From blogs to books

What do Julia & Julia, PostSecret and Stuff White People Like have in common? If you answered, “They’re blogs,” you’re correct. If you answered, “They’re books,” you’re also correct.  Another favorite released this year: Apartment Therapy from a wildly popular home décor blog of the same name started by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan– whose mission is to help people make their homes more beautiful, organized and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, ideas and community online.

Since roughly 2005, publishers have been looking to social media for new talent and new material to buoy book production, bridging the gap between computer screen and coffee table. There’s a world of difference between being a blogger and a book author, but more writers are wearing both hats these days. It’s not surprising that pro writers are becoming bloggers, but “amateur” bloggers getting book deals. According to statistics by R.R. Bowker, A staggering 764,448 titles were produced in 2009 by self-publishers and micro-niche publishers. The number of “nontraditional” titles dwarfed that of traditional books whose output slipped to 288,355 last year from 289,729 in 2008. Taken together, total book output in 2009 rose 87% to over 1 million books.

Social Media and the Book Publishing Industry make a very good marriage in these times when normally, logic would imply a struggle under the weight of the recession. Why? Social media makes information producible, accessible and spreads it easily, quickly and without barriers of entry. On the other hand, the publishing industry provides the creative with resources not available to them, namely: the production of books, the distribution, the pricing, marketing and sales.