Nothing is as popular on the internet as cat pictures and videos. Everyone loves Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Maru, so why wouldn’t they love your cat too? That’s why Quirk Books released the tongue in cheek book How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity, which claims on the cover to be “a guide to financial freedom.”
The book itself is reminiscent of the humor books of decades past. With thick pages and large pictures, it harkens back to books I remember picking up in my younger days. Beautiful pictures of cats punctuate the writing to give clear examples of what points are being written, often with sketching on them to accompany the cute pictures of cats.
While How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity points out a lot of the things that cats do and what a cat owner can do to make their cat do it for videos and pictures to make their cat internet famous, the writing falls short for me. I didn’t find the writing to be particular humorous, relying on snark than anything I found actually funny. I wouldn’t mind if there was actual information that could be useful to the reader, but they come in blips, and usually it’s glossed over. Rather than explaining things like how to take better photos, it is more likely to be brief with the actual information then spend three times the amount of space making lame jokes about it, even punctuating a paragraph about lighting with “My God, you see how boring camera talk can be?”
While the potential for How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity could be great, it seems more wrapped up in self-entertainment than actual information. I may not be the proper audience for the book, but I would have liked a more informative book that wasn’t looking to play off jokes that didn’t work for me.
