A book's my dream: bring it on!

Book deals are a logical leap for many bloggers: after all, love of expression brought most of us here. And nothing says prestige like perfect-bound dead-trees on a shelf... though perhaps e-readers and e-paper will successfully shift the medium into pixels.

Week one, we discussed some bloggers who made the leap, like novelist Rebecca Agiewich, as well as some who cross-pollinate cheerfully like career-expert Michelle Goodman. As she noted:

Those of us who value eating have adapted, branching into online markets, magazine work, trade publications, corporate work, consulting, editing, et cetera. You know, diversify or starve.

Although I got my 9-to-5 start in newspapers, I’ve never been more than a sporadic contributor since going freelance in 1992. In the intervening years, I’ve hopped from freelancing for the book publishing biz to dotcoms and the corporate tech sector, back to magazines and newspapers and books, and lately, over to web news media — though to stay afloat, I still do some of each.

Yet still, she wants to work in publishing. "As an aside, it’s my firm believe that most people do. I mean, when was the last time you met a person who didn’t tell they wanted to write a book? When every last one of us is reading a Kindle or whatever the next space tablet is, wannabe writers and life coaches will still be saying they hope to see their name in print someday."

Two routes typically lead to book goodness: gather up all your samples, proven audience (reader stats and demographics) and draft a 30-to-50-page proposal. This could net you an agent, though some insist that's harder than actually selling a manuscript. And your agent, or potential publishers, may well have some strong views on how to revise that massive document you've slaved over. The process is big fun.

But it could land you a book deal. And then you'd be eligible for a Blooker award, the first prize for literature based upon online content.

Option two – self-publishing – also makes your volume eligible for a Blooker, provided perfect-bound hard copies exist (the contest doesn't accept e-books). This route's increasingly popular, as businesses like Amazon and Netflick shift smaller quantities of a wider range of products. The term "long tail" describes this phenomenon, coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. "Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody," he wrote. "People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture)."

Thus DIY publishing – once dismissed as "vanity press" – is gaining fresh vitality.