The Revenge of Gawker

A few years back, a publisher paid Gawker $250,000 to write a book; they had thousands (perhaps millions) of readers, so how could it be a bad thing? It turned out to be a very bad thing. I'm not sure how many copies it finally sold...I know in 2007 (when it first came out) less than 500 copies were sold. I imagined this number has grown thanks to places like the .99 cent store, who probably currently have it on there shelves. Whatever the numbers were, it was disappointing, and it made a lot of editors think twice before shelling out cash for a book by a blogger.

So what does that have to do with anything? HarperCollins just paid former Gawker writer Nick Douglas (no relation to Scott Douglas) a five figure advance to write (if you call this writing) a book of his favorite Twitter posts! The only thing odder than paying money to read a book with nothing but Twitter post, is that the guy can actually find enough Twitter post to fill up a book an entire book.

I sarcastically asked a few weeks ago if Twitter was making us dumber...well, we might find out real soon.