Today I woke up to yet another article demonizing a blog turned blook. And the problems mentioned were exactly the same as a hundred other similar reviews I had read in the past: it was sloppy, it was put together slap dash without a thought on how it would read on the page, blog popularity did not translate to book sales. Etcetera etcetera etcetera.
And it’s funny, you know, how blog popularity and stunning wit in a blog just doesn’t seem to jump onto the printed page. Because it should. Because writing a post is as linear as writing a chapter in a book, and there shouldn’t be any problem in converting the things you love in the blog from one form to another. And it’s just frustrating for me to see such great writing, such amazing blogs at the forefront of blooking, stumble the leap to the static page. And get a bad review in the process.
The two links I posted above refers to The Order Of The Phoenix Park and Petite Anglaise (though the 2nd link also talks a little about Julie And Julia) respectively. The first had newspapers calling it “resolutely clunky and self-indulgent’ and having ‘sloppy’ structure. The 2nd had this particular comment going for it (I’ve read similar ones on Julie and Juila the year before, so this review is by no means alone):
I remember being disappointed with Julia Powell’s Julie and Julia that the book wasn’t a series of her best blog posts. I didn’t ever follow her experiment (to cook her way through Julia Child’s massive tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking) online, and I expected the book to be a series of vignettes charting her progress. Instead, it was fluffed out with less fascinating personal detail. The same is true with Petite Anglaise: the blog itself was gripping in a reality TV, slice-of-life, car crash kind of way, and the book itself isn’t. It’s fluffy, and like candy floss, doesn’t satisfy.
My theory for this is that personal bloggers don’t approach writing the same way writers do. Writers set out on a project to tell a story; personal bloggers just want to let steam off after their boss yells at them or their cat pees on the couch. And the good ones do it so well, so brilliantly, so witty, so true, that we readers can’t help but fall in love with them.
But the problem with all this is that when Penguin comes knocking on their doorsteps any thought to the formula that has so far worked for them goes flying out the window. They start to approach the project like a writer writing an actual manuscript, but not exactly, because they’re sourcing material from their online rantings. So what you get a mix of both: blog writing and book writing, and it doesn’t appeal to either groups that will buy these blooks: the blog readers (who follow these bloggers) and the book readers (who browse a bookstore and don’t care if it’s a blook; they just want something good to read).
In the end readers aren’t going to read you because you’re hip and in the news all the time. They’re going to read your book if your writing is good and your story is solid, regardless of where the source material is from. So please, blook writers – you Petite Anglaises and Julias out there. Write your book as a writer would (from scratch) or capture your blog posts without tinkering around with the format that has worked for you so well.
Just don’t mash the two approaches together. Put out a book that’s worth reading, that’s worth falling in love with – because it’s the ideas and stories in between the covers that matter the most, not the fancy technological shwag that got it there in the first place.
And that’ll do all of us in the blook medium a big favour. We won’t have to deal with any more negative preconceptions about jumping to the static page. And that – if it happens – can only be a good thing.
