Traditional book deal FTW!

Over at Hilobrow, Matthew Battles makes an interesting point about ROFLCon. (Well, he makes several, but I’m only going to address one of them here. Read his whole writeup here.) In the panels he attended, he notes: “Too often the tone was, ‘turn your snarky web site into a book — or even a TV show!'”

There’s a lot of truth in that — many of the meme-makers and Internet celebs and other proprietors of what was being celebrated as outsider weirdness got a hearty round of applause upon noting their recent book deal or other cash infusion from the trad media. This is interesting in part because it suggests that if there’s a ROFL subculture, it’s not exactly standing in opposition to the fabled MSM, despite rhetoric to the contrary. (Surely this relates to my uncertainty about what that ROFLCon attendee was getting at with her accusatory “Seriously? The New York Times?” blurtage.)

To be fair, there were also stories of turning away MSM overtures that were particularly insipid, and more than one ROFLmaker seemed to take the attitude that they were better off going with a more autonomous monetization strategy (selling ads, selling merch direct to fans, etc.). The point is that I’m not sure if MSM represents a sanctifying force in ROFLCulture — or simply a source of ready money. (Money that ROFLmakers may see as a no more than a dumb windfall.) Or some of each.