Regina Cannot Explain It All

I think it’s important to specify that the blogs themselves, whether it’s LATF or TIWYF or the “Shit My Dad Says” Twitter, (or the people behind them) aren’t stoking my ire. It’s just frustrating to watch publishers grasping desperately at something — anything — that can be cheaply produced with a low level of creative output to boost flagging book sales.

And by the way, this attitude isn’t limited to blog book deals: In a couple of weeks Quirk Books will release Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, coming on the heels of its very successful predecessor, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which was essentially a 200-page reiteration of the same joke. S&S&SM drops Sept. 15th. Do you know when Quirk first announced the book deal? July 15th. Two months. Two months between the announcement and the release. That is not just a rarity in the book world; it borders on absolute impossibility. And if you watch the trailer (yes, there’s A TRAILER for a book), you’ll see the character of Willoughby say he’s “a sensible man, not easily swayed by emotion.” How Regency! How British! How totally inaccurate if you’ve ever actually read Sense and Sensibility. If they can’t even write 20 seconds of dialogue (before the sea monsters appear) without destroying one of the biggest pieces of characterization in the novel, can we really expect a book that is cheeky and fun but also well integrated into the story Jane Austen told? The whole project seems slipshod and is obviously motivated by the desire to make a quick, cheap buck. Forget about quality. Forget about artistic integrity. And I know we’re talking about sea monsters here, but “not serious” does not and should not equate to “lacks integrity.”

So there’s a massive industry-wide flail,  of which the blog/tweet books are a part, that’s annoying the hell out of me. But it’s also exacerbated by my suspicion that these books won’t sell. Because if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that people who aren’t buying print material [books or magazines] anyway but like reading things online probably won’t buy a book of something they read/can continue to read online. Peter Feld wrote something awhile back that I thought was incisive: that “audiences are more stratified by media habits than they are united by common interests.” And if the fanbase(s) for these blogs/twitters are people who spend a significant portion of their time reading blogs or tweeting, if they “hang out” online, my Spidey sense tells me they might find blog-books or tweet-books stale — the nature of the medium that gave life to LATFH and TIWYF and SMDS is one that is constantly updating in small increments. While none of these blogs are particularly “newsy” or topical, I would argue that you read them with a different mindset than you read a book, even a collection of discrete works (like stories or essays or poems or anecdotes). Blogs and tweets just possess an inherent sense of immediacy that books don’t.  (Now in the cases of LATFH and TIWYF specifically, if the pictures are well-composed and interesting, that might be enough to make the medium irrelevant. But I’m not sure how this works for non-photo blogs or tweets.)

Again, this isn’t a dig at any of the people who have secured book deals. I just think the publishing industry is making some questionable creative decisions based on very questionable business “savvy.”

I suspect what will happen is that these kinds of books will either be profitable or they won’t (shocking!); but if they are, they’ll just quietly slink off into niche-dom, which isn’t terrible but it does mean it won’t be newsworthy when, you know, Insanity Wolf gets his book deal (which I’ll have to buy and review because he’s threatening to napalm my office building).