I blog for two reasons; firstly it amuses me and secondly it provides an income stream through giving me an easy and structured way to generate content which I have monetised [sic]. (Male respondent, 2006)

Advertising

Of course, as well as promoting blogger’s talents, blogs can also make money through carrying advertising or offering subscriptions. As one American male respondent in the 2007 survey pointed out bluntly:

There is a growing interest in blog advertising on the part of media agencies. Blogs can deliver extremely focused audiences in terms of interest and demographics. The Internet offers a serious rival for advertising income to mainstream newspapers and magazines, and blogs are particularly useful for establishing and exploiting niche audiences that may be too small or geographically scattered to be addressed by a traditional print publication. A blog on the subject of parenting a child with special needs or lawn green bowling will attract readers with similar experiences or interests, thus offering product manufacturers easy access to such niche markets. Many bloggers have signed up to companies such as Google Adwords or Blogads, which place advertising on a website roughly based on the topic of the page. Lopez (2009) points out that the so-called ‘mommy bloggers’ were targeted by advertisers at the 2006 BlogHer conference in which a new session was offered entitled ‘$$$ Generation’ and the BlogHer Ad Network was launched with an initial test group of parent bloggers. The readers of such mommy blogs are educated, website-loyal, married women who tend to make purchases on behalf of their whole families – perfect for advertisers. However, Lopez suggests that there has been a fierce backlash in the blogosphere against mothers who host such advertising on their blogs, with suggestions that it might compromise the editorial integrity of their blogs and even that, as mothers, they should somehow be above such money-making endeavours.

While the majority of bloggers will not make their fortune through such revenue generation, most find that it provides a small income, possibly enough to cover their blogging expenses. A male blogger from the United States, whose blog specialised in advice about genealogical research, admitted: ‘A successful blogger can earn a small income by hosting advertisements. While not enough to support a family, it may be enough to pay for one’s genealogical research fees, subscriptions, etc. I do consider blogging a part-time job.’ By the 2007 survey, bloggers were becoming confident enough about the advertising possibilities of their blog to attempt to reach advertisers directly rather than making use of the agencies: one male respondent’s blog carried a section offering the possibility of running a banner advertisement at the top of his blog for a month with the guarantee that no other advertising would be accepted during this time. He charged £200 a month for this privilege.

Such bloggers may have been inspired by press coverage of highly successful bloggers who now make enough money from the advertising sold on their blog to devote themselves to it full time. The sole income of the Armstrong family, for example, now comes from advertising space sold on Heather B. Armstrong’s very popular blog http://www.dooce.com. Armstrong started writing her blog in February 2001 and, by October 2005, had attracted enough advertising to enable her husband to leave his job to support her on the technical and business aspects of the blog. A feature article about her in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 2008 suggested that at that time her blog received 5–6 million page views a month.

Armstrong’s success has also attracted the attention of the print publishing world. In 2008, she took a step into the bookshops by editing Things I Learned About my Dad, a collection of short essays taken from popular parenting bloggers such as Finslippy and Laid Off Dad, and, in 2009, she produced It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, a book focused on her experiences of post-natal depression, which were, of course, also documented in her blog.

Advertising on Dooce is sold through Federated Media Publishing, which handles the advertising for several other bloggers, including those mentioned previously as contributors to Things I Learned About my Dad.

Advertising is not the only source of potential income for bloggers. Other bloggers have raised money by selling merchandise, writing product reviews or even selling their successful blogs to larger media companies. A name frequently mentioned in the business press in connection with blogging and revenue generation is Weblogs Inc. Set up by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2003, Weblogs Inc. was an umbrella company aimed at creating niche business blogs, with individual bloggers as partners with Weblogs Inc. Money was made through advertising revenue and the blogs concerned included some very popular ones, mainly in the area of technology, such as Engadget. In 2005, AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for a reported $25 million (Gillmor, 2006: 153; Newson et al., 2009: 45). Weblogs Inc. currently offers 90 blogs, including popular and respected blogs Engadget, Joystiq and Autoblog.

There is even the possibility of raising money through direct requests for donations on your blog. For example, Joshua Micah Marshall of the political blog Talking Points Memo asked his readers to help him travel to New Hampshire to cover the presidential primary in January 2004. They raised more than $4,000 (Gillmor, 2006: 155). One enterprising blogger from the original 2003 study, now based in Berlin, carries a button on her blog entitled ‘Support my DIY Masters’ requesting donations via Paypal.

Another innovative use of blogs to market a product was reported in The Times of 5 July 2009. Christian Braun, owner of an unusual house in Baron’s Court, London, had launched a blog in order to sell his house. The house, formerly owned by an artist and with strikingly large windows, had failed to attract a buyer in the time that Braun had it with a local estate agent and so he set up a blog (http://rememberthewindow.com) devoted to the house and the history of the surrounding area in the hope that more interest could be raised this way. After two months, he was able to tell the Times reporter that, while the estate agent had provided only two or three viewings since the previous autumn, the blog had already attracted seven viewings and an offer of an exchange from an artist in Mallorca (Brooke, 2009).

However, although financial profit certainly seems to be a growing motivation for blogging, not all respondents were so positive about the potential for money-making through blogging. Two respondents, both male, explicitly stated that they were not looking to make money from their blogging and one of these admitted that he had started blogging ‘to see if I could drive traffic and earn money … now it’s for pleasure and fun. Money doesn’t matter’. Interestingly, in the 2007 survey, one American male respondent felt that his strongly worded views of US government policy that he put forward on his blog had actually led to a loss of work from the defence industry. He also considered that blogging was a threat to his career as a journalist: ‘Sadly I feel my work abilities (writer, reporter, photo-journalist) are going to go the way of the dinosaur. Note the rise in cheap digital stock imagery, blogging, “citizen” journalist submissions to network and cable TV, websites, publications, etc. (all for free, mind you).’

Blooks

While the majority of our respondents were hopeful that their blogs would bring them a little money through advertising sales, a smaller group of respondents hoped for a different sort of financial recompense. They were hoping to be discovered by a publisher or agent through their blogging and to thereby establish a career as an author. In the United Kingdom, these bloggers’ hopes were stimulated by the publicity that surrounded the publication of books such as Belle de Jour’s Diary of a London Call Girl and, more recently, Wife in the North. The outing of Dr Brooke Magnanti as the blogger Belle de Jour has already been mentioned. Her blog, supposedly the confessions of a London call girl, was first noted by The Guardian in 2003. A book based on the blog was published by Orion Books in the United Kingdom and the United States and, in September 2007, a television serialisation, based on the book, starring former Dr Who assistant Billie Piper was shown in the United Kingdom. It has since been shown in the United States and a second series started in the United Kingdom in September 2008.

The publication of Wife in the North is of more recent origin. At the end of 2006, Judith O’Reilly, heavily pregnant and with two small children, moved from London to live in a small cottage in Northumberland in the north of England. The family was in pursuit of her husband’s childhood dream to live in such a rural vastness. However, her husband did not actually move with the family. He retained his job in London, lived there for most of the time and became an infrequent visitor to his family. In the meantime, O’Reilly struggled to cope with the isolation, the complete change in her lifestyle and the exhausting job of looking after her small family and at the same time organising the complete refurbishment of the cottage they had bought (Grice, 2008). A professional journalist cut off from the London media world in which she had once worked, O’Reilly turned to blogging to express her thoughts and emotions. Her blog was officially launched in January 2007 and, within ten days, she had a book contract. Viking Penguin offered an advance of £70,000 and the book was published in July 2008, with an initial print run of 35,000 copies. In the same month, it was Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The book has been acclaimed by reviewers as both funny and very moving. It is a best-seller in the United Kingdom and has been recently published in the United States.

Wife in the North and Belle de Jour are examples, albeit very successful examples, of blooks: blogs that have been transformed into books. And many of our respondents felt that they too had a blook in them. For example, one female respondent explained: ‘I have aspirations to write a book about the food industry and I believe that writing the blog is a tool to (1) exercise my writing muscles and developing a voice; (2) distinguish or create a unique voice; (3) offer me opportunities for credibility and to be viewed as a subject matter expert.’

What precisely is a blook? Although the term can also refer to an online book published via a blog, the generally accepted meaning is the idea of a printed book based on blog postings. It is generally accepted that the first blook was User Interface Design for Programmers, by Joel Spolsky, published in June 2001 and based on his blog Joel on Software. However, the term blook appears to have been invented the following year, when journalist and blogger Jeff Jarvis suggested it as the title for the printed book of a fellow blogger’s postings. Of course, the publication of books based on serialised newspaper or magazine articles is nothing new. During the Victorian period, works by authors such as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell were originally published in parts or as magazine serials, thus enabling publishers to spread the costs of publication and widening the market for their works to include those who could not afford an entire book in one purchase (Feather, 2005). It should be remembered that Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary started as a column in The Independent and with its short, chronologically ordered entries might very well have been a blog if it had been written a few years later.

The advent of the Internet has offered the opportunity to move such part publication online, with one example being Stephen King’s The Plant, although problems arise connected with payment when the publication remains online and it should be noted that King did not complete his experiment with The Plant (Palko, 2007). Other authors and their publishers, however, can now experiment with using their blogs to publicise their printed works, posting digital content – either parts of their books or sometimes even the entire book, perhaps for a limited period – on their blogs or elsewhere on publishers’ websites in order to publicise it directly to their core readership (Nowell, 2009).

Blooks even have their own prize. In 2006, the Blooker Prize was inaugurated by print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com, whose publications list features many blooks. The founder of Lulu, Bob Young, has stated that while conventional publishers want 100 books that would each sell a million copies, he wants a million books that will each sell 100 (Cohen, 2007). The definition of blook that Lulu.com used for the prize was a book derived from blog content. The competition was open to any English-language blook, published by either a conventional publishing house or a self-publishing company. The first Blooker Prize competition for blooks published in 2005 was won by a cookery blook: Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by US blogger Julie Powell. The blook is based on Powell’s 2004 blog and is the story of her attempts to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1 in a year. In 2009, the film of the blook – the flook? – was released starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Julie Powell and offering, as an extra stimulant to would-be bloggers, the possibility that one day their own lives, as documented in their blog and then augmented by a screen-writer such as Nora Ephron, would become a Hollywood movie.

Given that the Blooker prize is open to any blook published in English within a particular year, I decided to further investigate the blook phenomenon by analysing the entrants to the 2006 prize. In particular, I wanted to investigate the publishers of such blooks, the background of the authors, the success of the blooks and whether their authors continued to blog after their blook was published. What type of author and subject combination was likely to produce a successful blook?

The 2006 prize had three prizes: for fiction, non-fiction and comics. In addition, one of these winners was acclaimed as the overall winner. Judges for the 2006 prize included the blogger Arianna Huffington, the previous year’s winner Julie Powell and the British journalist Nick Cohen. Only printed, bound books were eligible, the blooks had to be written in English and significant amounts of the printed material had to have been developed online. The complete details of 53 of the entrants were sourced from the Blooker Prize blog (http:lllulublookerprize.typepad.com) (there was no definitive list given on the blog and the related prize website has been closed). The prize winners for the 2006 Blooker award were Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies (comics winner: a category that attracted very few entrants), The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky (fiction winner) and My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell (the non- fiction winner and the overall winner).

Of the 53 entrants, 37 were written by male authors, 14 were by female authors and there were two blooks written by groups of mixed-sex authors. The majority of the blooks fell into the non-fiction category with 35 entrants, whereas there were 15 fiction entrants and only three comic blooks. Interestingly, all but two of the fiction authors were male. The most popular topics in the non-fiction category were relationships (five blooks by five female authors) and war (five blooks, four by male authors and a historical analysis of Christmas in the trenches during the First World War by a mixed-sex team). So far, so stereotypical. There were also three blooks on religion (all male authors) and two each in the categories of health and business advice. Other categories covered included living abroad, cookery, parenting and politics.

Of the 53 blooks, 28 were self-published entrants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 20 of these were associated with Lulu.com, the sponsors of the prize. Lulu. com does not claim to be a publisher. On its website, the company prefers to describe itself as ‘a digital marketplace that eliminates the traditional entry barriers to publishing’ (http://www.lulu.com/uk). Lulu.com claims that, in 2007, it published more than 98,000 new titles globally. Books are printed on demand and ‘creators’, rather than authors, receive 80 per cent of the income. Six of the self-published blooks made it into the short lists for the Blooker Prizes: two in the comics section and three for the fiction prize. One of these was the eventual winner of the fiction prize: The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky. In March 2007, The Sunday Times ran an article on the Blooker Prize that included an interview with Losowsky, at that time one of the shortlisted authors (White, 2007). It explained how his blook of short stories was inspired by a trip to Florence, where he found himself wandering around the city alone and started photographing the different designs of doorbells in the old city. The article went on to ask whether such blooks might bring fresh life to the publishing industry, allowing publishers to access new talent and also discover readymade markets in the hordes of readers already reading an author’s blog. However, it finished by warning against the expectation of literary riches through this route into publishing. When asked how many books he had sold so far, Losowsky good-naturedly admitted that he had sold only 17 at the time of the interview, not including copies bought by him. This was, of course, before Losowsky won the Blooker Prize for Best Fiction. The Doorbells of Florence was re-published by Chronicle Books in March 2009, and it is to be presumed that the publisher expected higher sales because of the publicity surrounding the award of the fiction prize – it certainly brought coverage of the blook in The Guardian, which used photographs and text from the blook as an interactive article in its online newspaper in May 2009. Losowsky, by the way, is by no means an amateur in the field of writing. His website reveals him to be a freelance British journalist and writer now living in the United States who has published articles in The Guardian, The Times, The Independent and The Wall Street Journal. He has also been associated with several other books, some self-published and some, such as The Time Out Guide to Barcelona, from more mainstream publishers. This Blooker winner was no neophyte in the publishing world, and I began to wonder how many other Blooker authors would turn out to be professional writers seizing blooks as just another way to access their audience rather than completely new voices entering the publishing business.

Still focusing on the self-published blooks, I investigated how many of them were for sale via Amazon and, if they were selling there, whether any of them had a high sales ranking. It must be remembered that the research was undertaken a year after the Blooker Prize and, therefore, nearly two years after many of the blooks were published. Thus, high rankings and sales should not be expected, although Lulu.com specifically states on its website that its books are available through Amazon and, because it is a print-on-demand company, there should be no issues with regard to a book being out of print. Twenty of the 28 self-published blooks were available through Amazon, although, of these, nine were listed but were given no ranking, implying few or no sales through the website. The highest ranked self-published blook, with a ranking in the 400,000 s in July 2008, was Surviving Paradise, written by Michael C. Perkins and based on his blog of the same name. Another Lulu.com publication, the blook offers advice on how to surf and swim safely in Hawaii and seems rather a departure from the usual subject matter for Perkins, whose other books, co-written with his brother, are concerned with the economics of the Internet and investment. Not surprisingly, when you consider that the brothers are the founders of the high- technology business journal Red Herring.

Perkins has published one other book with a self-publishing company, iUniverse. This is a co-authored novel about life and death in Silicon Valley. It seems, therefore, that Perkins is another established author who is using self-publishing and the blogosphere to expand his range and test the market for alternative writing projects rather than a particularly new voice discovered through his blogging.

Which were the most successful blooks entered for the Blooker Prize? Again, using Amazon, and with the repeated warning that many of the blooks had already been in print for two years, the blooks that had sales rankings up to 100,000 in July 2008 were identified.

The most successful blook actually had a ranking under 5000. It was My Secret: A PostSecret Book by Frank Warren. Warren has published four blooks in a similar vein all based on his blog PostSecret. The blog is billed as an experiment in community art and invites people to send in anonymous postcards that make art out of their innermost secrets. My Secret is the second blook based around the blog and focuses on postcards submitted by school and college students. Warren now undertakes speaking tours at universities across the United States, billed as PostSecret events.

None of the ten most successful blooks were self-published. The publishers included HarperCollins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Random House. Only two were fiction, with the rest being non-fiction and six of the ten were on the Blooker short list, including the overall winner. Three of the authors were female, the rest were male. Two of the blooks were focused on business advice. Again, one of the authors, Seth Godin, is the author of nine other books, several of which have been bestsellers, featuring in the New York Times business bestsellers list. However, both of the business blook authors are obviously committed bloggers as well, posting their business advice on a frequent, usually daily, basis and Godin, in particular, appears to be a prolific blogger, who started his current blog in January 2002. Of all the blogs linked to the Blooker Prize, Godin’s was the earliest established and one of the highest ranked as far as Technorati rankings were concerned. Thirty-one of the Blooker- nominated blogs were ranked by Technorati, with Godin’s blog ranked the second highest (15th in September 2008). The highest-ranking blog represented in the Blooker Prize was The Daily Kos, which offers US political analysis from a liberal perspective. This is a team-written blog and one of its writers co-wrote the Blooker shortlisted blook Crashing the Gate, again one of the top ten sellers according to Amazon.

The key thinking behind blooks is that well-received blogs, with high readership numbers, should bring their market with them when they are turned into books. To a certain extent, the blooks submitted for the Blooker Prize bear this out. Many of the better-selling blooks, ranked high on Amazon, also carry high rankings on Technorati, demonstrating a readership that is eager to read the thoughts of these authors both in print and online. Good examples of this include the cookery blook Vegan Lunchbox and the erotic memoir Girl with a One-Track Mind. Vegan Lunchbox is a particularly good example of a true blook. Established as a blog in September 2005 by the stay-at-home-mom Jennifer McKann, Vegan Lunchbox started to win blogging awards almost immediately: winning PETA’s Proggy Award for Blog of the Year in 2005, the 2006 VegWebby Award for ‘Best Family Blog’ from VegNews magazine and the 6th Annual Bloggy Award for Best Food Blog. In turn, these awards attracted the attention of publishers and the blook was published in 2006 by Little S Press, with a second edition coming out in August 2008. Girl with a One-Track Mind is a Belle de Jour-alike. Again written by a British author, the blook takes a year’s worth of entries from Abby Lee’s blog, which focuses on frank writing about her sex life. Abby Lee is the pen-name of Zoe Margolis, a camera operator in the film industry who has since carved out a career for herself as a media commentator (Williams, 2006). The blook was published by an imprint of Random House in both the United Kingdom and the United States, although in the United States the blook was given the title of Diary of a Sex Fiend suggesting, according to the author, that Americans needed things spelled out for them a little more!

With these two cases, good Technorati rankings transferred into high sales. Another blook that sold reasonably well was based on the blog Random Acts of Reality, written by Tom Reynolds, an Emergency Medical Technician working for the London Ambulance Service. His blog is consistently highly ranked by blog-tracking directories and has been named Medgadget Best Medical Blog and Best Literary Medical Blog. The associated blook is entitled Blood, Sweat and Tea and was published by The Friday Project, an independent publisher founded in London in 2004. This publisher’s main stated aim was to source material for printed books from the Internet – for example, in November 2005, the company published an anthology of British bloggers, including excerpts from Tom Reynolds’ blog. The Friday Project had a confident start in the publishing world and, in 2006, was able to hire Scott Pack, ex-buying manager from the book chain Waterstones, as commercial director. In May 2007, its managing director Clare Christian was awarded UK Young Publisher of the Year at the Nibbie Awards. However, after a bad Christmas, the company was forced into administration early in 2008, with HarperCollins buying some of its assets – Reynolds’ second blook, More Blood, More Sweat and Another Cup of Tea was published in June 2009 under The Friday Project imprint of HarperCollins. Criticism of The Friday Project in the blogosphere suggested that although it had managed to get several of its titles featured on the Richard and Judy Book Group television programme in the United Kingdom, the company had not had the resources to sign up enough bloggers with general appeal, such as O’Reilly or Belle de Jour, both of whom were published by mainstream publishers, and instead were forced to turn to well-written blogs focusing on more narrow interests, which did not always translate into high enough book sales to sustain the company’s ambitious expansion plans.

In other words, a popular blog does not necessarily translate into a popular book, and an Internet readership will not necessarily become a book-purchasing market. The blogging style: short, chronologically ordered entries, does not always easily translate into a book, and some of the more popular blooks mentioned previously have been rewritten to remove this formulation. Very topical writing becomes less topical when it is published months later. The transformation of a blog into a blook usually also removes the comments of readers and the way in which the blogger interacts with his or her readership. In some cases, this is the heart of the blog and by removing this interaction the blog becomes less interesting or readable. Yes, some popular blogs become best-selling blooks, but that appears to be more to do with the writing skill of the blogger than with the blogging format. As we have seen, many of the bloggers shortlisted for the Blooker Prize turned out to be successful authors in other formats and it is possible that their book would have been published anyway if they had taken the idea directly to a publisher. Their commitment to blogging may also be debatable. At least four of the blogs entered for the 2006 Blooker Prize had been closed down by summer 2008 and several others were being added to much less frequently, and mainly with details about the book and where to buy it. Yes, bloggers such as Seth Godin and Tom Reynolds continue to blog as frequently as ever, but for others, the blogging experience seemed to finish once their blog had been turned into print, whatever the success of the blook.

This is not to say that the blook phenomenon has not unearthed some successful books that would probably never have seen the light of day if they had not started as blogs. The overall winner of the 2006 Blooker Prize was My War: Killing Time in Iraq by Colby Buzzell. In his article detailing his experiences as a judge for the prize, Cohen had only praise for Buzzell’s book, arguing that it would never have been written if blogging had not been invented and that Buzzell had been given confidence in his own abilities because of the on-going praise he received from his readership (Cohen, 2007).

Colby Buzzell had no interest in a career as an author before his blog became popular. He was a soldier. He was not hoping that his blog would become so popular that it would attract the attention of publishers: he was more concerned about not catching the attention of his superiors, who ordered him to close down his blog when it was eventually discovered. His blook has been tremendously popular and Buzzell has gone on to write articles for magazines such as Esquire. On leaving the army, he used the GI Bill to enrol for a photography course at his local college. Unfortunately, he was not able to keep up the blogging as frequently, but one of the main reasons for this must be that, in May 2008, he was recalled for deployment in the Middle East.

I originally chose to investigate the blook phenomenon because of the reported hopes of many of my surveyed bloggers that their blog would soon lead to contract negotiations with a publisher. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the concept of blogging as a form of creative writing was popular among respondents to both surveys, and several stated that they were hoping that their blogging would lead to greater things. Such hopes may be overly optimistic. The blook is not a guaranteed way for publishers to source new best-selling authors and blooks are not challenging the way in which the publishing industry operates. The demise of The Friday Project suggests that a total reliance on material sourced from the Internet is not – as yet – a winning formula for the publishing industry. A highly ranked blog is not necessarily a guarantor of a best-selling book, although some authors have managed to cross over. However, many of the successful blooks discussed here were written by professional writers and it seems that blogs and blooks are to some extent being used by already established authors to experiment with other genres. Once published, there is no guarantee that the author will continue to blog with the same vigour as before or on topics other than the promotion of their new book. For some blooks, the readership of the blog has successfully been transferred to the associated book and even on to the associated film or television series. Having said all this, however, just occasionally – as with Colby Buzzell – blooks are a way in which a brand-new writing voice can catch the attention of the public.