Tumblrs with book deals – gutenbait?
by Josh Kimball
(Updated 7.6.09 – added a couple of blogs with deals)
Below is a list (by no means exhaustive) of tumblrs that are now available in lovely printed form. I’ve also included a number of near-tumblrs – simple, single-concept tumblr-like blogs that are as much about images and an idea as they are about prose. Is like half of all book-reading now being done on the toilet or something?
Anyway, I informally propose blogs of this type and flavor henceforth be called Gutenbait (Digg-bait for the gutenberg-era).
*Look at this fucking hipster – St. Martin’s
*This Is Why You’re Fat – HarperStudio
*Hot Chicks with Douchebags (this should have been a Tumblr) – Simon Spotlight
*FML – Michel Lafon Publishing
*Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves – Three Rivers Press
*Rules for My Unborn Son – St. Martin’s
*Texts from Last Night – Gotham
*Sleeveface – Artisan Workman
*Cake Wrecks – Andrews McMeel Publishing
*I’m not counting: Postcards From Yo Momma, I Can Haz Cheeseburger or Stuff White People Like. Because I am in charge here.
I’d like to recommend for bookization:
*Goths in Hot Weather
Furthermore, Give Us A Book Deal offers a regular stream of idiotic book deal-bait tumblr ideas such as “Rules for My Future Dog” and “Slutty Ninjas.”
*Update: Apparently Gawker doesn’t read the Listenerd. Or at least doesn’t link to it! Not much new info in this book-to-blogs post, but a shout-out to Boner Party, which is good?
[...] Tumblrs with book deals – gutenbait?: “Furthermore, Give Us A Book Deal offers a regular stream of idiotic book deal-bait tumblr ideas such as ‘Rules for My Future Dog’ and ‘Slutty Ninjas.’” [...]
[...] ideas that are Gutenbait – tumblrs that seem almost as if they’re optimized to garner book deals – usually [...]
this is really interesting to me, as the majority of the content on these tumblrs is “found” — couldn’t a book company just go behind the tumblr’s back if they wanted to and just make an imitation collection, get the rights to the found content? is it possible to copyright curation? (should it be)? do the book companies actually want the branding of the blog, to profit from its existing fan-base, is this why they aren’t just making rip-offs? i suppose the short captions are original content, though the images are usually whats important, and the curation of the images. do the creators of the found content get compensated (are they even contacted)?
G – Great questions, many of which I do not know the answers to. Apparently, we are all Greg Gillis now.