This is a new genre and a growing one. More and more excellent writing is being done in blogs, and there are many reasons to capture this writing in, as Kos says, "analog form."
Now we’ve talked before about your blog being the raw material for your procedural, analytical, or informational book. However, you may want to maintain the "blogginess" or just use your information as you have written it. But beware: how you organize and write the book will be quite different.
To Tell the Truth is an 18-week mini-series exploring the practical side of non-fiction writing and publishing. The series outline is located here, and previous episodes may be found here. To Tell the Truth is published Monday evenings and is crossed posted at MélangePress.
For more writing and book diaries, visit Write On! on Thursdays, Bookflurries and What Are You Reading on Wednesdays, and Books by Kossacks.
Blog-to-book compendiums seem to fall into one of three categories: "I can haz a book", essay collections, and topic series.
I can haz a book?
There are many funny blogs that have brought their humor to book form, including theI Can Haz Cheeseburger sites and my favorite, Cake Wrecks. These are essentially compendiums of their funniest pictures/jokes/posts. Great stuff – and pretty self-explanatory. If you’re running a funny blog and want to turn it into a book, the only advice I can offer is this: make sure the material is timeless, and make sure you have enough to fill a book.
Essay Collections
Many bloggers have, in essence, written essays that are timeless enough to be read again. In the pre-blog days, you’d see these sorts of books written by columnists like Molly Ivins (may she rest in peace), Dave Barry, and Lewis Grizzard. They key in compiling these sorts of books, again, is to make sure the material is timeless, and you have enough to fill a book.
NOTE: I talk a lot about timelessness, and you may be wondering why it’s important. Wouldn’t a book of essays taken from your blog be a nice snapshot in time? Sure, if you frame it that way and set the environment or atmosphere. Take, for example, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. (While he was too early for a blog, I suspect if the form had been available, Hunter S. would have been all over it.) The book is an incredible snapshot in time, framed exactly as a snapshot of a particular experience, with all the references, namedropping, social and cultural references firmly ensconced in Thompson’s distinctive style. And yet it is timeless, because he frames it exactly AS a snapshot in time. All the President's Men is similarly a snapshot that remains timeless. On the other side is a collection of New Yorker humor articles and essays. Some are indeed timeless (see Thurber), but some of them from the 1930s just ‘whoosh’ over our 21st century heads. The jokes don’t land, the cultural references are lost, the atmosphere isn’t set well enough to give us a sufficient snapshot.
And now, back to your regular diary, already in progress...
Topic Series
Occasionally, a writer will create a series of blog entries about a particular topic (like this series) that has either a planned end, or an inevitable end. The prime example, of course, is Recounting Minnesota: Blogging the Al Franken Election Saga by Carl "WineRev" Eeman (who will be around for an hour or so to take your questions and unabashed praise). In this case, what started as a few ‘what is the media saying’ diaries turned into a daily account of the recount process as well as astute media criticism (see Carl’s screed against the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Pat Doyle). There was, potentially, an end to the series – although none of us expected it to be as late as it was. But we knew in March that it should become a book, and thus took on this monumental task.
Perhaps the most important part of turning a topic series into a book is making sure you pull out repetitions; often, there will be reviews and a rehashing of information that is not necessary in a book. In Recounting Minnesota, for example, we edited out the repetition of the Nauen 61 explanation – once was enough.
Translating Netspeak to English
There is a balance to be struck between the casualness and immediateness of blogging and the rules and regulations of proper English. One on hand, you wouldn’t expect to see emoticons and internet acronyms in print, and yet they may be vital to the flow of the piece. There is also a lax in grammatical rules (such as using nine or ten periods rather than the three required for a proper ellipsis – WineRev, I’m talkin’ to you) that may not translate well. You and your editors can devise a style sheet that will define which conventions will stay and what must go.
Comments
One of the most difficult tasks is deciding what to do with comments. In some cases, the comments are minor and have no real bearing on the writing itself. In other cases, it directly feeds and supports the writing. Just make sure, if you decide to include comments, you are selective. If we’d included all the comments from the WineRev series, we’d have had another thousand pages. We in fact had seriously considered not including any comments except those he had specifically woven into subsequent diaries, but eventually, another 40 or so were added in.
Personal and Meta Information
Again, this is a balance. On one hand, having some sense of the personal ("early day at the wine shop") grounds the book in the immediate (more of that atmosphere stuff I mentioned earlier). On the other hand, there is some personal information that just doesn’t serve the flow of the piece at all.
And meta content should be especially important for it to stay. Often, we edited out comments about other diaries, questions to specific commenters, and rec list notices. We did keep the meta line about one of Carl’s diaries being put on the front page – that was quite an honor. But we used it sparsely. I advise the same for your meta content.
There is a lot more we have to learn about the blog-to-book genre, and as new media evolves, so will this genre. But it’s an exciting time to be writing this kind of book!
Next up – the misfits: types of non-fiction that don’t really fit into one of the other categories. (It’s always the way, isn’t it?) See you next week!
Cheers!