Blog Wars

After a week of publicity - from The New York Post, The Sun, Gawker, my local paper back home, to Chinese TV and PR companies - I wrote an article for the Village Voice entitled 'blog whores'. I interviewed four prominent female bloggers who've managed to turn media interest in their blog into the start of a new career. I asked every one of them the same questions - Why your blog and no one elses? Is it talent or marketing which turns a blog into a book deal?

These questions nag at me, because I was a writer before I was a blogger. As an unknown I was already pitching magazines and newspapers, and toiling over a first novel, having doors slammed shut in my face. People first noticed my blog because of my words elsewhere - The Village Voice articles back in March. I didn't get any 'real' publicity until August aside from my own words, and then suddenly I was subsumed beneath a barrage of media interest and people telling me 'you have to do this to get a book deal'. I felt manipulated, and worse, I felt like the people telling me what to do - were simply wrong. But who did I have to turn to? No one. I was still an unknown. I had no contacts or friends in high places, just my own determination and ambition, and a complete inability to give up my dreams of becoming a novel writer and journalist. So I quietly withdrew from the attention, and started working on a book I wanted to write, which had my voice, which charted the gradual decline of my hopes and dreams into a drunken, miserable pool of pain, but through the voice of a character which wasn't me. 'Mimi', you must understand, isn't me, and never has been. She's just a convenient tool for making life a little more bearable. Well, I was surprisingly outed once again and the press jumped on my story and are proceeding to worry it like a terrier on heat - and I'm quite content to let them do so. As long as, in the end, I write the book I want to write, and I have the career I want to have.

In response to my question above, 'Is it talent or marketing?' Jessica Cutler laughed and said, "If I was a novelist working on my craft for years, and someone like me came along and got a book deal with a 13 day old blog I'd be really pissed!". I had lunch with a features editor at a major magazine yesterday and he sniffed disgustedly over sushi and commented that it seemed easier to get a book deal nowadays than a magazine contract. Well, he didn't give me a magazine contract, but I was happy with the corporate lunch and the possibility of future work. He's right and he's wrong. When you start becoming the darling of the press, you learn how to manipulate it to maximum and ruthless effect, and that's something learned through cold, hard experience and having the intelligence to become media savvy very quickly. Melissa of Opinionistas suddenly found several mentions on Gawker and major press interest was enough to convince her to chuck in her job as a lawyer, and meticulously plan a daring outing in The New York Observer, carefully orchestrated to coincide with the launch of her new website and career as a writer. Brooke Parkhurst of Belle in the Big Apple is frenziedly, as we speak, attempting to drag her poor, obscure boyfriend from the South out of his innocuous existence into the realm of blogebrity, launching an, erm, interesting new site and plastering her face across the blogosphere. Bloggers become greedy as we quickly learn how to work the press. And once one book deal has been signed, it seems oh-so-easy to try and get another - as 'Belle' plans her new book with Chef Jamie called 'Romancing the Stove'. I've met both Jamie and Belle. Believe me, the girl is going to eat up that little Southern boy if he doesn't show some promising signs of celebrity pretty darned soon. Hey Gawker! Attention Please!

In the end, despite my scepticism about blogging book deals (when you've struggled through Stephanie Klein's website and gasped in horror at the absence of punctuation and coherent thought, and realised this is the girl purportedly worth half-a-million, you'll see what I mean) the flipside is, it takes tremendous work to hand in a proposal which has been honed to suit 'what's hot' in the publishing industry right now. It takes a certain degree of compromise. It takes facing the fact that this silly little blog you started for a laugh has suddenly gotten dollar signs plastered all over it, and if you want to capitalise on that, you have to give them what they want. It takes skill to handle media interest, and, in Melissa's case, use it effectively and gracefully to further your new career. It takes time, effort and frustration to produce 80,000 words which can captivate and entertain, even if it's not 'the great American novel'. I admire Jessica for writing her book in only two months. I respect Melissa for having the balls and the sense to ease into her new role as writer with professionalism, and attempting to control the terrifying offensive of press manipulation with dignity. I always call up Nadine when I need some press advice, after this girl was subjected to a barrage of media interest back in August and consequently has the PR skills of a jaded mincing Publicist who's been working for 20 years - with the added benefit of being neither gay nor jaded. I marvel at Brooke's single-handed takeover of the tabloid press.

There's a big part of me, which is determined for more than a one-hit wonder - a long and successful career in fiction and journalism, a career dependent on more than an article in a tabloid labelling me 'stripper'or 'dinner whore'. And I know that some of these girls feel the same. When I read an article about me which doesn't even mention this damned blog, or what I've done to fund my writing dreams these past few months, then I'll be happy.

But one thing I've learned from these girls? Call that Publicist back right away, and kiss that new agent's hand. Talent or marketing? It pisses me off, but you need a good healthy dose of both, and the ability, like Brooke, Melissa, Jessica and Nadine, to assiduously and ingeniously milk every opportunity for all it's worth.

Does this make sense? My internet went down and I got drunk with my sis....Here are the gratuitous pics, as becomes a blog whore, taken by my sister, Piu-Piu today