Rebecca's Ford’s next-gen promo blog at Oxford University Press—and how such approaches could help both e- and p-books

Pity the publisher trying to promote an e-book. How to alert prospective buyers? How many e-books have you seen piled up at Barnes & Noble? And has Oprah touted an e-book original lately? Oh, and forget about newspaper book supplements, which can’t even do justice to p-books and are dying or being folded into other sections.

What to do? Could a formula be found through which publishers could spread glad tidings about e-fiction and e-nonfiction alike?

Search engines: Important—but just one kind of tool

Publishers talk about the use of Amazon and search engines as ways for consumers to find books, and in fact, Evan Schnittman, a bizdev-and-rights VP for the U.S. end of the venerable Oxford University Press, has nicely laid out the benefits of services such as Google Book Search and Windows Live. See parts I and II of his essay. The goal is to make 100 percent of a book searchable through the engines—to weave it into the skein of the Internet.

Turbocharged searching alone, however, won’t be enough to spread word about books of interest to buyers. What about a personal touch, too? Can a search engine alone create a best-seller, for example, or help the world discover a promising new novelist? Might there still be room left for human- rather than just Google-powered initiatives?

Humans and the T word

Far more than techies and other civilians realize, the book world is built on trust and personal relationships—one reason why it annoyed me endlessly when the OSoft downplayed the OpenReader standard it had promised to support aggressively. Don’t think trust counts in book publishing and other media? Try contacting a book editor for the New York Times or getting yourself on the Today Show. Well-established imprints such as the centuries-old Oxford would be foolish to toss out the peoplish approach when e-books do catch on in a major way (same for good small publishers).

That’s why I’m so intrigued by Oxford’s OUPblog, moderated by Rebecca Ford, who earlier gained a handy mix of journalistic and Web experience at Creative Loafing’s alternative newspaper for Atlanta. Check out a Publishers Weekly piece on her blog work.

Why Rebecca’s book-promo blog is special

Most publishers lack blogs, and the existing efforts are often just repositories for impersonal press release material or else are just plain amateurish. Rebecca, however, rather than hiding behind an corporate facade, has made herself part of the OUPblog, complete with an editor’s desk feature. She’s using the old relationship-oriented approach in a new setting. Just as significantly, Rebecca:

1. Stocks the site with lots and lots of content from authors and others, including Evan Schnittman. She encourages them to create the items in the first place. The posts have a good information-to-hype ratio, with timeliness counting—as in the case of “Passover and Mom” or an item pegged to National Autism Week. The less hype, of course, the more chance a blogger will want to link. In fact, Rebecca tries to think of herself as an information source more than a promoter. Regardless, the intended effect is the same—more interest in Oxford books, especially compared to what the usual press releases alone would generate. Although Oxford is nonfiction oriented, some of the same concepts could apply to the promotion of novelists, who theoretically could not just do linked audios and video but also contribute essays on nonfiction topics related to their novels. In the end, whether the book is fiction or nonfiction, we’re actually talking about several forms of credibility—the book’s, the author’s, the publisher’s, Rebecca’s own in the case of Oxford, and, of course, the believability of the independent blogger making the recommendation of the post or the actual book. And, yes, unlike promo people at some large houses, Rebecca won’t hesitate to send out review copies to reach niche audiences.

2. Writes handcrafted notes to appropriate bloggers to ask if they’d like to link to posts. Hey, that’s how I learned of the Schnittman essay. Rebecca is building long-term relationships.

3. Pitches carefully—only to bloggers with an interest in the specific posts and, of course, the books themselves. A post needn’t promote an individual title, by the way.

4. Has regular topic-oriented features such as Medical Monday and Oxford etymologist. What’s more, Rebecca has just started a classics club with Alice in Wonderland as the first book under discussion.

5. And last but very definitely not least, has a well-organized home page for the blog with subjects stripped across the top—so visitors can head immediately toward the posts of most interest to them. In the case of fiction, the site theoretically could organize posts by genres and authors within them, as well as by topics and geographical locations of the writers and their novels’ settings. In the future, hometown bloggers and book reviewers could subscribe to RSS feeds based on searches that combined the desired criteria. But even that could never replace the personal touch that Rebecca offers—joined in time, I’d hope, by other Oxford University Press people, once the results of her work are better known.

Blog’s unique visitor count up from 2K to 25K per month

Rebecca at this point does not know the amount of extra sales revenue she has created as blog moderator, but she told Publishers Weekly that the site now averages 25,000 unique visitors per month, compared to 2,000 when she took over. The entire Oxford University Press site, not just the blog, has a daily reach of .01 percent of Net users reported via Alexa, and in a sense that’s good news—for it indicates a substantial upside potential. I can see the Oxford blog scaling up through the addition of more content, including pointers to first chapters (am I overlooking something?), and more help for Rebecca

Granted, just a faction of book-buyers read blogs, but I suspect that’ll grow. What’s more, the media are trying out blog-style approaches, increasingly, and Rebecca will be ready for them. So, while her traffic is far from Amazon.com-sized, and while this approach is hardly a panacea, it’s one more tool for book marketing online and a great way to help popularize both E and P in the future.

Details: I think novels and other long texts meant for sustained reading in e-book form—“immersive reading,” as the experts would say—are going to be more important than Evan Schnittman apparently does. It’s just a matter of better displays and other tech and more Net-oriented humans being born. That said, his essay raises a number of excellent questions in areas such as ownership of books and access to them under the Google model. As I see it, alas, hardly anything is “forever” on the Net. That’s one reason why I fret not just about DRM but about the possibility of the E-Book Museum model becoming the only digital one for most publishers.

Related: Book Widgets and Book Selling 2.0, by Casey Podolsky, technology VP for Oxford University Press’s Academic and USA Divisions. The Flash-based widgets, used by Random House and HarperCollins, can allow “search inside the book” features to appear within any site. Be interesting to see what Oxford might do in that area. While blogs like Oxford’s have their place, it’s important for publishers to try other tools such as widgets. Here’s to many approaches!

Meanwhile you can see a HarperCollins widget in action below. Find it easy to read text? I don’t. Too much scrolling. It isn’t as crisp as a regular HTML page displayed on my screen, and the movement through the book is a bit sluggish. If nothing else, I’d like to see a fast-read option, so that the widget was less faithful to the actual appearance of the book but made better use of screen real estate and used heavier fonts. Two columns maybe? Anyone have other impressions?