.

And take from this article this useful lesson - if your way of doing a page a day is to blog, go for it!

The Latest Trends in Trend Pieces

For a different take on the trend-piece-as-personality-piece hybrid (usually it's one or the other), this week's New Yorker looks at bloggers who become authors. Or actually it's a future trend; "Suddenly, books by bloggers will be a trend, a cultural phenomenon," when "Two years from now-give or take-Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of the gossip Web sites Gawker and The Kicker, will publish her first novel."

At least they know how the paper of record works. "You will probably read about it in the Sunday Times." But they can't resist declaring that it's really all due to one person: "When that happens the person to thank-or blame-will be Kate Lee, who is currently a twenty-seven-year-old assistant at International Creative Management."

As befits such a venerable traditional publication, they must deliver a facile swipe along the way: "Lee does not so much read as prospect, sifting through sloppy thinking, bad grammar, and blind self-indulgence for moments of actual good writing." The other bloggers the enterprising Lee represents are the writers behind Hit & Run, The Black Table, Dong Resin, Zulkey, Low Culture, Lindsayism.

What this proud publication is blinded to (or at least misses in their overstatement), amidst their impeccable grammar and dandy sentence structure, is that plenty of other bloggers have struck book deals (among them Baghdad blogger Salam Pax, the UK's notorious Belle de Jour, the Julia/Julia Project, Cantonese columnist Mu Zimei, the eponymous Real Live Preacher).

Miller column
Style piece
New Yorker