Books, Blogs & Blook Publishing

Are you familiar with the term "blook"? If not, you should at least warm up to the idea, if not fully embrace it.

Basically, a blook is a blog that's been turned into a book. Or, put another way, it's a book made up of blog posts.

Here's part of an excerpt from Wikipedia's definition:

"With the advent of the blog people started to publish books serialized on their blogs. Chapters are published one by one as blog posts, and readers can then subscribe to the blook via an RSS feed, tag it and comment on it. This type of blook was popularized by Tom Evslin in 2005, with the launch of Hackoff.com, a murder mystery set in the dot-com bubble."

A more recent example is Seth Godin's latest book, Small Is the New Big, a collection of several year's worth of his most popular blog posts and articles. The format even inspired Lulu.com to sponsor an annual Blooker Prize.

This serialized concept actually isn't that revolutionary. In the 1800s, many of Charles Dickens' novels were exposed to the public one chapter at a time, published in newspapers.

You may be asking, "But if people can read all the chapters on my blog, why would they buy the book?" Well, if they enjoy your ideas enough, they'll appreciate having all of your words in a convenient, well-packaged form.

Cory Doctorow, a well-known author and blogger (who I've written about before), believes blooks change the nature of the creative process involved in writing:

"Previously such jottings might have been kept in the author's notebook," he says, "but something amazing happens when you post them online: readers help you connect them, flesh them out, and grow them into fully-fledged books or blooks."

So what you post on your blog may be early drafts of the more polished chapters that end up in your book.

Another blog/book approach is the one taken by Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail. For nearly two years before his book came out, he blogged about his topic. But he didn't publish book chapters per se. Instead, he blogged about the subject matter of the book and kept people updated on the progress he made as he wrote it. This created a buzz about the book and gave him regular feedback from readers, which he used to make the book better.

In fact, I'm using some combination of the above as I move toward the publication of my upcoming book, Full-Time Author: How to Make a Living With Your Self-Published Book.

-Bob

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