Next year this blog will be 20 years old and I’m thinking of publishing an abridged version in paperback.
At least, that was the plan. I have been advised however that 85,000 words is the perfect size for a standard A5 paperback and anything above 100k may be too thick and heavy for the spine.
Yesterday therefore I spent the afternoon copying and pasting posts that were published from March 2007 to December 2009 into a Word document and even with a bit of editing (omitting, for example, posts that now seem inconsequential or irrelevant) the word count was 100k. At that rate the total for the full 20 years is going to be around 750,000 which is significantly longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
In other words (no pun intended) it’s going to require a huge amount of editing. Other options include publishing it in several volumes, which seems a bit vainglorious, or abandoning the idea. It was interesting however to discover long forgotten posts I haven’t read since I wrote them all those years ago.
It wasn’t unknown, in those early years, for some TL posts to get in excess of 100 or even 150 comments. Blogging however peaked in the late Noughties and in terms of audience it’s been downhill ever since but I’ve continued to blog because I imagine it’s rather like keeping a diary - it becomes part of your regular, if not daily, routine and if fewer and fewer people are reading it that doesn’t bother me.
But I digress. Although some successful authors began online, very few blogs have been published as books. One of them was Out Of The Tunnel by Rachel North which I believe was based on a blog that was written in the aftermath of the London terrorist bombs of July 2005.
Another was Wife In The North by former Sunday Times journalist Judith O’Reilly who was rumoured to have received an advance of £70k from her publisher. I read Wife In The North and enjoyed it. Likewise her follow-up book, A Year of Doing Good. O’Reilly now writes thrillers under the name Jude O’Reilly.
Another blog that appeared in abridged form in print was Head Rambles by Richard O’Connor aka ‘Grandad’. (You may recall that he died last year because I wrote about it here.)
There are several more but in general blogs don’t translate too well to print because, by their very nature, many tend to be of the moment. Also, although I occasionally revisit a post to change something I think could be better phrased, many posts are in effect an unpolished first or second draft, hence you’ll find repetition of words and other horrors (dodgy grammar, for example). There is however no excuse for poor spelling.
Anyway, I am now in two minds whether to proceed with 20 Years of Taking Liberties so watch this space.
