Publicity 2.0, or Online Book PR, or 'Blog me the money!'

Almost as soon as I thought of the subject matter for this blog I began to worry about what I like to think of as my ‘online rep’.  ‘Blogging’, one of our work experience children tells me, has been around for some time now (it’s something to do with the interweb, FYI) and there are a few out there who write (the verb is ‘blog’, weirdly) about literature.  Now, I use email as much as the next person, and I even have a Twitter account (look mum, look at all those followers! Mwhahahaha…) but blow me down if it doesn’t seem like I’ve been flying by the seat of my pants all this time… I’m a bit worried I’ll seem like a techno dinosaur (although that would be cool).

Of course (wait for it), I’m exaggerating a bit and I do deal with a number of literary blogs and bloggers.  I’ve even commented on a few.  And I’m pretty honest about nailing my Penguin colours to the mast when I do it.  Honesty and integrity, it appears to me, are watch-words of literary blogging, even when I don’t necessarily agree with a review or a point or anything else or don’tmakemecomeoverthereandstartsomething.  Sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to stick my oar in.  But blogs are all about discussion, at their best, and people need to feel free to say what they want and also have an idea who they’re saying it to, hence me putting my hand up and saying “I work at Penguin, guv.”

The problem with online PR is that, it’s perhaps fair to say, there’s been a certain amount of scepticism in the publishing world as to the merits and affects of book blogs, and even the reasons behind them.  In my time emails have gone round the publishing houses warning of someone purporting to be from a print publication that is, in fact, fake, just to get free books, either to read or to sell.  Blogs caused suspicion because even if someone linked through to one that clearly existed, it could be a fairly ad hoc enterprise, one that potentially took little effort on the part of the blogger to circulate or even write when compared to the book-y rewards they were receiving.  It’s a quid pro quo agreement, sending review copies out, albeit a flexible one.

Two things have caused me and I’m sure many others to have a re-think.  Firstly, the simple fact that there’s now less space in the traditional outlets, such as newspapers, magazines, radio, etc, and every book publicist in London is competing for it.  It’s always the hardest part of the job, convincing someone that they should consider, look at, perhaps read and, if you’re lucky, cover a book and there’s less room now than there used to be, for various reasons.  So as publicists, we have to look beyond where we’ve usually aimed for coverage.

(Who’s this guy with Joe the Publicist?)

The second reason is the obvious increase in the number of serious, quality book bloggers and sites out there.  Blogs such as ReadySteadyBook, Dovegreyreader Scribbles, Untitled Books or Asylum have clear aims in mind, an important ethical and aesthetic approach to their book coverage and, most importantly and informing all of this, a passion for books that means they take it very seriously and do it, well, properly.  They’re not after any free copy they can get their hands on and won’t just review a book well, or even at all, because they’ve been sent it. 

An interesting discussion appeared on Twitter recently about the effect of book blogging and online discussion.  While it remains hard to judge what sales come directly from a blog, from a particular online review or comment, or whether one blog is ‘better’ or more effective than another, the phrase that keeps coming to my mind is word of mouth.  That phrase is mentioned a few times in the Twitter discussion and it seems to be mentioned, at least indirectly, in online forums.  People who interact with book sites do it more and more frequently; relationships and trust builds up; you get to know other peoples’ tastes and they get to know yours; and it’s no longer a closed circle for a certain type of person.  In short, getting a review on a widely-read blog gets the book you’re working on talked about somewhere, and that is far, far better than silence.  As publishers that’s essentially what we’re trying to do.  Yes, we need to make money but we’ll never do that if no one is talking about our books.  You may not be able to measure sales from them 100% but neither can you do that with a lead review in Sunday Times Culture.

So I’m going to carry on with my mission of finding out more about the sites and bloggers I already work with and do my best to cast my net a little wider and discover more.  I’m hoping to find out what they like, what they read, what they look for from books, and publishers, and I think I’ll learn a lot from it.  As publicists, and as publishers, we need to look beyond what we’ve always seen as a benchmark for a publicity campaign and see what we can do to push ourselves, and our books, a little further.

For your reading pleasure (you need something to help you get over how serious the above got, right?) here are five literary blogs I’ve discovered and enjoyed recently:

http://robaroundbooks.com/  

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/

http://www.booklit.com/blog/

http://www.acommonreader.org.uk/

 

Joe, Literary Publicity (@Joethepublicist – I know, I know)

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Comments

[Euro Crime (Karen M)]

Interesting post Joe. Here at Euro Crime we try and review all the books sent to us but it's a losing battle as more and more books come our way and not all of them relevant to Euro Crime. As a PR person do you prefer it if there's no review to a less than glowing review?

[John Self]

I'm a one-man operation so I couldn't review all the books sent to me even if I wanted to - and I wouldn't want to, because then it would stop being enjoyable.

Do blogs sell books? The answer I think is 'yes but'. I think a blogger who is trusted by his/her readers and with whom they feel they have a 'relationship' can persuade them to buy a book. With Hugo Wilcken's Colony, which I actively pushed a month or so ago, it sold maybe an extra couple of dozen copies from my review - though most of those didn't show on Nielsen BookScan as they were from Amazon Marketplace and the Book Depository, neither of which registers on BookScan.

But these people are regular bookbuyers already, so it's not getting to anyone outside that circle. Otherwise book blogs can only help to increase awareness of a book, and because there are so many of them, I think they can be quite effective in that way (see all the blog reviews of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet recently). If a reader has seen various blog praise of a book, then sees it in the shops, they are presumably more likely to buy it than if they hadn't seen any coverage of it at all.

As to Karen M's point about no review or a bad review, I don't think it matters (though PR people may disagree). Certainly when I give a book a negative review, I usually find that people pop up to defend it, and very persuasively too, which can only increase interest in the uncommitted reader's mind. I don't feel any commitment to read or review books sent to me unsolicited, though I do try to have a look at them all, and I don't feel any commitment to review a free book positively.

I don't do it for the freebies. If I had a choice between receiving even more freebies than I do now, and none, I'd choose none, because I like buying books, browsing in shops and supporting authors. Where the publisher relationship becomes more important to me is in getting advance copies of books I'm interested in, before I'd be able to get hold of them in the shops.

[John Self]

Oh and I meant to say: I have noticed a definite sea change in publishers' attitudes toward blogs in the couple of years since I started doing it. The first publisher to contact me was Picador, which remains one of my most frequent contacts and most regular suppliers of books.

Otherwise I couldn't get arrested. I asked for review copies of the 2007 Booker longlist and got most of them, but the contacts I made with most of them weren't long-term or particularly reliable. Penguin for a long time didn't even reply to my emails! :o

Since then I've seen most of the major publishers get in touch, all of whom seem keen to send me anything I want. I'm guessing this signals a key change in how publishers view and deal with book bloggers. I suppose they take the view that it's better to get a review in a blog that a few hundred people read each day, than no review in a newspaper which can only cover half a dozen novels each week and gets hundreds for review.

[Kat @ Fantasy Literature]

Interesting to hear a publicist's thoughts on this, especially about no review vs bad review. It's necessary for reviewers to be willing to give a critical (but thoughtful and objective) review for a book they truly think is flawed, even if it's sent by the publisher or author. Otherwise, they lose credibility with readers and just become another Harriet Klausner. That's not very useful.

We review every book we specifically request, but don't feel the need to review books that are sent unsolicited (although we've enjoyed plenty of unsolicited ARCs) or that don't fit our genre (SFF). We have a team of 14 "voted in" reviewers, so if someone gets something they don't want to read, they mail it to another reviewer who will read it. We don't sell or "swap" ARCs we request. We donate them to our libraries.

[Joe]

My 'online rep' continues to take a battering: I thought I'd posted a comment but I see I did something wrong...

Overall, and in short, I'd say I agree with John on this: a bad review gets people talking about a book and, in a blog format, it will usually be defended by someone. On a personal level itt irks me when I see a bad review of a book I love, whether it's Penguin or not, but that's just me.

[Mark Thwaite]

Don't forget http://www.britlitblogs.com -- that'll help you begin to find your way in the blogosphere...

[Lexie C.]

It's kind of funny honestly, because I had originally begun my book review blog as an off shoot from my personal blog. Most of my friends on my personal blog aren't really into books so I'd be posting reviews and rants and such there and they'd be like 'that's nice sweetie'. I wanted a place I could voice my opinion and be heard--so thus I created Poisoned Rationality.

To be fair I don't expect books--I enjoy receiving them of course, but I have over 1600 books (and rising by the week) of my own collection that I can review happily (or unhappily). I think a good part of blog reviews is making sure that you alert the right people--tell the author, e-mail the publisher, twitter the link!

Recently there have been author groups that have begun to crop up to promote their books in both online and offline mediums. Word Ninjas promotes the YA books of the authors--through twitter parties, contests, promotions, offline readings and author visits--and its met with a decent amount of success. A lot of the authors are from smaller publishing houses that may or may not get HUGE marketing for their book, so this has been an opportunity for them to travel the blog-osphere and meet readers who may not know about their book.

[Crystal Jigsaw]

I'm sneaking in here as I don't review books on my blog but I do write about my own book, which is yet to be finished, and hopefully published. As a blogger, I would definitely say that blogs sell books; I have bought numerous including Wife in the North (a personal friend of mine, not to mention a very talented writer).

Thanks, Kathryn Brown (Crystal Jigsaw)

[John Williams]

I was thinking to leave a particular comment, but then you made it yourself almost verbatim two or three sentences after I thought it: "You may not be able to measure sales from [blogs] 100% but neither can you do that with a lead review in Sunday Times Culture." That seems an important point -- how many sales can you directly attribute to any one thing? (Besides, here in the States, perhaps a mention on Oprah or a front-page rave in the NYT Book Review.) The important thing, as you conclude, is to make people aware of the book.

In any case, food for thought. And I'm here to also promote my own online book review, The Second Pass, run by me but with several other contributors:

http://thesecondpass.com/

[Dick Madeley]

The astonishing thing I continually discover with blogs is that no matter how far you search, you find not only individual blogs of great note but communities of bloggers you never dreamed existed. Men and women of great insight, touching tales, funny anecdotes...

Oh... and there's Jeffrey Archer too. He writes a blog.

Regards,

Dick
http://www.richard-madeley.com

[Rebecca Sykes]

I think blogs do sell books - and not just literary blogs either. I read the most fantastic book recently and felt compelled to talk about it on my blog, via Twitter, on Facebook. Nobody asked me to, I'm not on commission, I was just making the most of the fact that I have a number of platforms available to me and have found something that I want to advocate about - I think this sort of honest review and recommendation is rife, probably much more common that dodgy or unreliable reviews.

And the book I loved? How to sell clever things to big companies by Carrie Bedingfield of OneFish TwoFish. http://tinyurl.com/aeet5a

[Victor]

Dude, you got a pic with pelé!

[Linda taylor]

How do you persuade publishers to reprint a favourite book that you want grandchildren to enjoy? I want to but 3 copies of Shirley Hughes @Lucy and Tom's Christmas'