Blog, books and rights?

This is a good question, I would think not, if the posts have been on your personal blog, however, I'd wait for some one elses thoughts.

I don't think so, for a couple of reasons. First, for a publisher to be interested, the blogger would have to offer a lot of content that isn't available for free on the Web. Book-only content.

Second, the organization of a book is likely very different than the organization of a blog. Although some writers might simply be republishing essays they'd written, I think more would be taking the material and repurposing it into a better flow with transitions and rewritten content to make the material work better as a unit.

I know a couple bloggers who've done this - the most famous one I can think of is Dooce:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1416936017/?tag=absowrit-20

Bear in mind:

- She has millions of hits a week. Publishers were willing to be flexible on that whole first rights thing.
- She added something like 30% new material. 20%? My memory is fuzzy, but she gave the exact amount on her blog when the book was first announced.
- If you read the reviews, you can see how many people were annoyed by it. Her followers were the ones most likely to buy the book (her "platform") but they were the exact people who'd already consumed the content.

There's a lot of confusion about first rights out there. In truth, publishers really don't give a damn about first rights, especially for novels. First rights really applies to short stories, and even with short stories, it's a highly misunderstood issue.

What publishers they care about is exposure. They care about market and money. If they think enough readers will buy a book, they publish it. It's as simple as this. The problem with putting something online isn't abut first rights, it's about exposure. Most things put online draw no large group of fans, but is out there to read for free, should anyone care to. So publishers usually won't touch it.

But just as one lucky self-published writer in a hundred thousand sells enough books to draw the interest of a commercial publisher, a blog that generates enough interest, and I mean a LOT of interest, is likely to be picked up by a commercial publisher, and as with the self-published writer, first rights are never even mentioned.

To take this issue a step further, what about someone (not the author) who solicits stories to be published on his or her blog? I've seen at least two people solicit submissions to do this, and from James' post it seems like it's not a good idea unless I don't want to pursue publication; in other words, submit my throw-away stories. Is this right?