Internet Connections

By Michael Drew - Sep 26 , 2007

Using the Web to Connect with Readers

Sparks are flying at RomanceNovel.tv.

Now hold on a minute—don’t cue the raunchy music track just yet. I’m not talking about those kinds of sparks. The sparks I’m referring to are much more likely to lead to a raging inferno of book sales rather than a flaming, torrid affair.

RomanceNovel.tv is an interactive site for fans of this particular genre of books. It gives visitors direct, behind-the-scenes access to their favorite authors through video interviews, casual conversations, online chats, and other venues. Visitors can read excerpts from soon-to-be published novels and even pose questions to authors through the site’s Ask the Author forum.

Cheers to the publishers and authors who are currently participating in these types of online communities! These and other types of online marketing are becoming more and more popular as more and more people turn to the Internet instead of to TV, radio, and newspapers for their shopping news.

In fact, according to Internet World Stats, the size of Internet users exceeds 232 million for North America alone. And online marketing revenue is expected to grow by 28% this year, with a total expenditure in excess of $21 billion dollars. What’s even more staggering, those dollars are projected to double by 2011!

So how should your authors take advantage of this ballooning Internet market? It’s not as easy as simply creating an image of your author’s book and making it pop up on millions of computer screens. What authors and publishers are discovering is that a certain level of personal interaction between authors and their target audiences is the best marketing, like what’s happening at RomanceNovel.tv.

And even more than that can be done. You could encourage your authors to set up online chat sessions with interested readers on a social networking site such as MySpace. Or maybe your authors could appear as guest bloggers on the site’s book channel. And if you have any authors writing a series, you could encourage them to create interactive message boards that allow readers to communicate with one another and even weigh in on the direction of specific storylines as they unfold in future books. And offering excerpts or advance copies to a certain number of online participants would help create a bigger buzz at publication time, no doubt about it.

YouTube is another popular social gathering site for millions of prospective readers. It would be the perfect place for your authors to post short videos as part of their pre- and post-publication promotional campaigns. These videos could provide audience members with real-time updates and a behind-the-scenes look at events, such as book tour seminars and signings.

So help your authors take a cue from romance novelist Nora Roberts. This best-selling author of more than 150 romance novels has a whole series of videos on RomanceNovel.tv, where she lets her hair down and talks about everything from writing trilogies to comparing her life to a novel. In addition, her publisher, Berkley, regularly provides the Lifetimetv.com website with exclusive excerpts of her upcoming novels. And, to date, four of her novels have been turned into Lifetime Original Movies.

Not only is this type of interaction appealing to readers, but it’s also much more affordable when compared to the cost of attempting to reach people through more traditional mass media channels. If it costs $1 to reach one person three times per week using radio, that same dollar spent online could reach twenty people three times per week. And when you consider the sheer number of people that are exposed to an online message via links and e-mail, the cost becomes even more outstandingly efficient.

The more people can relate to an author as a person, the bigger the potential for growing that author’s marketing platform. So publishers, encourage and help your authors to build a book promotion presence online. Encourage them to let potential readers interact with them and “see them real.” Start creating sparks today that could lead to a raging inferno of book sales just a short jog down the road.

Questions about promotional efforts online may be directed to Michael R. Drew at the Austin, Texas, headquarters of Promote A Book : 512-858-0040. You can also contact Michael via email at michael@promoteabook.com.