Stuff Publishers Like: Ready-Made Ideas That Package Themselves

The Stuff White People Like book that Random House published in July is still on The New York Times best seller list. Granted, it's at number 34, just one spot away from falling off (keep hanging on, The World Without Us), but still—it was less than a year ago that this thing was just a blog that some internet people thought was funny. Then in late March, Random House paid its author, Christian Lander, an advance worth upwards of $300,000 and everything changed!

Which accounts, perhaps, for how it came to pass that Zondervan, the HarperCollins-owned Christian publisher that who recently published a quickie biography of Sarah Palin, has acquired Jon Acuff's Stuff Christians Like, a "send-up of all things evangelical in America" based on a blog the author has been updating since January.

Unless publishers suddenly disavow that time-honored acquisition strategy where they just find things that resemble other things that already exist (a notion mocked in The New York Times by Jeff Johnson in July), the world may be in for a lot more Stuff.