The New Yorker has a piece about a literary agent, Kate Lee, who searches for bloggers to represent. In this search, she spends an hour a day reading blogs. (An hour!) The hitch is, they have to be willing to produce books:
Isn’t it just possible that people who blog blog precisely because they like this literary form? It’s not as if the idea of writing a book wouldn’t occur to a person without the prodding of a literary agent.
MORE: And I love the assumption that writing a book would be more time consuming. You can write a 365 page book in a year if you write a page a day. Don't you think the bloggers who impressed Lee were writing at least a page a day? It seems to me that the bloggers she contacted who didn't want to write books were genuinely interested in writing blogs, writing time-stamped entries that immediately reach out to the whole world. I'll bet the really good bloggers are generally much more "up" and energetic than your average novelist. A blogger has to leave entries every day, and the entries have to be good enough to make people want to come back. I have a sneaking suspicion a good percentage of novelists have long unproductive spells and are among the least up people around. And finally, if Lee really is interested in bloggers, why doesn't she have a more positive attitude toward blogging? I mean, aside from the fact that there is no role for the agent in blogging.
Sometimes she writes to a blogger only to get the e-mail equivalent of a blank stare. The pseudonymous author of The Minor Fall, The Major Lift was particularly unreceptive. “What am I going to write a book about?” he replied. …
[W]hile she loves her bloggers, and has faith in them, it can be difficult to get them to be productive. “They all have day jobs,” she pointed out. Writing anything longer than a blog post is a commitment they don’t always seem up for.
Isn’t it just possible that people who blog blog precisely because they like this literary form? It’s not as if the idea of writing a book wouldn’t occur to a person without the prodding of a literary agent.
MORE: And I love the assumption that writing a book would be more time consuming. You can write a 365 page book in a year if you write a page a day. Don't you think the bloggers who impressed Lee were writing at least a page a day? It seems to me that the bloggers she contacted who didn't want to write books were genuinely interested in writing blogs, writing time-stamped entries that immediately reach out to the whole world. I'll bet the really good bloggers are generally much more "up" and energetic than your average novelist. A blogger has to leave entries every day, and the entries have to be good enough to make people want to come back. I have a sneaking suspicion a good percentage of novelists have long unproductive spells and are among the least up people around. And finally, if Lee really is interested in bloggers, why doesn't she have a more positive attitude toward blogging? I mean, aside from the fact that there is no role for the agent in blogging.