Blogs Sell Books

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

Grumpy Old Bookman wrote recently - “blogs don’t sell books“.

I think not.

Some real examples:

Belle De Jour and Girl With A One Track Mind both had bestsellers on their books based on their blogs. Girl is on her 5th printing in the third week of publication I think. Both of them published on plain vanilla Blogger-hosted blogspot accounts. No bells or whistles or technical knowledge required.

They write filth - entertaining, intelligent, literate filth, but filth all the same. So perhaps they can be discounted as anomalies - sex sells and all that.

John Battelle’s The Search, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations are all books that were written chapter by chapter on the authors’ blogs to a large degree, with readers offering feedback and critique along the way. Those books wouldn’t be half as good or half as successful without the process of talking theories and ideas over with readers.

All three books have become subsequent bestsellers. But perhaps they are only successful because they are in the tech market, and the internet is full of geeks.

Seth Godin has just published Small Is The New Big, a collection of marketing aphorisms - which are taken from his blog. Granted, he’s had several bestselling books already so he can get away with it, but the content written on his blog is still good enough to be turned into another bestselling blog.

Nearer to fiction, Mil Millington got a newspaper column and a subsequent book deal out of his proto-blog Things My Girlfriend And I Argue About.

And, of course, let’s not forget the bit of buzz around Tom McCarthy’s Remainder created by the various Brit Lit blogs which must have helped move at least a few more copies.

Blogs do sell books - it’s all still in its infancy, and it’s hard work too, but these books show there’s a lot of potential for finding an audience. MJ Rose had a moan at publishers in the Holtzbrink group (Holt, St. Martin’s, Farrar/Straus, Tor, and Picador) a couple of weeks ago for suggesting their authors set up a blog and that it wouldn’t take much time to maintain - she’s right, blogging does take time, but I don’t think a publisher should be castigated for encouraging their authors to do it. (Admittedly I wouldn’t publish a blog on my publisher’s site - I’d do it independently so I have complete control over it).

What would be a better idea would be a guide for authors to blogging so they can minimise the pain of getting a blog set up and getting it noticed.

Fiction still remains a hard sell through blogs - through anything - because it remains so intangible. Even when fiction is categorised as “historical”, “thriller” etc it’s difficult to generate any excitement around that.

But the blog format is also what lends itself to a different style of writing. Belle De Jour and Girl With A One Track Mind and Mil Millington all write in short, sharp, pithy entries - driven by the diary format of the blog perhaps, but also creating a brevity and immediacy that a lot of other writing could use too.

Perhaps more tellingly, the blog format - ie adding to a narrative over time - also lets the writer build an audience of readers. One of the reasons all those books mentioned above have done well is because there were hundreds of people who bought the book as soon as it came out because they read the blog. Finding the audience is the hardest part of writing.

Someone writing a novel with half an eye on serialising it on a blog - like David Wellington’s Monster Island, a zombie novel on steroids - will hopefully make an effort towards being concise and letting each chapter work as an advert for the book. I don’t think that’s compromising the integrity of the book - I think that’s a writer pushing themselves to make their writing really tight. (Wellington’s site is a masterpiece of presentation too for putting a book online too - clean, clear and readable).

There is, then, a lot more fiction writers can do with blogs to promote their work - and also use blogs themselves to help their writing and find their audience.

Posted on August 26th, 2006.

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