Someone Else Buzzes & The Blogging Thing Part 7

Blog watch

Michael Cader mentioned a new blog in Publisher's Lunch today that I just put on my blog watchlist. It fits right into Buzz, Balls & Hype since the author works at Vintage and Anchor Books and describes his job thusly: "…to research and develop new ways of marketing and publishing books, to identify new channels for promotion and sales, and to organize alternative marketing campaigns - and by "alternative" the book publishing world often means "online." Examples of what I do are organizing and launching a fan club for Alexander McCall Smith, offering a "waiting room copy" of OVERCOMING DYSLEXIA to pediatricians so that parents would see the book while waiting for the doctor, and arranging book give-aways with popular bloggers. My job is to take non-traditional ideas, buzzword = outside-the-box, and turn them into feasible plans."

Sound like our kind of stuff.

The Blogging Thing Part 7: Ron Hogan's Beatrice.com

Although I'm a relative newcomer to blogging, having just recently
passed my fifteen-month anniversary, I've been doing the Beatrice.com website off and on since 1995. When I launched, it was devoted to Q&A features with a wide variety of writers--basically, whoever I could catch coming through on their book tours, wherever I happened to be living at the time. I didn't make any money doing the site, but I was able to support myself with freelance work (and later as a staff copywriter for Amazon.com), and I was getting free books from the publishers, which pretty much eliminated what would otherwise have been my hugest expense.

By the end of 2003, I was doing so much as a freelancer that I no longer had time to do the intensive labor required for Beatrice Q&As: reading the book, talking to the author, transcribing the tape, editing the tape, etc., etc. The site went into a protracted limbo; it was still active, but nothing new had been posted for months. When the review copies stopped coming, I figured I'd better do something quick before I had to start buying my own books again. I looked around, saw some of the established bookblogs, and realized I could do LESS work linking to a couple stories from the mainstream press, writing about the readings I was going to anyway, and maybe asking a question or two here and there.

It turned out to be not QUITE that simple, but in the long run I've been able to feature more books and more authors on Beatrice than ever before and quintuple the daily readership while doing it. And when I landed a book deal of my own, then had just three months to turn the manuscript in, I invited several dozen other writers to write short items recommending books as holiday gifts, so I could work on my book instead of my blog. I was so pleased with how that turned out that I've started offering more and more of my blog's "real estate" to other writers, who can write guest essays or send me their tour diaries or interview each other about their writing.

Sure, one advantage of this approach is to further cut down MY writing workload, but it also ties into the main reason I started Beatrice a decade ago and why I refused to let it die out: I write about the books and writers that intrigue me because I hope that maybe they'll intrigue you, too.

Frances Dinkelspiel's Blog

I started to blog on impulse. I woke up one night around 3 a.m., unable to sleep. I had just attended an authors’ event at the Berkeley Public Library and I found myself wanting to talk about it. Since I was the only one awake, I turned on the computer and started a blog, called Ghost Word.

That was in mid-February, about six weeks ago and since then and I found I unintentionally have a new obsession. I am a journalist, an aspiring book author, and a bookworm, and in my blog I can write about all those subjects.

The Bay Area literary scene is a rich one, full of author readings, panel discussions, writing groups and other literary-related events. Blogging propels me to dive into that world and tell others about books, writers and topics I find interesting.

Blogging has its drawbacks, however. Now I have a sense of obligation. I have readers! I must give them something to read! When the ideas flow, it’s not a problem; when they don’t it’s difficult.

Comments

[Jozef Imrich]

This movement MJR and Co began is starting to look like a conspiracy of love for different stories ;-D

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/495
[The Political Long Tail is under a microscope as well]

[Jozef Imrich]

The theory of Long Tail in action - Sepulculture is more than a vintage thanks to MJR ;-D

http://sepulculture.blogspot.com/2005/04/call-me-martin-luther.html