Swinging the Spotlight

BLOG.COM

Though blogs started out as personal journals, and then started providing links and information across a range of topics, the medium has evolved sufficiently to allow for high-quality specialisation.

There are now intelligent, well-written, 'exclusive' blogs on practically any topic you can think of "" from management to food, from music to celebrities to even Star Wars.

One of the categories taken most seriously is literary blogs run by a small but very dedicated circle of bloggers who make available reams of information on the latest developments in the world of publishing.

On sites like The Elegant Variation (http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar), Chekhov's Mistress (http://www.chekhovsmistress.com/) and The Rake's Progress (http://rakesprogress.typepad.com/rakes_progress/), you'll find not just links to external reviews but also original reviews, literary discussions, coverage of author tours and bookstore signings, and much more.

By their very nature, literary blogs are unlikely to be as widely read as the more popular personal blogs or technology blogs "" but the reader bases they have are intense and capable of fostering the most impassioned debates.

Some of the more respected literary bloggers have fan followings of their own: they are often invited to participate in prize ceremonies, both offline and online.

One example was the First Annual TMN Tournament of Books, hosted earlier this year by The Morning News (http://themorningnews.org/), which audaciously paired books off against each other in a tennis-tournament format, with jury members debating their merits and demerits at each stage (for the record, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas beat Philip Roth's The Plot Against America in the 'final', by a 10-5 margin).

One of the more notable joint initiatives by literary bloggers is the Read This! movement, launched in April 2005 by a website called The LitBlog Co-op (http://lbc.typepad.com/). The idea was born when some bloggers realised that, too often their sites were all providing the same sets of links and talking about books and authors that were already in the news.

Consequently, they made it their mission to pick one deserving book that wasn't getting adequate publicity and to highlight it on the LBC website for a period of three months. "What would happen," they asked, "if a bunch of your favourite literary blogs got together four times a year and picked a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem that we'd get behind as a group and bring to your attention, flogging it ceaselessly both here and on our respective individual blogs?"

The literary co-op inaugurated its first title in May this year. The book that it is currently being promoted is Kate Atkinson's Case Histories and the author herself has made regular appearances on the site to answer readers' questions and share thoughts on her work.

Inevitably, there have been hitches: it's never going to be easy for 21 opinionated lit-bloggers to agree on one book, and the webmasters have also had to deny allegations that they are accepting money to promote a certain title.

Also, whether the LitBlog Co-op makes a difference in terms of increasing book sales remains to be seen. But as an idea it can't be faulted; it showcases the power of blogging to direct public attention on what isn't in the spotlight.

Jai Arjun Singh, aka Jabberwock, blogs at

http://jaiarjun. blogspot. com