Twitterature

Isabel Wilkinson writing on The Daily Beast Blog

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When HarperCollins reshuffled its imprints in February, one side of the company grew. The It Books imprint, designed to bring hot titles to the publishing house, will launch this fall. One title is the first authorized Twitter book, Twitter Wit, edited by Gawker alum Nick Douglas and due out next fall. Douglas will cull the best tweets from around the Twitterverse, and write an introduction. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone will write a foreword for the book.
Douglas says that he joined Twitter in 2007, and saved all of his favorite tweets since. Over the last two years, he has mined over 7,000 tweets, searching for 140-word gold. And he’s invited the Twitterverse to submit their favorites on TwitterWit.net. Every contributor he selects for Twitter Wit will receive a copy of the book, which his publisher says is a great marketing tool in itself. “These books offer a unique grassroots marketing possibility,” said It Books editor Kate Hamill.

Kate Lee, a literary agent at ICM who specializes in online writers, says that an author’s digital marketing ultimately helps the sale of a book. “Anything an author can do on their own behalf is important, and is absolutely a plus for the publisher—and a plus for the author,” she told The Daily Beast. “They’re building their own fan base.”
Lee says there’s no secret formula for a blog that makes a good book. It ultimately has to be a good, marketable idea. One such book she has recently signed comes from the blog Pets Who Want to Kill Themselves. “There was something human and universal behind how we all treat our pets,” she said of the site. “From the more practical perspective, these pet books sell like mad.”

It seems problematic, of course, to move the content of a free blog into hardcover and expect people to buy it. Andy Selsberg, author of a Tumblr called Dear Old Love, which was recently bought by Workman Publishers, says selling the book requires a unique mix of new and old material. “When you change the water in an aquarium, you need to leave some of the old water in there so the fish don’t freak out,” he said. “Similarly, from the blog to book, there will be some new stuff, but also familiar things, because that’s what people have grown to like.”
Making books out of Tweets lets Twitterers enjoy, as Nick Douglas puts it, “the old-school joy of the printed word.”
“We don’t think it should be just the best writers and celebrities publishing out there,” Kate Hamill said. “We’re offering the opportunity to tell a story to a lot of different people.” Adds Kate Lee: “I look at blogs, Tumblr, Twitter—whatever you want to call it—as just another platform for finding talent.”
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Isabel Wilkinson is a Daily Beast intern who attends Columbia Journalism School. She has written for New York magazine and Women’s Wear Daily.