In the wake of the online community’s success with Patry Francis Day, Therese and I read with interest this article from Publishing Trends. In a nutshell, PR reps are heading to blogs and websites to help their clients maximize publicity for their books:

It’s unanimous. Publicists think online is the way to go for promoting their authors’ books, but before you cancel your next pub party, read on: Publishing Trends polled publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media to find out what publicists claim they’re doing, and what the media report they’re actually doing. Nearly all (70.9%) publicists said they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing. The remaining said they do even more.

Does this mean a sea change is in the offing for marketing books? Not so fast:

The majority (72%) of publicists said the number of cities on an author tour have gone down in the past two years, while 86.8% of publicists think that blog tours are up. Yet even the most digitally zealous, the ones who initially declared traditional media washed up nobodies, tended to qualify enthusiasm with “well, of course a mention in the NYTimes still sells a lot of books.”

In our own experience, we get spammed by authors who drop a line in our writerunboxed inbox wanting to do “a virtual book tour.” What does that mean? I always ask them. Do you have an ARC you want to share, a Q&A session, what exactly do you want to do that fits with WU’s mission of sharing craft and publishing experiences with other writers?

Those folks rarely follow up. That’s because they didn’t do their homework in the first place about WU.

We understand. Authors, especially new ones, are desperate for publicity, and if it’s free, so much the better. But hitting an online community to promote a book isn’t a magical publicity pony. It can help, sure, but there’s a lot out there to get your book to stand out in cyberspace. If you, the author, publicist, or bookseller, want a blog or an online site to help promo your work, then take five minutes to learn about that blog or website. Otherwise, why should we bother? You wouldn’t send your sci-fi novel to an agent that specializes in literary historicals, would you?

We’ve interviewed authors who do a bewildering array of online promotion. Blogs, podcasts, Facebook, MySpace, Amazon diaries, contests, the list is endless. Sometimes I wonder when they have time to get back to actual writing. In other cases, I get turned off by the obvious and heavy-handed publicity wh*ring.

Am I alone in this? What do you think about online promotion for books? The more publicity, the better? Or is a more targeted approach a better use of time? I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.
Kathleen Bolton
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