How to get involved in online book promotion
Today, Buzz, Balls & Hype bemoans diminishing marketing budgets and suggests authors and publishing houses work together closely to maximize their efforts.
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One area that is particularly conducive to a publicity novice jumping right in is the online arena — blogs, discussion groups, wikis, etc. Although all publicity and marketing departments maintain increasingly large lists of bloggers, there are so many blogs that change so frequently, it’s impossible to keep track of all of them. This is where the author comes in.
Did you write a book about the Civil War? Or knitting? Or pets who are heroes? Look up blogs and discussion groups about those topics. Use a site like Alexa or Technorati to determine which of those blogs get the most traffic. Check the blogroll (the blogger’s list of favorite blogs) to find other related sites. Blogs that appear on a lot of blogrolls are obviously more popular than those that do not.
While finding a handful of blogs might take an afternoon, becoming a part of an online community can take weeks or months. Bookmark the blogs. Better yet, add them to your RSS reader. Read the posts regularly. Comment when you have something wise or funny to say. Get to know what a blogger likes to cover, their tone, how frequently they post. Get to know other commenters.
Right about now, you’re asking whether it’s worth spending the time to do this. First, if you had the wherewithal to write a book about knitting, please tell me you at least have some interest — book promotion aside — about what’s rocking the boat in the knitting community. And second, blogs and websites link. They link to small sites, which link to medium-sized sites which link to larger sites. Freelancers who write about knitting visit these sites. Print reporters who cover crafting visit these sites. So yes, it’s worth taking the time to do this.
Get in on the blogging action with guest blogs
Posts have been sporadic of late (I actually forgot my WordPress log-in name) but hopefully I’ll get in a few more posts before everyone decamps for the holidays.
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Many authors these days are blogging (or thinking about blogging). For those who want to get involved without having to commit to setting up a blog, guest blogging on someone else’s site is an option. Buzz, Balls & Hype offers eight tips (and lots more dos and don’ts) for guest bloggers.
Morning Brief — Thursday, July 24
Yesterday saw a lot of coverage of Peter Shankman’s HARO (Help a Reporter Out), a Profnet-like service that matches up PR folk / experts with journalists: Mediabistro, Gawker, the Industry Standard. I’ve posted about HARO before, but in the four(?) months since Shankman started the service, the group has grown from 1,000-ish members to almost 20,000 as of this morning. More importantly for us as publicists, major national media outlets from The New York Times to USA TODAY to CNN and many more are now using HARO to source their stories. Although I don’t see queries appropriate for my authors all the time, I do frequently see queries that would be appropriate for other peoples’ authors. (If I could be bothered, I would pass on those queries, but I can’t be bothered, so you should probably just take two seconds to sign up for HARO if you haven’t already.)
HARO’s primary benefit for book publicists is that unlike most PR folk who represent only a handful of clients, we represent dozens (or hundreds) of authors who can speak about dozens (and hundreds) of topics — HARO’s reporter queries are therefore that much more useful / applicable for us.
Shankman sends out three email messages a day with reporter queries. He summarizes all queries at the top with details below, so it takes all of 10 seconds to eyeball the message to see if any of your authors might fit. I’m not saying this works all the time, but it is a free and efficient way to supplement our publicity efforts.
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M.J. Rose of Buzz, Balls & Hype directs us to a post about how Twitter circumvented the press release by tweeting their news. My word. When I was a recent college grad working for a Big PR Agency I was driven to the brink of madness keeping track of Press Release Draft # … 19. (That’s when scrubbing bathroom floors starts looking like an appealing career choice.)
Morning Brief — Monday, May 19
The Literary Saloon mentions a couple new book blogs at Harper’s and the New Yorker. Also, Bud Parr of Chekhov’s Mistress brings our attention to the new Kenyon Review Online and the accompanying blog.
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Ed Champion of Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits sent over a link to A Whole Lotta Nothing post that provides some tips about how to pitch bloggers; chief among them, don’t blast email a stock press release.
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Thinking about starting a blog but wondering what it should look like? Chris Brogan gives some tips including what to include in your “About” link, what to include in a blog roll, what fonts and colors to use, and more.
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Joan Stewart of The Publicity Hound’s Blog talks up the benefits of commenting of blogs. (Blogging isn’t just about writing posts on your own blog — it’s about interacting with other blogs and bloggers too.)
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And finally, authors who are comfortable blogging and who have regular traffic (or are willing to blog regardless), may want to consider blogging their tour. Buzz, Balls & Hype links to Tony Horwitz’s USA TODAY guest blog for his tour for A Voyage Long and Strange.
Cool author websites
Wednesday evening Rebecca Skloot posted about Sloane Crosley’s website for her new book on the NBCC blog Critical Mass. This morning, the Ad Man wrote up Toby Barlow’s site for his new book on M. J. Rose’s blog Buzz, Balls & Hype. They couldn’t look more different (Barlow’s is heavy on flash, Crosley’s has a more basic vibe) yet both are equally cool and creative. Both also include information vital for author sites — author bio, events, reviews, buy links — and I’m sure will attract a lot of attention from readers.
One now-standard website feature both are missing, though, are permalinks — unique URLs for each page/section of a site. For example, if someone wanted to link to Barlow’s or Crosley’s events (or reviews or bio), they would only be able to link to the site as a whole, not to the events (or reviews or bios) sections on their respective sites. Not the end of the world, but in this day and age where people expect sites to load instantaneously and kids think email is inconvenient, it’s worthwhile trying to save readers a few seconds.
I was interested to see one that resource Crosley utilizes – which most of us are personally familiar with but I haven’t seen it used on author websites (or, at least, not on my author websites) — is Flickr. It doesn’t look as sophisticated as housing pictures on the author site itself, but it works — the first series of Crosley’s Flickr photos has more than 1200 views. (I don’t know exactly how much it costs to construct different types of websites, but I’m guessing that “outsourcing” pictures to an online photo archive like Flickr can save a dime, so Web savvy authors on a budget might consider this.)
Morning Brief — Thursday, May 22
Tiffany from Krupp reports “Jessica Guff from GMA Now is taking a six-month leave of absence starting in June. Moving forward, contact Lee Alexander and/or Laiea Smith.”
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The PR blog The Buzz Bin talks up the importance of bloggers commenting on other blogs. (You may remember that the other day The Publicity Hound’s Blog posted about blog comments as well.)
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ReadWriteWeb posts some very handy tips about social media, essentially social media 101. It talks about blogging and also using social networks, Twitter, YouTube, etc.
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RWW also lists the top 10 social networking sites for the month of April. Although MySpace has far and away the most members, its three percent growth last month is a sliver of the 56 percent growth rate for Facebook or 361 percent for LinkedIn.
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Buzz, Balls & Hype runs a feature about how often authors should check in with their agents. As a publicist, I don’t have much to do with the author / agent relationship, but it’s interesting to see how these things work.
May 22, 2008 Posted by Yen | Blogs, Miscellaneous, Social Networking | agenting, Buzz Balls & Hype, commenting, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, ReadWriteWeb, The Buzz Bin, The Publicity Hound | Leave a Comment