Tag Archives: books

Turning free web material into books

The NY Times ran an article on blogs/sites moving into printed products. Pretty interesting though nothing really new is mentioned. They don’t even mention the word “blook“. Which is a book mainly consisting of blog posts (and one word I hope never makes it into the dictionary). Basically some marketing folks look at a blog’s traffic stats and see dollar signs, but over the last two years, publishers have realized that a high number of unique visitors does not always translate into dollars.

Though it seems that comics and illustrations do seem to do better than fiction and narratives.

Basically, Frank Warren (of Post Secret fame) summed-up the whole business model when he is quoted in the article saying “I don’t think there is a formula,” Mr. Warren said. “There is a bit of magic there that can’t be replicated.”

List of lists listing lists

I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago, because by now I think we’re all listed out. But it’s new to me and I thought it a pretty cool thing. It’s a site and meta-list that’s new to me. It lists all of the “best of 2007” lists on the web. It’s constantly changing.

As of this post, 66 “best books of 2007” lists, have been submitted. But there are whole bunch more topics to read through too. The best food blogs was another of my favorite categories.

Birmingham’s ‘Big Read’

Susan Swagler posted about the JCLC’s new “one city, one book” type program which kicks off with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

Festivities officially start January 14th and go all the way through April. Looks like lots of movies, group talks, road trips are on the calendar. I’m digging their plan to place 1,500 copies of the book around town for folks to pick up, read and then set loose in the wild again. Could be good fun!

According to Swagler’s post, one of the speakers at the Alabama Bound event, in April, is a scholar who wrote a paper “questioning Atticus’s heroism.” Huh? What blasphemy is this? I’m going to have to find said paper and investigate. You can bet I’ll have red markers at the ready!

Actually, I’m just glad that the JCLC has taken the time to get all this organized.

Adding more ads

It’s getting imppossible to keep up with the latest trend in book publishing… ads. Folks like WOWIO led the way. Yahoo! even mentioned last year that they are offering this service, now Lulu.com is offering their self-published customers the same revenue stream.

So now you can self-publish a book with them and they’ll help broker ad deals, kinda like you would for placing ads on your blog, I think. I guess book publishers got tired of seeing all the rich folks sitting over at the magazine publisher’s table and decided to  hop on the train.