Six-digit advance and a hardback...…just a blog away?

Radhika Agarwal

Sex diarist Abby Lee has landed her first million as advance. Her hugely popular blog ‘Girl With A One Track Mind’ draws a lakh readers a month and has won the Best British or Irish Blog award at the 2006 Bloggies.And she could be among the first of the lucky ones.

Some publishing companies in India are keenly tracking local bloggers. A few book projects involving bloggers are already on, although the money may not match up to Western book deals at all.

Kapish Mehra, publisher, Rupa & Co, says: “Wow, blogs would be something with chutzpah and good writing. A blogger is writing every other day. If he/she is able to retain the interest of visitors over an extended period of time, then that’s a blogger to watch out for. In fact, we have seen some promising writers on the Internet and we’re in the process of working things out.”

He adds: “Also, Indian bloggers have cracked the code. They have made it big in blogging circles, and outside. As publishers, we are constantly on the lookout for bloggers as a good resource pool of writers.”

Mehra tosses a few names — warfornews.blogspot.com, jaiarjun.blogspot.com, 2x3x7.blogspot.com, dogjournals and indiauncut among others - as the next big bloggers to watch out for.

Rashmi Bansal, editor, JAM magazine, and an avid blogger, points to sidin.blogspot.com. She says, “Here is a blogger who is writing a book. Sidin’s book has commercial potential and will eventually get him his pot of gold. More than anything, blogs are now a platform for showcasing one’s writing talent before a publishing house.”

More than 25 per cent of India’s 38 million Internet users are active bloggers. Currently, there are over 120 million bloggers worldwide.

But Peter Griffin, a media consultant and a passionate blogger, says: “Apart from Abby Lee and a few others, how many out of the millions of bloggers have cracked book deals?”

So is blogging really as big a phenomenon in India? Bansal echos Peter’s sentiment: “Blogging is still not as big a cultural phenomenon in India as it is in the US.” However, she feels that at the rate people are now sitting up and noticing blogs, it may be just a year or two before talent hunters sniff out the talent reservoir. With youngsters jumping onto the bandwagon daily, the blogger community is growing by leaps and bounds each day.

“In India, there still aren’t enough bloggers to make that kind of an impact like Abby Lee,” says Peter Griffin, “And also, the interface used by most bloggers is English while interacting, while majority of the population does not understand or know English.”

His writers’ forum Caferati, which also runs a blog, is planning to publish a book - a compilation of good blogs. It is also helping Delhi-based publishing house Zubaan promote the recent call for submissions for their compilation of writings by young Indian women.

While most bloggers wouldn’t buy a compilation or a reproduction of a blog, they are willing to put their money on books written by these bloggers.

With publishing houses scouring for talented writers, a range of legal issues have come up. Employers have dooced (according to urbandictio-nary.com, the word dooced means “to lose one’s job because of one’s website”) employees for maintaining personal blogs that discuss things about the organisation. Other areas of concern are copyright, confidential information and defamation.

Kapish argues: “These are issues that definitely need monitoring, but they are just as relevant, if not more, to the Internet and not just blogs.” But then bloggers who make confidential work stuff public on blogs are probably violating their employment contracts.

Popular  blogs from the country

Vantage Point: Gaurav Sabnis’ blog created quite a stir (he subsequently chucked his job at IBM) after his posts exposing the false claims of IIPM, a B-School, led to the IIPM management threatening to burn their IBM laptops as a sign of protest against him.

India Uncut: Amit Varma’s blog won the Best Indiblog of the Year 2005. He also became the first Indian blogger to be nominated for the Best Asian Weblog in the 2006 Bloggies.

Sepia Mutiny: This blog was started by South Asian American bloggers in 2004. Since then, it has become a space for desi Americans.

Youth Curry: A blog started by Rashmi Bansal, editor and publisher of popular youth magazine JAM. She goes beyond the superficial and gets under the skin of the Indian youth.

Caferati: This is the brainchild of a group of writers who came together via an online forum on the networking site. Originally the Bombay Writers’ cafe, it has become a valuable resource for Indian English writers.

War For News: This outrageous blog was born in January this year and has been blocked by some news channels in their offices. This anonymously-written blog espouses the behind-the-newsroom scene at channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN and TimesNow as they fight for TRPs. Office gossip, dirty politics, love affairs, sex scandals, boardroom battles, internal emails and resignation dramas are thrown to the lions. Official and confidential e-mails from the acmes are routinely leaked and are carefully dissected.

Technorati: Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo, PubSub and IceRocket. As of August 2006, it indexes over 50.6 million weblogs. The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show. It has also been nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices. Technorati is blocked in China.