Brit Lit Blogs
It’s been three days since the launch of BritLitBlogs.com, a website that showcases the latest blog posts from six British litblogs. By bringing together posts from 3:AM, Ready Steady Book, Book World, Scarecrow, This Space and Splinters, we’re hoping we can make it easier for people to simply find all this stuff at all. Our blogs are pretty eclectic, and some are more literary than others (I think Splinters is probably the least literary of the bunch) but I think that’s precisely their collective strength.
What’s been quite gratifying is how quickly the site took off thanks to the blogosphere. We had 300 pageviews on the first day alone, with 500 the next day, thanks purely to links from other blogs, mainly from our US counterparts. (We’re putting together a list of US blogs for BritLitBlogs incidentally - don’t think we’re xenophobic). That number has continued to grow, and we’re also already getting quite a few enquiries from authors and publishers about their books, which is exactly the sort of input we wanted to encourage.
(There’s still a big disconnect between the litblog world and publishers - there’s a lot more that could be done that would cost publishers very little of their marketing budget and generate a lot of word of mouth interest and publicity - and Amazon sales too. But publishers and especially their publicists are busy people - BLB takes a step to making it easier to get the word out about their titles - one email gets to the editors of six different blogs. Between our blogs we must have about 3000+ visitors a day. That’s a lot of people interested in books. I digress.)
How well BLB will progress once the initial novelty wears off will be interesting. There’s nothing technically clever about the site - it’s just each blog’s respective RSS feed fed into a web template. I don’t think Microsoft uberblogger Robert Scoble will be banging on my door to talk about technological innovation just yet. But it’s not about technological innovation - it’s about what you do with the technology itself that’s important, however simple that tech might be.
What is interesting is that BritLitBlogs.com couldn’t exist without blogs and RSS. If blogs are mainstream these days, RSS still remains a geek thing - but hopefully more and more people promoting the arts and other non-geek things online will grab hold of how easy it is to pull together a bunch of feeds into one webpage. If they do that, then they get some collective strength to promote their work. And beyond setting up the aggregator site, there’s no extra work. Everyone carries on with updating their blog and RSS takes care of syndicating it. Meanwhile surfers get a site that’s continually updated. While geeks will recoil in horror, a lot of people still rely on the Web as their way of getting news, not RSS. I don’t think that will change for some time. BritLitBlogs.com will be a good experiment in seeing if I’m right.
[Note to self : The publicist thing: maybe building a form that sends email to every litblog out there (and there are dozens) might be a great tool for publicists to publicise their books and for litbloggers to get the free books they crave. Connecting people etc.] [This memo format TM Hugh McLeod]
More on Brit Lit Blogs:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Britlitblogs redesigned
- Blog on Been enjoying surfing round blogs recen…
- Big Smoke Blogs
- Paid To Blog
- Blogs Sell Books
