Book Blogs and Publicists

What seemed promising in a post on 3quarksdaily, about the promise held by the internet for novellists, “Could cyberspace be the novel’s best friend?“, turned out to be more hype about the publicity-power of the internet.

The article in the Villiage Voice is called Book Smart: Could cyberspace be the novel’s best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up. sets out to give book blogging some of the journalistic attention that has lately been applied largely to political blogging. Unfortunately for this reader, most of that attention has to do with marketing. It is as if to say that the only thing that can come positively from blogging is money, or that the only way to support novellists is by advertising, as if thats all that book blogs are.

That wasn’t the whole topic of the article. There was an interesting comparison between today’s blogs and the earlier ezines.

An editor at feed.com back in the Internet boom days of the ’90s, Lipsyte believes the new wave has a very different agenda from the Web pioneers who founded content-heavy sites like Feed and Suck. “These bloggers are not so evangelistic about the medium,” he says. “For them, it’s not about using technology to create a new world. It’s about creating a space that isn’t available elsewhere to talk about the thing they care about—which happens to be books.”

Here’s hoping they don’t sell out too much.