things kevin hates

I don’t remember exactly why I started this blog six months ago. It probably had something to do with the fact that I’m a total show-off attention whore despite my introverted personality. (When I was in elementary school and I won any sort of award for making the honor roll or whatever, I’d high-step up the aisle, Deion Sanders style, to accept my award.) And it’s because I think I’m funny. Not life-of-the-party funny, but at least clever/erudite/witty/profane when I have the time to write and edit my material. And because I want to show the world that I’m right. About everything. Whether it’s grammar or football. I like to think I can make the world a better place by convincing people that they should hate what I hate.

Now, that’s why I started out. I had a little tiny wordpress.com site. Then a friend of mine from high school showed it to one of his co-worker who said he could host it for me (that co-worker is the man behind Movie Crematorium). So I bought the thingskevinhates.com domain name and started dreaming of fame and fortune. I imagined myself raking in the dough from a few ads on my page.* Of being a media pundit. Of holding court on various issues, with my opinion well respected by thousands of followers all over the world. And most of all, I dreamed of…a book deal.

Now, I suppose one could argue that a magazine column would be more plausible, but I don’t think you could get advances or royalty checks for those. So fuck that. I want a book deal. So many fucking blogs have book deals it’s ridiculous. This 2004—holy crap that’s a long time ago in the online world—New Yorker article details the start of the blogs-to-book movement, with an enterprising 27-year-old agent-in-waiting named Kate Lee working at International Creative Management and scouring the web for bloggers who could become the next best-selling author. This trend exploded, to the point where stuffwhitepeoplelike.com could get a $300,000 book deal. Six motherfucking figures. It’s funny stuff, don’t get me wrong, but $300k? The anti-hipster brigade is raking in the book deals left and right. LATFH has one. Stuff Hipsters Hate has one. I’ve done the whole anti-hipster thing, but there are so many other things in the world to hate: why should I limit myself?

Then there’s 1000awesomethings.com, which is an ode to life’s little pleasures and is largely devoted to nostalgia, leftovers, and observational humor. Not that there’s anything wrong with those things—again, it’s a funny site—but if he can get a book deal, why can’t I?

I could sit here all day listing blogs that have gotten book deals; Mashable.com has an article with interviews from six people who have pulled it off. Sure, there’s a lot of great blogs out there. And maybe they’re better than mine. But where else can you get such a broad array of topics from the same person? Unfortunately, that’s my problem. I don’t have a niche. I write about everything. All the advice about blogs says to find a niche. Fuck niches. The world has too many people with their heads up the asses of whatever niche they’re in. Sure, my blog has a gimmick—you gotta get a gimmick—but it doesn’t have a niche. Also, I think if I had a book deal, I’d probably have to cut out all the musical theatre references that people wouldn’t understand. But I’m totally okay with dumbing things down for a mass audience.** Selling out is A-OK by me. I’ve got some standards, to be sure, but not many.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to sell out as one might hope. I’m not really sure what the process is; it seems like most bloggers have gained fame on the web, then been approached by agents or publishers. But I think I need a few million hits for that to happen. So tell your friends to read my blog, dammit! If I can get nine people to tell nine people, and then they tell nine people, and so on, pretty soon I could have 525,600 people reading my blog.***

I’ve also thought about taking a trip to New York and just barging in on the offices of every agent who does these blog-to-book deals. There’s a handful of them: I already mentioned Kate Lee; Erin Malone is the agent at William Morris behind the deals for Stuff White People Like and 1000 Awesome Things; Kate McKean represents Ben Huh, the man who owns icanhascheezburger, the fail blog, and others; and Hannah Brown Gordon made deals with LATFH and Animal Review.**** The romanticized notion of New York makes me think that anyone can come from anywhere, go straight up to a person of authority in one’s chosen profession, and win a job out of sheer pluck.

But I doubt it really works like that. It just sounds creepy, to be honest. Maybe I can just hunt these agents down on twitter, follow their feeds, hope they notice my distinctive icon—I’m amazed at how well the “no” sign works at 31 pixels square—visit my blog, see it as a work of genius, sign up to represent me, then march off to Random House or Penguin or whatever and get me a five- or six-figure advance. Unfortunately this sounds just as implausible as the previous paragraph, and cyberstalking is only marginally less creepy than actual stalking. And this strategy would work better if I had more twitter followers. So follow me on twitter! And tell your friends to follow me on twitter! I can’t exactly make my blog go viral by myself. In short, dear readers, I need your help. Tell your friends, especially if your friends own publishing companies. Come up with some clever guerrilla marketing campaign. Maybe I can scrawl thingskevinhates graffiti all over every building I can find—okay, that’s probably not a good idea. Homemade t-shirts with sharpie marker on cheap white tees from Wal-Mart? Okay, probably not a good idea either. That’s why I need your help! Spread the word about my site. What do you get in return? Your friends will love you for introducing them to my awesome site. Win-win if you ask me. (Although if I actually do manage to get a book deal, it’s more like hugely awesome win for me, very minor insignificant win for you. Sorry.)

* Unfortunately, it’s apparently not that easy to come by thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Or hundreds of dollars. Or dollars.

** Sure, most of my current readers probably understand the reference I just made to Gypsy, or my post about Cats, but when I start talking about obscure Broadway shows with tiny cult followings, I may lose a few readers.

*** See what I mean? Fortunately that reference was cryptic enough that the people who don’t know what I’m talking about might’ve just thought that was clever and random. Whereas you, the intelligent reader who understood the reference, may now bask in the glow of the smug satisfaction that comes from catching a reference that hardly anyone understands. Now you know how those people who like movies feel when they read Bill Simmons’s columns.

**** Animal Review (which, unsurprisingly, reviews animals) has a hit counter showing a mere 257,764 hits. I can get to that number. That doesn’t mean I’d have a book deal, but I can aspire to that number of hits. I’m over 7k including both thingskevinhates.com and the old wordpress.com. Only 250k to go.