Marketing Your Book with Your Blog

The other day, I read on a message board a plea from an author for advice on marketing her book.  She has written what she feels is an incredible resource which isn’t getting much attention from her publisher and she’s frustrated.

Rather than write a response there, I’d like to share here with you the story of a first time author who using his blog to market his new book.

Chris Brogan is not your traditional author.  He’s the President of New Marketing Labs, a new media marketing agency.  His company works with large and mid-size companies on how to use “new media”.   New media means the internet plus social networking tools like blogs and Twitter.

Chris Brogan has a popular blog and almost 50,000  Twitter followers.  He is now marketing his book – Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust

This is Chris’ first book.  First books usually don’t become best sellers – but in this case, Trust Agents is well on it’s way.

You might be surprised to learn that  within a week of it’s release that Trust Agents is in the top 100 in book sales at Amazon.com.    But you shouldn’t be surprised.  See, Chris has been doing a LOT of promotion surrounding his book.

Chris gets over 200,000 visitors to his blog each month.  Despite all of the other demands on his time, he still blogs regularly.  His blog has over 30,000 RSS subscribers – which means when he posts to his blog – which he does on a regular basis – over 30,000 people are notified that he has made a new post.  He’s been actively promoting his blog for YEARS to gain this kind of following and support.

Through his blog, Chris has been talking about writing the book with his readers for months.  He’s been offering a free ebook with a sample chapter of the book as a “legal bribe” to encourage you to subscribe to his email newsletter.

Yes, Chris Brogan not only has a blog -a facebook profile – a linkedin profile and a twitter account – he also maintains an opt-in email newsletter to communicate with the people who want to know what Chris knows – which Chris willingly and freely shares.

At this point, I want to point out that Trust Agents – Chris Brogan’s new book – is NOT self published – it’s being published by Wiley.  Chris has made the traditional book release marketing rounds such as doing book signings and jumping through all of the other hoops that Wiley has asked him to jump through in the promotion of his book.

On August 17, Chris posted “The Big Push” to his blog and told his 30,000 RSS subscribers – and his 200K blog readers how they could help make his book a success.   In that post, he makes this offer:

If you purchase 200 copies of Trust Agents, I’ll fly out and spend a half day with your organization for free. I’ll let you know right now that my consulting rate is far more than the price of 200 books, so it’s a pretty darned good deal, so this might be the chance for a two-fer. You can give your group some books, and you can get specific consultation about how your organization can use online tools to be human at a distance and deliver business value.

Talk about going above and beyond – Chris is really giving his all to put his book on the best seller list.

For the author who posted the plea – the one who is sitting back and waiting for her publisher to begin working hard to market her amazing book – I have news for her.  It probably isn’t going to happen.

However, the good news is she can start TODAY.  She can launch a self hosted wordpress blog and begin using it to begin developing a following for her amazing book.  Just because the book is already published is no reason to think it’s too late.  If the book hasn’t been remaindered – there’s still time.

If you’re ready to begin marketing your book – but don’t know where to begin – stop by Keys to Web Site Success for an easy step by step suite of tutorials to help you to begin marketing your book with your own blog.

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