screen grab, LATFH.com
via The Brooklyn Rail:
by Sarah Hromack
Historically
speaking, those of us who embraced the Web long ago have suffered the
summary dismissal that tends to accompany all major cultural paradigm
shifts. This all-too-familiar feeling of resistance toward the Web
(hide your daughters, the Internet is coming!) has only been
exacerbated by the current economic climate, where newsroom vets are
gripped by terror as “The Youngs” hack their way into a system formerly
reserved for J-school initiates. As the mainstream media embrace the
Web, that dialectic tension already feels a bit tedious. Bloggers are
getting their due—or making progress at, least—and that is that. We are
and always have been evangelists for the Web, devoted to a platform
that provides us with a degree of agency that the print bureaucracy
simply does not. The curious part, however, is that we’ve never stopped
wanting to see our words in print, even when editors have refused to
look at them.
Enter the Book Deal, a harbinger of fame (and hopefully, fortune)
that for many now serves as a strategic reason to begin blogging in the
first place. The most lucrative deals tend to be awarded to those whose
sites function as durational book proposals, where an author’s thesis
coalesces through a succession of topical, short-form posts. These
one-offs lend themselves naturally to publication in print, where the
narrative has more room to develop. (A great irony, yes, given the
Web’s indexical capacity. Yet a couple hundred thousand words simply do
not read the same online as they do on the page.) Political pundits
tend to score publishing contracts, as do other subject-specific
authors. Being “Internet famous” never hurts, either: Minds reeled
around this time last year when former Gawker editor Emily Gould spun
her now-seminal New York Times Magazine account of her tendency to
“overshare” into a full-on memoir deal. Her take was initially said to
be $1 million, a rumor that has since been debunked.
Newer
publishing platforms and social networking applications—namely, Tumblr
and Twitter—have ushered in a new kind of blog-to-book deal: The user
generated model. Look at this Fucking Hipster is the Internet
brainchild of one Joe Mande, a standup comedian with his own show at
the Upright Citizens Brigade theater and, as of early June, a
soon-to-be published author. LATFH is his
chronicle of hipsterdom at its sartorial best, posted anonymously to a
Tumblr account that caught the attention of editors at Penguin’s Gotham
Books imprint, publisher of blog-to-book luminaries Barack Obama is
Your New Bicycle and I Can Haz Cheeseburger—not to mention the rest of
the Internet, where Gawker gleefully outed Mande as the site’s author. LATFH
The Book will likely take the form of its analog predecessor, Vice
Magazine’s “Dos and Don’ts”, a dorm room cooler-cum-coffee table-worthy
collection of the magazine’s brutal fashion critiques based on
photographs of dubious origin. Reader-submitted or “found” content is
perfectly suited to Tumblr, a one-click publishing platform whose users
tend to favor rapid-fire, image-heavy posts over longer missives. As
with Twitter, bloggers can “follow” one another’s Tumblr accounts,
re-publishing posts at will in a free-and-easy exchange of authorship,
a Deconstructivist’s dream made manifest through the Web.
While
media watchdogs fixate on the actual book deals—namely, on the dollar
sum of the advance, as this is one form of online commerce that still
amazes us—few pause to consider the books themselves. How strangely
anachronistic is it (and yet, extraordinarily telling) that those who
participate in perhaps the most monumental democratic exercise ever—and
who do so daily, often for a living—would seek to tame the great,
unbridled, immaterial beast that is the Internet with some high-gloss
stock and two binding boards? How thoroughly odd it is that one would
attempt to translate the particular digital reading experience of the
Tumblr blog, or Twitter feed, or Facebook update into an analog one.
What about the Kindle?
When asked why he felt compelled to
select 600 tweets for Twitter Wit, his forthcoming book from Harper
Collins, former Valleywag editor and Internet wunderkind Nick Douglas
cited Postcards from Yo Momma, another blog-to-book phenomenon written
by Jessica Grose and Gawker alum Doree Shafrir:
To make a book out of these submissions is to fix what PFYM is about, or to create an entity intentionally different than PFYM
in certain ways. This is not the mere regurgitation of web content: The
different balance of reader attention, standards of quality, intended
audience, and writer-reader relationship (the reader, for example, can
no longer comment, and a mediocre submission no longer encourages
similar but better submissions) turns the book into something new. Of
course many bloggers with book deals start saving “the good stuff” for
the printed version.
The possible pitfall with
the blog-to-book translation has as much to do with form as it does
content: Sneaking a tweet during a lecture or a film, followed by a
quick checkup on my friends’ updates with a flick of my iPhone’s
screen, is a much different tactical and cognitive experience than
settling in with a piece of printed matter (a veritable luxury given
the good, solid twelve-to-fourteen hours a day I spend online as a
writer and editor). While I appreciate the convenience of a published
compendium of essays culled from a favorite website—again, I’m talking
about long-form writing here—the Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook
experience depends as much on looking as it does on reading. Why else
would Facebook users revolt when the site launched its new interface
several months back? Would the Twitter’s infamous Fail Whale, the
jovial cartoon that delivers a pop-up apology when the system is over
capacity, hold its charm in print? Here, I am doubtful. (To be fair
though, perhaps we will surprise ourselves in casting a backwards
glance from the Internet to print. One can hope.)
By that
token, this hybrid identity between blogger and author wouldn’t exist
to begin with if a few chaps in Cambridge and San Francisco hadn’t
taken a gamble on the Internet’s ability to summon our most deeply
rooted needs and desires. Most powerful amongst these is validation:
Everyone wants to feel wanted. And it’s hard to deny an opportunity to
see our names memorialized in a tangible, keepsake form. We can’t
literally hand the Internet down to our children, after all.
Or,
as writer and Gawker contributor, Melissa Gira Grant, who is also
working on a book proposal about sex and the Internet, puts it: “People
will sign over their proprietary rights to a post or an image because
they don’t see a picture of a hamburger as having cultural value unless
it’s published in a book alongside 300 other hamburgers. They can’t see
the aggregate form.” Ultimately, the blog-to-book deal constitutes a
leap of faith on the part of the author (and publisher!)—an attempt to
traverse genres while certain of others’ willingness to come along for
the ride. “Publishing is still a healthy industry,” Douglas insists,
“and this will be the biggest audience some of my contributors have
ever reached.” Spoken like a true believer.
Sarah Hromack is Web Editor of Art in America and the former editor of Curbed San Francisco.
