There are some websites that were just made to have ebook imprints. Like McSweeney’s. Or Salon.com. Or Emily Gould’s thing. But more importantly Thought Catalog. Yes, the post-tween insta-nostalgia festival was basically designed to sell books for $1.99 from authors who think they’ve written the next Perks of Being a Wallflower-meets-Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
And you know what? We would read these books. We would pretend that we were only hate-reading them, but we would devour them like the pieces of pop-culture cotton candy that they were. Case in point:
While writing a traditional site listicle of “20 Things I Did In College That I Will Never Do Again” –Little known fact: this was originally David Foster Wallace’s title for Infinite Jest— Thought Catalog’s Ryan O’Connell lets loose this little nugget:
11. Believe that my senior thesis is a big deal. I wrote a novella about the Chateau Marmont????!!!!
Whoa, what? Back that train up. Someone from Thought Catalog has a novella lying around about the Chateau Marmont and it has somehow never been published? This is an outrage. Less Than Zero was made off of one of Bret Easton Ellis’ college essays he wrote on the back of a bar napkin while having a threesome…or so legend goes.
The Chateau Diaries would definitely sell, and sell big. Look, Mr. O’Connell. Why don’t you send us your senior thesis and we’ll get our friends over at Penguin to take a look at it. Deal? Or you can even make one up! Just write in your own fan fiction about the Chateau Marmont and we promise to at least consider publishing it. It’s a win-win, naturally.