If you were to find yourself in a lift with blogger who had, say, been writing for the last… oh, four and a half years, and that blogger said that, despite an underlying feeling that it was in some way cheating, she was considering pulling together some of her best posts and tidying them up and seeing maybe if there was some sort of, oh, I dunno, book there… What would you say?
I have to admit when the first blooks (or was it blogooks? or bloks? I dunno…) came out, I found myself looking down my nose at them a little. I means, Belle de Jour. Please. The standard of Ms de Jour's writing was only slightly above that of teenage boy from Swindon who'd read too much Jilly Cooper, seen too many bad porn films, and hadn't yet come to terms with his obsessive shopping gene.
But there are plenty of fantastic bloggers, there really is a potential I think for bloggers to write books which can stand alone as books without the context of the blog from which they were derived. Tom has proven that in spades.
I'm also getting over my feelings that somehow it's cheating to turn a blog into a book. Just because the effort's been spread out over four years doesn't mean you haven't put any thought into what you're writing. Indeed, some of my posts have been more like essays than blog entries, and I've thought them out in a lot of detail.
And finally, the whole thing about vanity publishing… well, I certainly wouldn't call The Friday Project, who published Tom, vanity publishers.
Of course, the difference between me and Tom is that Tom's blog is pretty focused. I remember a couple of years back being advised by Hugh MacLeod that if I wanted to be successful I had to focus my blog on one particular thing. Of course, that's a bit like asking a butterfly to settle down. My brain doesn't really work like that – I flit from thing to thing and the only unifying theme is the fact that it's me that's flitting. I don't really know if that's enough.
But let's say our anonymous blogger in a lift decides to do this. Which posts would you like her to pick?
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