New Reading
Last night I came across an old piece from the VLS on literary blogging, and since it mentions several of the blogs that I read regularly, I thought I’d link it here. (There was a time in my life, just after I had got my first job, when all I wanted was to publish in the VLS. After I had written to them several times, once even arguing that it was every Third World child’s dream to see their name in that paper, I was given the chance to write an 800-word review of A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies. Sent the review but never heard back from the editors. No yes, no no, no maybe. The only time I did get published in the Voice was when I paid them–I can’t remember now how much–for a Valentine’s Day Special PDA section. My ad said something like this: “Hey babe, Let’s snuggle in bed and read the poetry of the future or even Spivak’s Scattered Speculations on Value that you so greatly admire. XOXOXO.”)
It takes five minutes to create a blog, and even the most successful litbloggers say they embarked on the whole thing casually—a kind of public doodle. Maybe they wanted to alert friends to cool articles and reviews, which is how Jessa Crispin of Bookslut started, or distract themselves from the impending war in Iraq, like Brooklyn blogger Maud Newton. Maybe they were bored or just plain procrastinating. But that non-professionalism is a big part of the appeal to readers—the off-the-cuff intimacy, the ornery opinions, the bloggers’ ability to say whatever they think without worrying about editors reining them in.
“What people look for in a book blog is someone whose taste aligns with theirs and who can lead them to some good recommendations,” says Crispin, a former librarian for Planned Parenthood in Chicago, “and that’s where their power lies.” Last month, a British survey suggested that nearly a third of those under 35 considered personal word of mouth the most important motivation for buying a book; only 6 percent based their purchase on ads. Over the years there have been plenty of attempts to bottle this transaction—for instance, amazon.com’s “personalized” suggestions made by a computer. But blogs are much closer to the real thing. Delight and disappointment are transmitted in ways more akin to dinner-table banter than to a verdict delivered from on high.
“Publicists take note—people who love books are making pilgrimages to our sites and they’re taking our word for things and buying books we recommend,” wrote Mark Sarvas of the Elegant Variation in an online essay last year. An L.A.-based screenwriter with a novel in the works, Sarvas started his blog impulsively in 2003. But he began to see it as a forum for championing unsung writers. Now Sarvas wants to prove that these sites have clout. He has recruited 19 fellow bloggers to launch the Litblog Co-op, a virtual collective stretching across the country that will bestow attention on four books a year—literary books that would not, Sarvas promises, get review attention otherwise.
