Opening Shot: Blogging Books
Monday, April 4th, 2005 (from DTW)
Welcome to another edition of “This Week on IAOCblog,” where this week’s topic is “Blogging Books.” I’m the guest host this week, which means I invited our guest bloggers Kevin Smokler, M.J. Rose, Shel Horowitz, and Gwendolyn Gawlick to join me in a discussion about using blogs to promote books. All of these folks have invested a fair amount of time in blogs over the past few years, and we’ve all learned a few things to pass along.
I come into this week pondering these five issues. I’d love to hear anyone’s take on one or more of them this week:
- Are Blog Tours Worthwhile?
- Pros and Cons of Author Blogs
- How to Buy Advertising on Blogs?
- Will RSS replace eZines?
- Will Blog Spam Kill Blogs and/or RSS?
Here’s my take:
1. Are Blog Tours Worthwhile?
Yes. It’s a smart idea to approach the blogmasters of half a dozen blogs and see if your author can do a day on the blog, If done well, this tour can result in news and promotional announcements reaching dozens of other blogs and web sites. Google matches for your author’s name and the title of the book can rise exponentially, from 2 sites to 128 sites in the course of a month. A blog tour is the fastest way I know to spread news.
On the downside, to book an author on a 4-blog tour can be frustrating. Finding good blogs is not easy. I have to visit 100 blogs to find four worth pitching. Despite RSS, the cream has not risen to the top. Blogs have an alarming decomposition rate. They start to smell sour unless updated at least as often as the milk in your fridge. Web sites updated only once a year can remain valuable.
Blogs are hot now, and because of the way they are built and the way search engines operate, blogs can disseminate news quickly. But the actual participation in blog tours can be remarkably poor. Many sites offer no ability to make comments, or comments are buried, or comments require membership – all of which results in very few comments on most of the sites on a tour. How easy is it to comment on this post? How many people will bother?
2. Pro and Con on Author Blogs
Yes, if the expense of maintaining the blog can be spread over multiple books or author projects.
No, as a single-title project produced by publishers. Just as book companion sites aren’t worth maintaining unless they’re attached to an author, imprint or brand, single-title book blogs are seldom a good idea.
3. How to Buy Advertising on Blogs?
I’m curious about this. It looks like you can buy your way onto many blogs with Google Adwords and maybe Overture? There are a couple display advertising consortiums – I’ll look for URLs and report on a couple later this week.
4. Will RSS replace e-zines?
So far, I haven’t seen it. Setting up an RSS Feed that works well is a lot like fine-tuning e-mail filters to block spam: it’s fairly complicated to get it right, and even then the results aren’t perfect. There’s no reason to believe that RSS will be any more immune to spam issues than e-mail is.
5. Will Blog Spam Kill Blogs and/or RSS.
Yes, I believe there is a real risk that spam issues will plague Blogs and RSS and thus curtail growth in their popularity as media alternatives. In terms of online power tools, blogs will continue to run a distant third in behind web sites and e-mail. In two years, they might be as big as Gopher servers.
STEVE O’KEEFE
Executive Director
Patron Saint Productions, Inc.
Hi all – I'm here to add my two cents on a few of these ideas. I've done a fair bit of author publicity, both on the internet and on the ground the “old fashioned way.” One pre-comment -comment is that I think most publicists are now combining tools from both the internet and real world toolboxes.
That relates to blogs because blogs are now becoming prevalent enough to merit an actual cubbyhole in the publicist toolbox. The best evidence of anything becoming mainstream
is its being co-opted by the big boys – like Nike, Mazda, etc. etc. Mark my words… soon we'll be seeing the WalMart blog…
Are blog tours worthwhile?:
Yes. Absolutely they are. If, as a publicist, I can tell my client that an appearance by her, with a
picture of her book, a link to buy, link to her website, etc., etc., is featured for even one day on a literary blog which receives 25,000 unique visitors a day – where's the downside? In terms of exposure, it's a score! Exposure, exposure, exposure. That is the publicist's job.
Pros and Cons of author blogs:
Again – I will have to stay largely on the “Pro” side of this one. All media and all publicity has a down side or two, or three. If the author hosts her own blog – then she has the opportunity to interact with her fanbase, share information, create more of a relationship (all words that marketers love).
The downside is that her blog can be a pain in the patoot to keep up with, but it's nothing compared to the pain of getting chapter 12 to the editor on time. Keeping a blog allows the author to be a part of things like blog-linkage, blog searches, blog rating sites and all sorts of things that add to her general profile. It's easy, it's cheap, doesn't take all that much time, so why not add it to the arsenal?
The cons of blogs I think are more related to inflated expectations of their performance. A blog is like any website – you can build it, you can host it, you can make it pretty, but they won't come until you promote it.
The same logic that publicists have always used with websites follows with blogs – find the ones that have a big audience and get yourself mentioned there. Take advantage of all the work they've done to build their audience.
As for advertising on blogs:
Technically, as a publicist, I usually advise my clients that buying exposure is not my area of expertise. My area is getting it for free. The old adage from Oglivy is that 'editorial' content is six times more powerful than 'advertising' content. There are various ways of buying advertising on the web – but at the moment, I do not know of one that will target your ad specifically to blogs, or to specific blogs themselves. I'd be inclined to go to the blog owner, request information on their visitor statistics, and offer them some money to put your banner ad on their site. It won't take long before this becomes more sophisticated, but so far, it's not.
RSS replacing stuff:
I don't, at the moment, worry too much about RSS. Until it becomes more advanced, reliable and usable, it's not going to replace anything.
Blog Spam:
My comment on this is that spam has not killed email. It's not killed newsgroups. It's not killed newsletters, ezines, the CNN news updates… I think that though spam management is always one step behind the spam, spam itself isn't going to come between viable new ways of disseminating and receiving information.
I think this is a great topic, and totally fascinating! Blogs are pretty neat – it's wonderful that we can still see interesting new things born from the internet. What a great time for media that we live in! Please post your thoughts – the more the merrier!!
Gwendolynn,
Good point that spam won't “kill” blogs or RSS — it will just injure them the way it has e-mail and Usenet.
Thanks for Contributing!
STEVE O'KEEFE
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