Image: Origami_madness
'In fact, we started to wonder if some blogs could become books...'
The snippet above comes from Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings' exciting new publishing project called the round, in which (amongst other prospects) the founders raise the potential for bloggers to make the leap from blogs to e-books and apps, and (it can be presumed) actually earn some money from it.
Exciting stuff, really!
Now, I'm sure a lot of people with good, well-attended blogs must have considered, at some point, the idea that they might be able to turn all that hard work into something that goes a bit beyond occasionally sloppy vanity publishing. And with some blogs (Scott Thornbury's An A-Z of ELT springs readily to mind) you can almost see top quality e-book in the making written all over it.
However, and forgive me if I appear to be completely daft here, one particular issue strikes me as very problematic in all this blog-to-book banter. And this isn't a spontaneous question; I've done a whole range of Google searches on this issue and come up surprisingly short in terms of getting any solid answers.
Assuming you go and convert all or just parts of your blog into a book which you intend to sell, what happens to/with all the comments?
I mean, surely they can't just be loaded up into the book and sold as part of the overall package. Can they? Wouldn't each and every comment contributor need to be contacted in order to get permission? And even assuming that that could be done, what would we do in the potentially sticky situation whereby comment contributors claim some sort of rights to the book (however minor) and demand a slice of any income it generates as a commercial product? Even if the comments are not included, but the content of the posts is adapted and edited content-wise based on the feedback and contributions in the comments, doesn't this still involve the comment makers in the overall process?
I'm sure that this has been addressed by somebody somewhere, but I can't seem to find the relevant information. It strikes me as being fundamentally important in any discussion or plan for turning a blog into a book.
Even if the comments are not included in the book version, how good can the final result be, anyway? What makes blog content truly interesting is not the original post, but where it heads and why based on the readers' contributions.
By the way, I'm not planning on turning the English Raven blog into a book anytime soon. God, what a god-awful mess of a book that would be... There are very good reasons for why it's been put into blog format and delivery, among them the fact that it would make for a shocking (I'm talking quality and readability here... okay, and some of the actual content direction, too!) attempt at a book.
But let's say I plan new posts for the blog which might specifically be targeted for later conversion to e-book format... One of the first things I'd want to look at is how to handle the comments.
Will we end up having to put disclaimers in advance just before the comments sections of our blogs?
Something like: 'you may comment here, with the understanding that I may print your comment or adapt my original post based on your comment, and that you are not entitled in any way to any of the commercial proceeds should this blog be later converted into e-book or printed book format...'?
;-D
