Blog networkshave been around for awhile and represent a new form of online publishing - functioning as online magazines or newspapers.  In earlier posts, I have talked in general terms about how blog networks might serve as the foundation for a more open model of book publishing.  Now it’s time to talk specifics.

First, the rationale.  Publishing is risky business.  The biggest risk, and the progenitor of most other risks in publishing, is title selection.  Publishers have experiemented with different modelsin an effort to address this risk.  In the past, publishers have relied on the judgment and experience of editors or agents to act as gatekeepers to the publishing kingdom.  Sometimes celebrity status or previous publishing success serve as good rpoxies for judgment and experience.  And sometimes the title acquisition process is more subjective and opaque.  More often that not the results are less than satisfactory.

Another approach is to substitute voting for gate keeping.  How would this work?  Enter the blook network.  It starts with the premise that anyone might be a successful author; we just don’t know which ones.  So provide anyone who has a story, an idea or a manuscript the opportunity to try and find an audience big enough to be book-worthy.  The tool for this is a blog.  The publisher rents the writer space in a blog network with a style guide for blogging in a manner that makes it relatively easy to go from blog to book.  The rental also includes an appropriate set of metrics to track how the writer’s audience building efforts are doing.

Blogs on related topics are linked.  In this way, stronger established blogs help direct traffic to newer blogs.  Blog statistics are tracked by the publisher to determine which blooks are developing an audience.  When pre-established audience targets are met, the publisher is alerted and may decide to publish the writer’s work.  The publisher correlates audience statistics with sales data for books in the category (e.g. from Book Scan) to make the final publishing determination.  In this way, analytics guide the decision to make the publishing investment.  Since the blog has been structured to be easily converted to a book, time to market is faster.  Editors use metrics to identify the best content in the final manuscript, thus helping to ensure a more marketable product.

The blook network helps the publisher find authors who can build an audience sufficient to warrant publication.  And the discovery engine pays for itself (or even earns a profit).  Even writers who are not successful in terms of getting published will have useful information (in the form of metrics, reader comments, etc.) that they can use to refine or retarget their efforts.

The process can be summarized as:

• Replace manuscripts with blogs
• Replace the slush pile with a publisher’s blog network
• Structure network blogs so their content can be readily converted into books
• Combine blog metrics and book sales data to determine when and who to publish
• Reinforce traffic to new writer blogs with links from high traffic network blogs

The benefits to publishers of using this approach are that it:

• Creates added capacity for publishers to take on new writers without expense
• Generates service revenue while the writer is developing an audience
• Provides detailed knowledge of the market before the book is published
• Provides a speedier path to market

The blook network is a potentially powerful tool for helping publishers better manage the risk of title acquisition and provide a firmer rationalization of their investments in editing, production and marketing.

Related Posts

• Non-Fiction Blook Mechanics Part 2: Organizing Posts into Manuscripts
• Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• Finding Book Gold in Blog Post Archives
• Blog Network ScorecardsBookmark this Post

In an earlier post (”Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design“), we discussed several ways to structure a blog to resemble the structure of a book.  For example, using category labels that could double as a table of contents.  Taking content from blog posts and turning it into a readable manuscript can be a challenging task.  Especially when you have a large inventory of blog posts from which to draw.  In this post, I want to propose two tools - the post outline and post sequencing - that can help you organize your posts into a manuscript in a logical manner, without massive rewriting.

Post Outline

First, use your manuscript outline as a tool for cataloging your posts.  An outline is good writing practice.  But it can also help you organize your blog posts.  Here’s one approach.  Use a numbering scheme for each levvel of your outline.  (Most word processor or other outlining software does this for you automatically.  The top most level correspond to chapters.  Lower levels correspond to sections of chapters and content within sections.  The outline forms the basis for a numbering schema to identify the part of the outline to which your posts will be associated. 

Let’s say you are writing a bog about raising dogs.  Part of your outline might look like:

1.  Dog breeds
1.1  Hounds
1.2  Terriers
1.3  Herding dogs
etc.

2.  Dog grooming
2.1  Coat
2.2  Teeth
2.3  Musculoskeletal
etc.

3.  Dog nutrition
3.1  Diets for puppies
3.2  Diets for adult dogs
3.3  Diets for older dogs
3.4  Organic dogfood
etc.

Post Sequencing

Next, use tags to indicate the specific intended location of a post within the manuscript outline.  One approach to doing this is to use the sequence numbers from the outline.  For example, using the outline above, if you had a post about talking about the different types of organic dogfood, it would appear in the category “Dog Nutrition” and might be tagged as “organic-dogfood-3-3-4.”  Sequence numbers would be as long as the number of levels in the outline.  Blogging platforms accomplish tagging differently, but it is a fairly universal feature.  Such sequence tagging allows you to later use the post search tools of your blog to find and organize posts corresponding to each part of your outline. 

Of course, outlines are subject to change.  Chapters can be added, inserted or deleted and this can cause problems with post sequencing based on outline numbering.  An alternative approach might be to code tags with names that correspond to the outline labels.  Then, if the outline changes, the tags are still valid.  Again, using our dog manuscript oultine above, let’s say your organic dogfood post was about feeding your hound chicken flavored tofu .  Using this scheme, you might code the post as ”nutrition, organic, tofu chicken” where the tags are arranged in the descending order of the outline.  If you had multiple tags about chicken flavored tofu for your dog, you could assign a sequence number as the final tag, or find a label that distinguishes them further. 

The advantage of this approach to tagging is that should you decide to move dog nutrition to some other part of the outline, your post sequences remain valid.  If you make dog nutrition part of a chapter on dog health, you can simply add a tag “dog health” to the head of all your tag lists for dog nutrition. 

Creating an outline and using one of the post sequencing techniques above can greatly simplify the task of organizing your blog content into a manuscript.  Good organization is only the first step.  There are other editorial processes that must be applied to get a manuscript that doesn’t feel chopped up, but we shall save those for later posts. 

• Non-fiction Blook Mechanics Part 1: Blook by Design
• Why Every Author Should Blog
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• When is a Blog a Book?

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Blooks - books based on a blog - are becoming more and more popular.  Authors, especially unpublished authors, can benefit from blogging their material first as a way to build an audience for their work.  There are enough blog to book success stories now to make this an attractive option.  Many of the early blook successes were more the result of serendippidity than plan.  In this post, I outline one approach for authors who are intentional about creating a book from a blog.

Title.  Use the same title and subtitle for your blog that you would like to use your book.  This has the advantage of allowing your blog to double as a book website after publication.  Also, it makes it easy for your blog readers to find your new book.

Table of Contents.  Layout out your blog categories to roughly corresond to the table of contents for your book.  Using exactly the same titles for categories and chapters may not always work.  Also, some standard table of content names won’t make any sense for a blog - e.g. Introduction or Epilogue.  The idea is to have a kind of one to one correspondence in mind so that when you go produce your manuscript, you’ll be able to map your blog content to the right places in your book.

Chapter content.  Your blog posts become the content for your chapters; content tagged for a particular category can go in the corresponding chapter.  If you have a post tagged for multiple categories, the flow of your content will probably dictate which chapter it lands in. 

Bibliography.  The links in your posts become your pointers to reference material that appears in a bibliography or set of end notes.

Visuals.  Pictures, illustrations and graphs may present a bit more of a challenge.  If the pictures you want to use in your book involve licensing or permissions, you may have to use substitues on your blog (or go without) while you are negotiating. 

Author bio.  Most blogs make it easy to share your bio, either as a blurb on your main blog page or as a separate page.  Include your picture, and both a short and long form bio for yourself which can be incorporated later into your book.

As you start to post, you’ll want to use blog statistis to rank content and track your word count to know when you have a book equivalent.  A good rule of thumb for a book equivalent is 50,000 - 75,000 words.  You should also track the word count by category.  Remember that your categories are acting as surrogates for chapters.  You will probably to be sure your content is relatively balanced as you go so you don’t wind up with too much or too little content in each chapter.

There are several ways to rank content.  Here are a few examples.

• Page views - the level of overall interest in a particular post.
• Comments - feedback from your readership.  A post with a high number of comments is a good indicator of blook-worthy content. 
• Longevity - the number of days since the original post.  This is useful to find topics that might be evergreen
• Concentration - the number of days since the original post for which there were page views.  Some posts may see all their activity concentrated in a few days (e.g. posts related to news stories) and thus may not be as “durable” as a post that continues to receive page views day after day. 
• Density - the number o page views for the post divided by the overall page views for the blog.  This shows the contribution of the post to overall blog activity. 

In subsequent posts, I plan to share more specifics on the blog to book process, including:

• Ideas for editing posts into a cohesive, engaging manuscript.
• Tools that make it easy ways to track and collect your references.
• Using tags as a surrogate indexing schema.
• Creating a compelling pitch card for publishers using your blog statistics.
• Blook techniques for fiction writers.
• Preparing a blog tour while crafting your blook.

I would welcome any thoughts or ideas that others like to share on this subject.

• Why Every Author Should Blog
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• Finding Book Gold in Blog Post Archives
• When is a Blog a Book?
• Blog to Book

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First consider the size and structure of the blogosphere.  The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years.  There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, which doesn’t even include the more than 70 million Chinese blogs.  According to recent demographic surveys by the Pew Internet Study and the New York Times / CBS News, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area. 

Blogs focused on a given topic tend to link to similar blogs.  What this means is you can use blogs to:

• Develop an audience for your work while you write
• Promote your book effectively and at low cost once it is written

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can:

• Feature your book on a special blog page, with your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials; thus your blog can double as a book website.
• Promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.  A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work. 

The blogosphere is not the only place to market your work, but it can one of the best. 

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.  This is, in essence, the new author book pitch.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

Related Posts

• Blog Touring 101: Around the Blogosphere in 80 Days
• Virtual Book Tours: An Interview with Steve Weber
• Emerging Blook Motifs
• Vive le Permalink! - the Humble Source of Readership 
• Finding a Few of Your Favorite Keywords
• The New Author Book Pitch

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Wikipedia has popularized the notion of a major reference being created by the crowd - unpaid individuals contributing their knowledge to be viewed and edited by others in a more or less continuous evolutionary process.  According to (what else!) the Wikipedia:

Wikipediais an online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone. It was formally launched on 15 January 2001. Initially it was created as a complement and ‘feeder’ to the expert-written English-language encyclopedia project ‘Nupedia‘, in order to provide an additional source of draft articles and ideas. It quickly overtook Nupedia, growing to become a large global project, and originating a wide range of additional reference projects. As of 2008, Wikipedia includes several million freely-usable articles and pages in hundreds of languages worldwide, and content from millions of contributors. It is one of the world’s most popular web sites and is an extensively used reference source worldwide.

This publishing process is known as “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds.  Crowdsourcing has been used to create textbooks and to solve problems in science and business.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary may represent the first instance of unpaid volunteers contributing to the creation of a master reference work that, for its time, challenged the capacity of an individual or even a dedicated team of experts to create.  The process of assembling and editing the content for what is now the world’s foremost English dictionary was described by Simon Winchester in his book The Professor and the Madman.  The idea of using non-experts to help gather the raw content for the proposed dictionary was suggested in 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench, dean of Westminster and archbishop of Dublin, in a speech he gave at the London Library entitled “On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries.”

He proposed a new, comprehensive dictionary for the English language that would provide essentially a biography of each word; it’s current and historical definitions, nuances and usage.   The project was gigantic in its scope and scale.  The idea of such a dictionary wasn’t new, but the method Trench suggested for gathering the lexicographical content for each word was unusual and exciting.  Here is Winchester’s description:

. . . here Trench presented an idea, an idea that - to those ranks of conservative and frock-coated men who sat silently in the library on that dark and foggy evening - was potentially dangerous and revolutionary.  But it was the idea that made the whole enterprise possible.

The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man  To peruse all of English literature - and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals - must be instead “the combined action of many.”  It would be necessary to recruit a team - moreover, a huge one - probably hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

The project commenced about a year after Trench’s speech.  The dictionary would draw from three periods of English literature:  1250-1526, 1527-1674 and 1675 to the present day.  A circular was issued asking for volunteers and each volunteer would specify what period they would read from.  They would create word lists as they read and also search for words of particular interst to the dictionary editorial team; then they would provide the context for the occurrence of these words.  Volunteers would record their findings on slips of paper.  Each slip would contain the target word, the date, the title of the book or paper in which it was found, the volume and page number, and finally the full sentence in which it occurred.   Volunteers would then submit these to the dictionary’s staff, which sorted them using alphabetically organized oakboard pigeonholes (54 in all).  The senior editor would then sort through these slips to find those of the greatest interest and necessity for the compilation of the dictionary. 

The project moved forward with fits and starts.  It’s original editor, Frederick Furnivall, eventually handed off the task of managing the compilation to James Murray, who was better able to motivate the volunteers and obtain sponsorship from Oxford University’s press.  The first complete version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was published in 1928.  The compilation, editing and publishing of the dictionary took over 70. 

The scope of the achievement is best characterized by the number of words it defines (over 500,000), the detail of its entries and the sheer physical heft of its printed volumes.  The OED team were the early pioneers of crowdsourcing.  Their version of the “wiki” was done without the Internet and computer technology.  It was also less democratic - while it used volunteers, the fate of the material they submitted was subject  to the scrutiny and control of the dictionary’s editorial staff.  In this sense, they were a not fully evolved ”proto-wiki.”  But the project demonstrated the wisdom of crowds and provided an important historical precedent for using amateurs to create important, large reference works. 

Wikipedia, with over 2.2 million articles and  961 million words, has vastly exceeded the Oxford English Dictionary in its scale and the speed of its growth.  However, Jimmy Wales, the charismatic founder of Wikipedia, would no doubt offer a tip of the cap to the tireless, passionate staff and volunteers of the original OED who for their accomplishment in creating an enduring and monumental reference work. 

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• The Quiet Revolution in Book Writing

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Blog to book stories are becoming more commonplace.  We have chronicled a number of such examples, and you can find a virtual library of blog to book stories on Blooking Central.  Some of these were serendipitous, but more and more writers, especially new authors, are being more intentional about converting their blogs into a printed title.   There is more than one way to execute a blog to book strategy.  Here is my attempt at a blook typology:

• indie blook - This is the type of blook where an author independently publishes and markets a title based on their blog.  Low cost self publishing and inexpensive Internet marketing techniques are making this an attractive option for new authors who are not shy about self promotion.
• traditional blook - This is the form of blook that you read about in the newspapers.  A publisher discovers a high traffic blog and offers the blog owner a book deal.  Tjhe rationale is that the blog has an established audience and a topic in line with the publisher’s market focus.
• podiobook - This is more of an audio blook.  Here the author serialize his or her book into podcasts and uses a blog for audience feedback and book marketing.  It is especially effective for fiction writers.  Two of the best know podiobook authors are Scott Sigler and JC Hutchins. 
• crowdsourced blook - This is a rare blook, but every author’s dream come true.  Here, the blog is so popular that a community emerges and contributes content which eventually winds up being part of the publishing or marketing strategy for a title.  In other words - build a community that helps you generates content and then publish it.  The best known example is Frank Warren’s Post Secret.
• reverse blook - In this scenario, an author blogs the content from an existing book to build an audience for the current or a new edition.  This may be a good way to revitalize a book whose sales are fading.

We believe that these - and other - blog to book strategies will replace the traditional (and mostly ineffective) approach to getting a book published which involves submitting a manuscript to agents or publishers in hopes of getting it read and eventually published.  Publishing is a risky business.  Of the many risks, the first and biggest is signing an unkown author who may or may not be able to attract an audience for their title.  An author who has a blog with an established audience is an attractive proposition.  Publishers can assess the quality and appeal of the writing.  The popularity of blog posts can be measured and ranked.  We can see how the audience reacts to the content long before it is edited into book form.   In the case of a popular blog, the audience can be larger than the circulation of many magazines or newspapers 

Blooks are not just a publishing sideshow - interesting examples of pluck and luck.  They represent the future of publishing in a world of consumer generated media.

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• Belle de Jour - Sex, Lies and Book Deals
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• The New Author Book Pitch
• Finding Book Gold in Blog Post Archives
• The Joy of Blogging - An Interview with Gluten Free Girl’s Shauna James-Ahern

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Blook Looks

by Cheryl Hagedorn

Cheryl Hagedorn authors Blooking Central, which examines
published books to discover what makes for a blookable blog.

I took 12 Florida college students to London for two weeks as part of a study abroad program, and then was privileged to teach for 65 days on Semester at Sea^™, operated by the Institute for Shipboard Education. 

As a volunteer for the WLRN-FM Radio Reading Service in Miami, available to the visually impaired in South Florida through a special receiver, I offered to do weekly reports chronicling our voyage at this interesting time in European history.

The scripts for the 14 tapes, including interviews with students and others on board, are presented here.

Up until now in looking at blooks, I’ve blown past the internet sites that mention podcasts. But Donnelly’s comment about the Radio Reading Service set me to wondering about the possibility of blooking recorded material.  Other than interviews or conversations, which may or may not be interesting to read on paper at a later date, I’m guessing that many podcasts are scripted.  Which means that there could be a file (some of us still write in longhand on paper … trust me on this!) which could be used to construct a dead tree version of a series of podcasts.  The same rules would apply when transforming blog content:

• Cluster posts/scripts by topic
• Write transitional material between them
• Provide a decent introduction and conclusion

In wandering around, I discovered that there are many sites stories that are delivered as podcasts (see Digital Podcast). Which only makes sense.  But what potential is there for non-fiction?   Who do you listen to whose opinion or perspective you would want captured in print so that you could return to it again and again?  Maybe even constructing rebuttals or making notes in the margin? It also occurs to me that taking the time to listen is somewhat limited whereas you can tuck a book into your pocket and read wherever, whenever.  Okay, so I’m technologically-challenged and maybe downloading and then listening whenever, wherever is also possible! But with reading you can really focus and reread — no rewind/replay

I’ve seen some audio transcripts that, frankly, weren’t worth the effort to transcribe. But it sure gives one pause to think that the same material worked up for a print presentation might actually fly!  Since I’m not a listener I wrote to GoingLikeSixty to see if he listened to anyone on a regular basis that I could cite as an example. He responded, “The only ‘podcast’ I don’t miss is actually a vlog — the best — Wallstrip.  I’ve tried to listen to podcasts but find them poorly produced, poorly written, and always way too long.”

Well, that gives one pause, doesn’t it?  Production isn’t a concern with blogs unless you’re talking about presentation.  But the criticism about being poorly written applies to both blogs and podcasts. And many blog posts are often too short, rather than too long, to make for blookability.

So where are we on this? Are there websites/blogs with podcasts that you know have been blooked or could/should be blooked?

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• Podiobook Communities
• Grammar Groove - An Interview with Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty
• You’re on the Air . . . a Podcast of One’s Own
• Pod Trailers and Book Casts

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Future Perfect Publishinghas often reported on blog to book stories.   But none is as unusual as that of Diablo Cody.  Diablo Cody, a pen name for Brook Busey-Hunt, graduated with a degree in media studies from the University of Iowa and, accoding to an article in Wikipedia, started her career quietly enough proofreading ad copy for Minneapolis radio stations.  Her first blog was Darling Girl, which detailed her daily experiences and interactions.  On a whim, she took up stripping and later switched to being as a phone sex operator.  Her blogging would, like her career, later become a notch more risque with the advent of Pussy Ranch. 

At the age of 24, Cody published the memoir Candy Girl: A Year in The Life of an Unlikely Stripper.  Prior to publication, Cody’s blog writing had attracted the attention of Mason Novick (”Red Eye”) who thought she had a fresh voice and wondered if she would consider writing a movie.  As related in a Seattle Times article, he called her and suggested she write a screenplay.  Cody, flattered by Novick’s confidence in her, obliged and wrote Juno, the story of a pregnant teen, who with the support of her loving but eccentric family, decides to have the baby and give it to an infertile couple.  Jason Reitman (”Thank you for Smoking”) directed the film.  Now she is head writer for Steven Spielberg’s new TV series The United States of Tara set to debut on Showtime in 2008, she’s got more movies in the works, and last month the Hollywood Film Festival gave her the Hollywood Breakthrough Screenwriter of the Year Award.  Whew!  (Her breathless ascent to Hollywood writer Nirvana is chronicled in a recent Wired article, Diablo Cody’s Tips for Blogging Your Way to Hollywood Success.)

Cody’s writing certainly provokes reactions on both sides of the spectrum.  But as the LA Times noted, her voice is authentic and refreshing:

In a town that shells out millions of dollars for screenplays so practiced that they read as though the human element has all but been squelched, hers is an authentic voice, alternately sardonic, wide-eyed, hilarious and sad.

“I’ve always gotten a large ration of negative reactions to positive in my writing,” she says. “For some reason, it tends to provoke reactions on the extreme ends of the spectrum. I hate the idea that I’m some sort of self-invented Gatsby-type figure who clawed her way to the top. I have done nothing of the sort. I’m Forrest Gump. I feel like I’m superimposed in all these scenarios. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”

Cody is certainly a refreshing conundrum, an unexpected mishmash and a self-declared “radical feminist” who’s routinely received angry e-mails from readers who believe that’s she a female chauvinist, complicit with the porn industry. Her memoir “Candy Girl” is certainly not for the fainthearted, full of the up-close-and-personal details of what it’s like to strip and entertain depraved customers.  Her book combines Diane Arbus prurience with a wacky sense of humor and Midwestern do-it-yourselfness; it landed her as David Letterman’s one-and-only “Book Club 2006 pick” and a jaunty appearance on the show, where she declared herself the “Margaret Mead of sex.”

Want to get a sense of the author?  Check out her appearance on the David Letteran show. 

Just as publishers are beginning to explore the blogosphere for commercial grade writing talent, look for Hollywood to follow suit.  But what is compelling and interesting about Diablo Cody’s work is not that she went from blog to book or from blog script; but rather that she went from life to both of the above. 

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• The Blook Journey - Interview with Lori Smith
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• Belle de Jour - Sex, Lies and Book Deals

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Blook Looks

by Cheryl Hagedorn

Cheryl Hagedorn authors Blooking Central, which examines
published books to discover what makes for a blookable blog.

I’m working with a friend of mine, Dave Wildman, on a project that brings blogging, and videoblogging together with his forthcoming novel, The Book of Enemy.

We’re looking for volunteers to participate in a social media art experiment. The Book of Enemy is a groundbreaking blog-novel that is happening in real time throughout the month of September. The project will culminate in a reading/performance piece at Axiom Galleryin Jamaica Plain, Boston, MA on September 28. A number of Boston artists, photographers and filmmakers are providing illustrations for the show, and we’d like to open the project up to the vlogosphere.

The concept is similar to that of The Germaine Truth in that multiple individuals could simultaneously collaborate on a story.  The difference was that The Book of Enemy imposed a time limit of only 30 days.  Judging by the three blogs referenced at The Book of Enemy website, participation was light.  One of the blogs has only a single post!  On another, I struggled to see any connection to the story at all.  This leaves one blog that appears to have been written by a character in the novel, but it’s hard to tell.

The inclusion of video was supposed to differentiate The Book of the Enemyfrom most other online works of fiction.  However, there is only one video clip.  The Book of the Enemywas supposed to include photographs but none are posted; yet the announcement says “A number of Boston artists, photographers and filmmakers are providing illustrations for the show.”  What’s up?  The scarcity of blogs and posts, as well as the dearth of visuals raises two questions.  First, was there an adequate audience from which to recruit participants?  And second, how was the marketing of the project handled?

I assume that Wildman’s novel must have been written and distributed to at least a handful of friends before being posted on the internet.  Attracting participants to a collaborative online novel is too difficult otherwise (unless you already have access to a large and motivated readership to begin with!)  It turns out that Mr. Wildman is the Arts Editor and chief film critic for Boston’s Weekly Dig. He had this to say about his reason for posting his novel on the web:

It’s tough getting attention for literary works. I actually got a rave review from Chuck Palahniuk, but I’ve had trouble getting agents to bite. So I’m making a spectacle out of it.

As a “social media art experiment” I’m not sure that it succeeded.  As an indicator of what the future might hold, I think it’s right on the money.

Another multimedia novel which made a splash — assisted by some healthy advertising – was Edge of Paradise by Roc Hatfield.  It includes a soundtrack as well as photographs and a slide show. I don’t know if the color photographs made it into print. I’m sure the music didn’t!  On the other hand, the music CD is available.

On the non-fiction side of things Carbondale After Blog by David More was based on the Carbondaley Dispatch blog.  More describes his blook this way:

Only the first two pages of each chapter will be printed in the paper edition, including one photograph. Also included inside the paperbound cover, a compact disc containing the complete text of every chapter, plus hundreds of color images, audio and video files and web-based content. Software needed to read Carbondale After Blog (TK3 Reader) will be included on the CD.

Both Carbondale After Blog and Edge of Paradise were solo efforts (as far as I know).  The Book of Enemy and Carbondale After Blog both include video. But it is the social, collaborative aspect of The Book of Enemy that could have made the project outstanding.

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Blook Looks

by Cheryl Hagedorn

Cheryl Hagedorn authors Blooking Central, which examines
published books to discover what makes for a blookable blog.

• Seth Godin’s Small Is The New Big
• Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
• Eric Sink’s On the Business of Software
• Robert Scoble and Shel Isreal’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers

Now, others are catching the vision.  Authors such as Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics: An Hour a Day) and Michael Lopp (Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering) compiled their selected essays and posts into book form.  Even Harold Feld of The Sausage Factory is considering capturing his blog’s content in dead tree form.

On the other hand, Tammy Lenski’s approach (Making Mediation Your Day Job) was deliberate from the outset - she intended a book - and invited comments, criticisms, and suggestions as she posted. This seems to be becoming the norm. A case in point is a blook called We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change by Five Independent Thinkers.

A quote from a post called Beta Publishing really lays out the argument for blooks:

The software industry has been able to grow and be more effective by actually releasing “beta” versions of programs. Users recognize that these products are not finished (thus not perfect), but in exchange for the ough edges, they get to provide feedback to the designers and actually have an impact on the final product. This concept has now been extended to the book publishing field as well, particularly by Pragmatic Programmers Press.

Blogging your strategies, concepts and wisdom - as a “beta” form of pubishing - seems to capture the idea, doesn’t it?

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• The Blook Journey - Interview with Lori Smith
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• The State of the Blook - An Interview with Blooking Central’s Cheryl Hagedorn

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