This article looks at the seemingly slick, buzzy process by which blogging can get you a book deal. It specifically draws on the example of Stuff White People Like , a blog I enjoy.
Christian Lander’s little monographs on ‘Caucasian’-specific tastes for things – ‘white people like dinner parties’ and ‘in order to fill the silence, white people will often turn to board games (Cranium!) or Wii Bowling’ – poke fun at experiences a certain kind of person, generally white and wearing a t-shirt, will be very enthused about. Anyone who has been to Islington or Edinburgh or the Lower East Side will recognise his target. If it weren’t for an aversion to North Face jackets and shorts, I’d be his target (Cranium is awesome!). The concept of the blog made me wonder what a Stuff Publishing People Like blog would look like.
Publishing People Like:
#1: The First-Line Test for a Manuscript
This works best with a book that turns out to be completely ridiculous. When a book is brilliant, sentences that would be questionable in any other context just look like clever in-jokes (first line of A Wrinkle in Time: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’).
#2: Throwing Around Mad Ideas for Book Covers
‘I don’t know if this sounds crazy, but . . .’ – just say it. Let’s call up symbols, allegories, allusions, shadowy figures to represent the story within. A tearful piglet in pyjamas would look great on that misery-eating-disorder-agoraphobia memoir.
#3: Writing Notes and Tucking Them into Books for Each Other
A habit that warms people’s cockles, on the rare occasions they actually open the book and find the note within.
#4: Going on Illicit No-Reading Sprees
. . . and boasting, in a mock-appalled way, at the end of it about ‘how long I went without’. This is a distant relation of David Lodge’s dangerous parlour game ‘Humiliations’, from Changing Places, in which players announce in turns the titles of famous books they’ve never read. Not quite as fun as Cranium.
#5: Fake Tattoos (we LOVE these)
Wentworth Miller in Prison Break attire would most definitely gain entry to our parties.
What Publishing People Hate is equally fun to imagine.
#1: Repeated Questions About What We’re Going to Do When No One Buys Books Anymore
Like many important, zeitgeisty questions, it provokes a lot of yawning.
#2: Repeated Insinuations, or Outright Accusations, that We Are Thoughtless Tree-Murderers
The earliest known example of written communication comes from Transylvania in the seventh millennium BC and looks like a few pictures scratched on a bit of shell. In Europe in the Dark Ages, monks treated thousands of flocks’ worth of vellum before inscribing the word of God into it, the same gospels manufactured over and over again. Since the advent of the printing press we print on paper; we have moved on from turtles and sheep. And if the seminar schedule from LBF is anything to go by, we are looking into moving on from trees too.
#3: Typos on Covers (and Generally)
#4: Negative Feedback from Authors / Customers
Alternatively, Getting Sued
#5: Paying for Drinks (yes, that old chestnut)
Maybe the list is getting too specific to Canongate, or to myself. Stuff Authors Like is another one we wouldn’t mind seeing, in addition to Stuff Book-Buyers Like (anyone care to pitch in? Lord knows it could be helpful).
