Blog book binge

Christian Crumlish

As Dori know, timing is tough in the tech-book racket. She rounds up the best known blog books in the works:

I pitched a book on weblogs in late 1999 or early 2000. It was probably a good thing that it didn't happen, as it was way too early in the game for a good book. No books on weblogs came out in 1999, or 2000, or 2001. According to a recent check on Amazon, though, there are seven books coming this year focused on weblogs.

• We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, Meg Hourihan (Wiley)


• The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)


• We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture edited by Rebecca Blood (Perseus)


• Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content by Biz Stone (New Riders)


• Running Weblogs with Slash by Chromatic, Brian Aker, David Krieger (O'Reilly)


• Essential Blogging by Shelley Powers, Cory Doctorow, J. Scott Johnson, Mena Trott, Ben Trott, Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly)


• Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer (Osborne McGraw-Hill)

If I missed any, let me know. Can you say "critical mass?" I knew you could.

I stole the kickback links above by the way.

Now I think we can stop listing the Slash book because yes, community weblogs are weblogs, etc., but they're not really blogs in the sense that most readers think, I think. Or are they?

Meanwhile, I've had ideas of my own about a book since last spring most recently and have had feelers out through my own network and through my agent. Bill Quick wrote in my comments somewhere that his agent had shopped a book and "everyone was waiting to see how the first books do." There's always this hokey-pokey with publishers waiting to see who puts their right foot in first. Then everybody shakes it all about.

What the above doesn't capture is a next wave of books, coming more from the tech-computer-book manual-how-to-tutorial explainifier market. Osborne's book looks to be the first of that wave (unless O'Reilly's was, depending on how you classify them) if its October date is for real.

I can't disclose details told to me by publishers in confidence but I know that at least three other publishers have books in the works, possibly as many as five, including at least one killer brand.