The Blog Tool - and how to use it.

Today’s AdAge.com reports that in 2005 U.S. workers will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

Well, one man’s waste is the publishing industry’s opportunity.

If people are reading blogs, publishers and authors need to figure out effective ways of utilizing blogs. And that doesn’t mean sending them ARCs they may never look at. It means connecting to the right bloggers. Offering them excerpts. Taking out ads (yes there’s that dirty word again) on blog sites that accept them.

It means creating podcasts of authors reading snippets from their books or being interviewed and getting blogs to offer them to their readers.

According to the article: “About 35 million workers -- one in four people in the labor force -- visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them.”

Employees this year will spend 4.8 billion work hours reading and posting to blogs. They estimate that everyday workers “essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.”

The article quotes Blogads founder Henry Copeland who said, “ Traffic rockets at 8 a.m. EST, peaks at 5 p.m. EST and then slides downward until L.A. leaves the office. You see the same thing in the collapse of traffic on weekends. … Bottom line: At work, people can’t watch TV or prop up their feet and read a newspaper, but they sure do read blogs.”

When a marketer wants to reach potential customers, the prevailing wisdom has always been find the largest vehicle that reaches the most customers.

You can’t use that wisdom when dealing with the blog reading population. While there are wildly popular blogs, the best strategy is to find the blogs that reach your specific target audience who are predisposed to be interested in your book.

Right now publishers are making the classic mistake of going after literary blogs only. But literary blogs tend to be read more by industry professionals. We don’t want to advertise books to other authors, editors, and publishing people. We want to find readers.

If you have a novel that involves a chef find the best cooking blog out there. If you have a non-fiction book about the theater, find a blog that’s written by an actor or director and get to them.

No question, it’s a time intensive proposition. Technorati, the major blog search engine, tracks 19.6 million blogs.

Ad Age reports the number of blogs has doubled about every five months for the past three years. “If that growth were to continue, all 6.7 billion people on the planet will have a blog by April 2009.”