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Julie Powell always wanted to write a book. But as a New York secretary verging on 30, she was losing hope of that ever happening.
"I graduated from college with a major in fiction writing, and then I spent years and years and years just writing and not ever finishing anything and really falling into the black hole of self-loathing," says Powell, now 32.
Then her husband told her about blogging, and on Aug. 25, 2002, she jumped in, starting a blog that would chronicle a year spent cooking every recipe from Julia Child's seminal 1961 cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Since then, Powell's blog blossomed into Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Little, Brown), which has sold nearly 100,000 copies. And today, Powell is being named the first recipient of the "Blooker Prize," an award created by publishing-on-demand site Lulu.com to recognize the burgeoning trend in which blogs are being turned into books.
The growing popularity of blooks shows that blogs are "the new means to discover talent and new voices that couldn't break into the world of publishing before," says blogger Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and publisher who writes the blog BuzzMachine. "You can go create a property and a voice and an audience without having to go through the publishing meat grinder."
Back in 2002, Powell's ambitions weren't so big. She just knew she needed a change. "It was really sort of 'I'm going to turn 30, I'm going through an existential crisis, I'm a secretary, I hate my life' sort of thing. And somehow, hey, I'll cook my way through this cookbook and all my problems will be solved."
And that is sort of what happened.
Just a few weeks after starting her blog, she realized she was developing an audience beyond her friends and family. And they were commenting and encouraging her. By the time she finished, she had thousands -- maybe tens of thousands -- of regular readers.
And they were not only helping her stick to her blog, but they also were boosting her confidence.
"The blog readers were almost in a way co-writers -- certainly inspirations," Powell says.
When the mainstream media wrote about her blog, book publishers came calling.
It isn't clear how many "blooks" have been published, but experts guess that it's still in the range of hundreds -- a drop in the blog bucket. There are 32.7 million blogs; 100,000 new ones are created every day, says the blog search engine Technorati.com.
But blooks are gaining in popularity, with topics as diverse as blogs themselves. Just last week, an Iraqi woman who writes the blog "Baghdad Burning" under the pseudonym Riverbend and who wrote a book by the same name was nominated for the annual Samuel Johnson Prize for contemporary non-fiction, the prestigious literary prize in Britain. (The winner gets $53,000; by comparison, the winner of the Blooker gets $2,000.)
Blooks are characterized by their passion, says judge Paul Jones, whose well-known blog features everything from his poetry to his views on open source software. "It helps a lot to have an obsessed audience egging you on in your own eccentric obsessions."
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