Book promotion through blogs

Update: Come and read the comments for a great update from The Girl on how she feels about this.

An interesting tale about a book promotion gone wrong over at Girl with a One-Track Mind. Abby is a sex blogger, a great one, who ended up writing a book based on her blog (a fun read, buy it if you get the chance). The book got published in the US in March of this year but it looks like the publishers are still pushing it, maybe hoping for a holiday sales lift, as they have recently started pushing it to a whole load of sex bloggers. Using blogs to promote books is pretty common, there’s a whole raft of book bloggers that are being used to review and promote new books that are used by the publishers. They get a free copy of the book and the publisher hopefully gets a decent review. Same as they do with the newspapers, but often easier to find on the web!

The sex blogging community is pretty strong, so I’m guessing the publishers thought getting them to promote the book was a great idea. But they ignored one key thing – Abby had expressly forbidden them from doing an outreach programme to the sex bloggers.

Back in March, when I was in NYC to launch the book, I declined the publisher’s suggestion to “ask other sex bloggers to promote it”, because I felt it entirely unethical and against everything that blogging – and I – stand for. To say I am gobsmacked that they have now decided to ignore my explicit wishes and go over my head by making a direct approach to my sex blogging pals themselves, is an understatement.

Abby is part of the community, she knows how it works and what she is comfortable with and decided that doing a cold promotion to them was not what she wanted. Many of them are her friends, relationships that have been built up over 4 years of blogging, if she wanted them to promote the book she would ask. But 6 months later, they do it anyway:

You have a great site. Like Abby’s, your blog provides great material for any “sex fiend,” and we’d ask you to please consider:

* Posting the cover, information, excerpt, and/or link to a bookseller on your site?
* Reviewing the book for your readers, or posting a review on a bookselling site?

Many of the bloggers approached went back directly to Abby, annoyed that they had got a mail from the publisher and not from her. Abby has had to spend time and effort apologising to them, leading up to the blog post and notice:

I have no idea how many bloggers, or whom, have been approached by my US publishers and asked to promote my book. All I can say to those who have received emails is: please know I had nothing to do with this PR attempt. I would never ask ANY blogger to plug my book. So if you are a blog friend of mine, or just a reader of this blog, and have received an email asking you to write about my book, please ignore it, because it was not done with my authorisation, or my support, or with any of my wishes taken into account.

And to my American publishers: I’m not quite sure an apology covers it, but as yet I have had nothing in my inbox.

Some lessons to be learnt:

• Listen to the client. Here, they had said no to this type of promotion, but the desire was ignored, or forgotten over time. Although it does raise the question here about who is the client. Is it the author or the publisher, who makes decisions on the marketing for books. Are authors ever consulted and bought into the conversation?
• Know your audience. Abby is a blogger, part of the community, she knows the space far better than the publisher, so should have been consulted, at which point she would have re-iterated her request not to do this.
• Do your research. Do the basic stuff. Vivianne’s post about the issue makes it clear that the company did not do the basic housekeeping for blog outreach. Getting things like a name right should be easy. Doing a 2 minute search and finding out that she had already written about the book is just as easy. But it looks like the mail was personalised – different email from the one quoted above – so maybe they did do some work
• Monitor the reaction. How long before the publisher actually comes out and reacts to the feedback?

One last thing to think about. Abby asked the question about whether publishers/advertisers assume that bloggers will post just anything that is sent to them. In my experience, there are 2 extremes. The first is as Abby suggests, which leads to the automatic inclusion of bloggers in multiple PR lists, without considering the the relevance of the information, as the practitioners here just assume that bloggers just publish without considering how and why they would publish and the consequences of being annoying. The second extreme is of the ‘why would they publish? what do we have to give them, what do we have to pay them?’. This can be close to reality for some bloggers, but it misses the point for many. Give people a little respect, show you have some understanding and give them something great to write about – that’s where you need to be.