Using Google Blogger for my book

It's been done lots of times, but why are you doing this?

Fort Ott said:

Will an agent read an entire book from a website to decide whether or not to get it published.

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Umm... no.

Let me step you through this:
- Agents don't decide to get book published; they market books to publishers--who can publish the book. Agents are just middle men that can get you into the business.
- If you allow your book, or it's contents, to be openly read (either free, or for a price), it's considered published. What you're reading right now, is published. If you put a chapter up, it's published. If you put your entire book up, it's published. All unless there's a method that does not allow the general public to view your product opening; i.e. like the SYW section here, since it's password protected.
- I would say unless your book--being published online, for free, in the open--is getting so much traffic that it would be stupid for publishers not to take it up, remove it from the web, rework it and sell it; an agent won't be interested. There's many complications with both re-publishing it, and re-marketing it. It's too much work, and possibly no return in the end.

Fort, I've merged the two threads you've started about this: one thread per subject, thanks.

Agents aren't going to trawl through blogs looking for writers to represent. They might get to hear of good blogs, read them, and contact the author to discuss what else that author has: but that happens rarely, and they're rarely interested in work which has already appeared, as has already been explained to you.

If you want to find an agent, the old route of querying is the most effective.

If you are going to publish via blog (which you have already done) I would encourage you to focus on doing that, and doing it well. Anything else that might happen (but probably won't) will be a bonus.

Amazon, B&N, and others publish a sample of each book online. It’s the first 10% for Amazon, something similar for B&N. So there’s nothing wrong with that from their viewpoint if you do the same on your own site. Many authors do. This is part of advertising your work. You are expected to have a link or links to where interested readers can buy the full book.

Be sure, however, that the formatting is readable. Which usually means indenting each paragraph and having no extra line after the paragraph unless it indicates a section break. You should also select a readable font and font size.

Blogger cannot do that. WordPress can, as you can see from this link to a chapter excerpt.

http://shapechangertales.com/shapechanger-stories/shapechangers-birth/prologue/

As others have said, if you hope publishing such samples will magically attract agents and publishers who will recognize your genius and offer you a publishing contract, you are being naïve. Only if you attract really huge numbers and the word gets around will they even glance at what you've done.

And chances are most agents and publishers will read a few paragraphs and decide that the work is not for them. It might be sheer genius, and obviously a possible blockbuster, but they may not be able to give it justice. Or they already have something similar. Or any number of reasons having nothing to do with the literary or commercial value of your work.

In this case OP has already posted his entire book on a blog.

veinglory said:

In this case OP has already posted his entire book on a blog.

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How do you know? Where is the link to the book?

In any case, this is all the more reason for him to read my remarks and the advice of other posters to this thread. And not just him, but everyone else who reads this thread. The questions the original poster asks may be ones many others want answered.

For one thing, he and everyone else should know that Blogger is not a good medium for publishing part or all of their works. A poorly readable work is worse than useless. It can turn readers off of everything you do.

There are a number of agents who specialize in making blog-to-book deals, which means adapting an appealing blog topic into a book. That's the exact process by which my grandparents' blog The OGs grew into my grandmother's memoir Fall in Love For Life. But publishing a book on Blogger? No, that doesn't use the tools of digital publishing effectively.

Laer Carroll said:

How do you know? Where is the link to the book?.

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It has been edited out of the original post, but was there before. I was just explaining the context of OP's question.

Fort Ott said:

Will an agent read an entire book from a website to decide whether or not to get it published.

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No. Blogging your entire book as a way to attract readers or agents or publishers doesn't really work as a strategy.

Have some bloggers gotten book deals? Yes; rarely for fiction, but it does happen.

By blogging your entire book you are publishing it; anything else would be a secondary publication.

If you want to be trade published, you're better off writing, revising, writing, revising, revising revising, getting crits, revising, working on a query, getting your query critted, sub to agents/publishers/editors.

In which case you have opted to self-publish. There is a good sub-forum here to help you get the most out of it.

Fort Ott said:

In case publishers don't like it and don't want to publish it. I just want to get it out there on the web for all my friends to see and maybe others will find it interesting.

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Right now, your reasoning is rather mixed up. You want a publisher to publish it, but you won't send it to them in case they don't like it, so you put it online so your friends would see it and publishers won't see it. If your goal is to get a publisher, this isn't helping you. I think you need to decide which of your goals is the most important and focus on that one.

If it's primarily to get a publisher, this route isn't likely to help you. You'd need to edit, query and all the rest.

If it's primarily so your friends can see, you could email them a copy of the file.

If it's primarily to have strangers read it, a publishing deal will help with that (which means following the route you'd take to get a publisher). Self-publishing could also get you there, if you work on doing it well rather than throwing it out there and hoping. But posting it on a random unknown blog isn't likely to help.

Laer Carroll said:

Amazon, B&N, and others publish a sample of each book online. It’s the first 10% for Amazon, something similar for B&N. So there’s nothing wrong with that from their viewpoint if you do the same on your own site. Many authors do. This is part of advertising your work. You are expected to have a link or links to where interested readers can buy the full book.

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Laer, I'm not sure how this applies to the original poster's questions at all. Could you clarify, please?

Be sure, however, that the formatting is readable. Which usually means indenting each paragraph and having no extra line after the paragraph unless it indicates a section break. You should also select a readable font and font size.

Blogger cannot do that. WordPress can, as you can see from this link to a chapter excerpt.

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You don't need to format text on a blog to look like text in a print book for it to be readable.

In fact, formatting onscreen has different rules to print formatting if you're concerned about readability. The default formatting on AW is a good example: sans serif font, spaces between paragraphs, and no indenting of paragraphs have all been shown to be preferable to serifed fonts, no spaces between paras and indented paras when reading online. Which makes your advice somewhat wrong, I'm afraid.

http://shapechangertales.com/shapechanger-stories/shapechangers-birth/prologue/

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Oh, look, a link to your own blog! Let's get those clicks happening!

As others have said, if you hope publishing such samples will magically attract agents and publishers who will recognize your genius and offer you a publishing contract, you are being naïve. Only if you attract really huge numbers and the word gets around will they even glance at what you've done.

And chances are most agents and publishers will read a few paragraphs and decide that the work is not for them. It might be sheer genius, and obviously a possible blockbuster, but they may not be able to give it justice. Or they already have something similar. Or any number of reasons having nothing to do with the literary or commercial value of your work.

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I think you're right here, but you do sound grumpy. I'm often accused of sounding grumpy online when I am not, so I appreciate it could be a "difficulty with correctly gauging tone when online" thing, but please consider how you're coming across.

Laer Carroll said:

How do you know? Where is the link to the book?

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The OP gave a link to his blog in his first posts. I've checked the editing history and that link was there, I think, when you posted this.

kimcooper said:

There are a number of agents who specialize in making blog-to-book deals, which means adapting an appealing blog topic into a book. That's the exact process by which my grandparents' blog The OGs grew into my grandmother's memoir Fall in Love For Life. But publishing a book on Blogger? No, that doesn't use the tools of digital publishing effectively.

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I don't think there are agents who specialise in making blog-to-book deals (at least, no really good ones), but there are some who seem to have a knack for it. Still, the books which come out of this route make up a very small proportion of the market, and it's not the best way to go after publication: querying is still far more effective.

Fort Ott said:

In case publishers don't like it and don't want to publish it. I just want to get it out there on the web for all my friends to see and maybe others will find it interesting.

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If you want to get it out there for anyone who might find it interesting, you could self-publish it in book form. This is free to do, and will get your book in front of more people than you'll manage just putting it up on you blog.

If you do want strangers to read it then trade publication is probably the best way to go but it's very difficult to get a book deal.

OP, I see that you don't actually have the book up yet, just links to the chapters. That's good, because you can consider your options.

I just want to get it out there on the web for all my friends to see and maybe others will find it interesting.

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If that's true, and you don't care about getting a contract for publication and getting paid, then putting in on your website is a perfectly fine thing to do.

(If you want a publisher to publish it, you should find appropriate agents or publishers that handle the type of memoir it is and contact them without putting it online.)

If you'd like for friends and family to have printed copies, CreateSpace at Amazon is a wonderful way to do this. You can set it up for free, buy a copy to make sure everything is correct, and either buy the number of copies you want or point friends and family to the page to buy their own. It can stay up for future purchases or someone interested who comes across it.

If your goals aren't anything beyond creating something personal for those close to you to share (and having it available for anyone interested, without concern for profits or publishing contracts), that's a wonderful way to do it.