Book Promotion, Web Style

Intuitively, it makes sense that if you get a book/author in front of more eyeballs, you increase your odds of selling books, and the web is a fast (and inexpensive) way of gaining exposure. So far, though, doing book promotion online often involves taking a leap of faith since it’s incredibly hard to correlate sales directly with online activities.

Unlocking effective ways to use the web to help books sell benefits everyone in the publishing food chain, so I’m particularly excited to see what Chris Brogan and Julien Smith are doing with their upcoming book Trust Agents, due out in August.

Chris and Julien are very web savvy and web active people, and their book is about the web, too, so it’s a natural place for them to create buzz and make sales. What’s cool, though, is that they’re opening up the process so we can all follow along and toss in ideas.

As a group, we can see what works and, inevitibly, what doesn’t work. If you’re an author, you can use or adapt ideas for your own projects. Plus, collectively, we can try to track longer term impact, too.

In his blog entry  Trust Agents – Marketing a Book, Chris explains what they’ve done so far and mentions future goals. You can look through the comments and head to the Trust Agents Facebook page and not only see other suggestions, but also see that from their time online, they’ve created a small army of volunteers ready and willing to help promote the book.

Already, that’s one key lesson to learn about promoting books online – community matters.

If you have an interest in book promotion or in effectively using the web to sell product, I hope you’ll join in the conversation there or here. I look forward to watching how Chris and Julien’s efforts unfold and expect to learn a lot in the process. And interestingly, by opening up the journey to all of us, they’ve already made me invested in the success of the book. That’s book promotion, too, one sale at a time.