OMG! Lauren Conrad to Write Books!

Lauren Conrad, the 22-year-old star of MTV's The Hills, is known for many things--her style, her eyeliner, her rotation of California-boy arm candy. But her flair for compelling dialogue? Not so much. Witness:

Lauren: This Thursday?
Stephanie: Yeah.
Lauren: Oh, I wanna come.
Stephanie: Can you?
Lauren: Yeah.
Stephanie: Okay.
Lauren: Is it okay if I bring a guy with me? What?
Stephanie: You have a guy with your life? Oh my God.

Harper Collins, though, seems determined to bring out Conrad's inner wordsmith. The publisher said it would pay her an undisclosed amount to write a trilogy of novels about a girl who moves to L.A. and becomes the star of a reality show.

The first in the series will hit shelves in summer 2009.

Conrad has parlayed her name and face into a lot of things, including a clothing line, a gig as spokesperson for Avon's younger-skewing Mark cosmetics line, and a Blackberry commercial with persistent Hills fixture Brody Jenner. All of that jibes with her persona. But will her fans follow her to Barnes and Noble?

Not if the success of past volumes centered on Conrad and her crowd are any indication. Laguna Beach: Life Inside the Bubble, the 2005 behind-the-scenes guide to Laguna Beach, the TV program that followed Conrad's high school social circle, sold just 34,000 copies. The Hills: City of Angels, a 2006 release based on her next program, The Hills, sold an even paltrier 13,000 copies.

Both of those titles were published by MTV Books, a division of Pocket Books, which in turn is a Simon and Schuster imprint. MTV Books plans to release a second Hills title, The Hills: Lessons in Love, this November. Which raises the question: Why would Conrad look for a book deal outside the mother ship?

Besides printing three books on Conrad, MTV backed her clothing line. So why wouldn't they want, or have the opportunity, to slap their brand on her literary endeavors? ("We aren't going to comment on this," Jean Anne Rose, director of publicity for Pocket Books, said.)

In the end, MTV may be happy to let Harper Collins have this one. After all, the company will have to turn two separate tricks to sell Lauren Conrad, The Author: they don't just have to get people to read her, they have to get people to read her fiction.

The novels promise none of the backstage dish of MTV Books' Hills titles. "I'm not trying to do a fictional story based on all my friends in real life, because their stories aren't mine to tell," Conrad told People.

That's a far cry from the City of Angels tagline, which promised "an all-access pass to what you didn't see on TV."

Which, considering that a Hills episode often seems like it has more commercials than it does syllables, must be an awful lot.

by Megan Angelo

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