The Blog, in all its avatars is the main tool for nanopublishers everywhere. A Blog is also a new point of entry for authors and other content creators to create awareness for their offerings and build communities around them.
Creating books out of a blog’s content is picking up and it will be a big things next year. It will be one of the key monetizing models of blogs and blog networks. I advise blog owners to structure their blog in a way that making a book becomes the next logical extension. Read Performancing or Problogger on more about monetizing your blog.
Highlights from all the action on Books From Blogs this year:
1. The New York Times has just published a list of the best blogged books of 2005. Interestingly, no books on Nanaopublishing DIY yet.
2. The first web-to-print publisher was launched this year in the United Kingdom. The Friday Project specialises in turning the Internet’s best-known blogs/online properties into books.
3. Tinu Abayomi-Paul, one of the contributors to “Unleash”,has just turned her blog on generating traffic via RSS feeds and blogs in to an e-book.
4. Publishers Little, Brown and Co. released the book ‘Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen’ written by Julie Powell. This book started out as a blog.
Julie Powell, by the way, has sold the film rights to Julie and Julia. You can read the archived Julie/Julia Project, here.
5. Thomson has signed Keith Thomson, writer of ‘Gus Openshaw’s Whale-Killing Journal’, an online novel that tells of a cannery worker whose wife, child, and arm are eaten by a rogue whale and his quest for revenge, for a hardcover book to be launched next year.
6. “We are Iran”, written by Nasrin Alavi, a UK-based Iranian woman who has been closely following the Persian blogging scene.The book contains hundreds of translated blog posts by Iranians on different subject matters which is then completed by useful background information about each topic that makes up different chapters of the book.
In other words, you get blog quotes plus some useful contextualization.
7. Finally, a name for books from blogs and a new award.
‘The Blooker Prize,’ The World’s First Literary Prize for ‘Blooks’ (Books Based On Blogs or Web Sites)
Launched on October 10, 2005, The Lulu Blooker Prize is the first contest to honor blooks, a hybrid literary form that has evolved in recent years from web sites, particularly the web sites known as blogs. The prize will reward the best blooks in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comic-Blooks (based on web-comics), but with one overall winner. It is open to blooks published anywhere by anyone, provided they are in English.
Asides:
Can Engadget ever be a book?
Plus, an excellent example of ‘in-the-works’ site.
