DailyCandy and the blogs-to-books trend

DailyCandy crowds a SoHo bookstore for its book launch party on Tuesday night.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

NEW YORK--Tuesday night was the first time I'd been to a digital-media-related event at a bookstore, unless you count the time that Google threw a conference at the New York Public Library.

It was the launch party for girly e-newsletter DailyCandy's new book, The DailyCandy Lexicon: Words That Don't Exist But Should, at the McNally Robinson bookstore-cafe in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood. Refreshments consisted of rum cocktails and, not surprisingly, candy.

Sample entry in the book: "textual frustration: a late-night text exchange that fails to result in old-fashioned lip-locking." DailyCandy staffers told me that about half the entries in the book are wholly original, and the other half are sourced from "Lexicon"-themed DailyCandy e-mails from over the years.

The party was mostly full of DailyCandy's own sundress-clad legions--the company employs about 60 people--and their friends. Fellow blog folk were few and far between, though a handful of people from nearby new-media companies like Flavorpill and Gawker showed up. So did Bob Pittman, the MTV executive turned AOL executive turned Pilot Group chief, whose investment firm owns a majority stake in DailyCandy. (Regrettably, Pittman left before I had a chance to ask him about his reported foray into the tequila business.)

I also didn't get a good answer to this question: Why is there such an impulse to turn a blog (or, in DailyCandy's case, an online newsletter) into a book?

This blogs-to-books trend seems to keep chugging along, despite the fact that none of their predecessors have been particularly successful. Gawker Media's Guide to Conquering All Media sold dismally, as schadenfreude-happy blogger Jeff Bercovici gleefully pointed out. Options, the book takeoff of the wildly popular Fake Steve Jobs blog, wasn't exactly a chart-topper, either. And now there are books either just out or on the way for blogs Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, Postcards From Yo Momma, Passive-Aggressive Notes, and a heap of others.

For a popular blogger, somewhat ironically, getting a "dead-tree tie-in" (to quote Bercovici) seems to be the way of knowing you've made it. But is that canceled out if it doesn't sell well?

DailyCandy, for what it's worth, has a much more longstanding brand than the likes of I Can Has Cheezburger, and it already has an earlier book (DailyCandy A to Z, published in 2006) under its belt. But the question still stands: why venture offline when the online brand seems to be doing just fine on its own? Will it really convert enough new readers to offset the cost and energy of book publishing? Is a "blog book" really just an ego boost?

The world may never know.

[Darth_Prefect]

The answer is simple. It's the same reason a successful playwright like William Shakespeare felt the need to write epic poems. In his day, writing plays did *not* make you a "man of letters". Plays were not considered "real writing". So it is today. Anybody can throw a blog up there, but a *book* is substantial. A *book* is real. A *book* means something, no matter how well it sells.

[elektric]

Caroline, you failed to mention several more notable bloggers who have released books. Stephanie Klein, Greek Tragedy, just debuted her second book, Moose, for a major publisher and there are other examples as well. Is this a real story, or an excuse to go to a dot bomb shindig?

[evohollywood]

I think its just a different market of books and really very similar to somebody collecting a series of articles from a newspaper column or regular magazine feature. These books don't exactly thrive on the shelves of Barnes and Noble, but they do fit in quite well on the tables of Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, or other small boutiques. People love to give these kinds of books as gifts or keep them on their side tables as a sort of bona fides.

This is hardly a new trend and hasn't generally been unsuccessful. For every example of failure you bring up I can bring up an example of success. UrbanDictionary.com has released two volumes of collections from its website and they have both sold quite well. And even if there have been more failures than successes, isn't failure the general rule in publishing anyway? I guess the only thing I don't understand about the trend is why some people seem so threatened by it, why so many articles have been written lately desperately trying to condemn the act? What's with the cynicism?

Evan