An idea for lazy writers (although not new, damn it!): get your readers' feedback on an interesting subject and then formulate that input into a finished book and sell it on the internet!

Cool idea...and that's just what Andrew Sullivan, writer of the 10-year-old Daily Dish blog on the Atlantic web site, has done successfully for the second time...Hell, I have to admit it, I admire pure genius.

He first published a book on the Blurb.com "Make Your Own Book" site back in June, made up of photos sent in under "The View from Your Window" feature of his Daily Dish blog and sold it for $33.95. He recently published a second book, The Cannabis Closet, made up of reader content solicited from readers who had experience smoking pot. To date he has sold approximately 1000 copies at a print-on-demand paperback price of $5.95.

Now, if only I could generate The Daily Dish’s 1.3 million unique monthly visitors!!!!

Anyway, this report is from Bridget Kinsella of Publishers Weekly:

For the second time, author, editor, and blogger Andrew Sullivan has taken reader content on his 10-year-old Daily Dish blog on the Atlantic Web site and created a crowd-sourced printed book published by Blurb and sold through its online bookstore. Last Friday Sullivan blogged about how the book, The Cannabis Closet, grew out of an extensive e-mail of Daily Dish readers writing candidly about their pot use. By early this week, Blurb had sold 1,000 copies of the print-on-demand paperback priced at $5.95.
 
In June, Sullivan and his four-person staff of the Daily Dish compiled photographs posted on its “The View from Your Window” feature on the blog into a full-color, $33.95 book with the same title with Blurb.
 
Sullivan called The Cannabis Closet’s unorthodox publishing route as the book equivalent of doing a “triple lutz” in ice-skating. “In as much as we could start with an e-mail thread that came through a blog, then turn it around in midair and make it into a book,” he explained. Sullivan provided the foreword for the book, Daily Dish executive editor Chris Bodenner edited the readers’ postings on marijuana use and Chip Kidd designed the cover.

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