Book Marketing Tip: Use Librarything to find reviewers for your book
By Robert Nagle
Wow, a few days I received this message on my librarything page:
Hi,
Was wondering if you’d be interested in reviewing my new novel and posting your comments here as well as a few other book-related sites. Saw you liked Paris Trout, and thought you might like my novel since it’s also southern and a bit dark (in the same vein as Paris Trout). I could e-mail you the novel in an e-book format if you’d like. Let me know if you’re interested. Here’s a link to a summary in case you’re interested:
http://christophertusa.com/blog/?page_id…
Thanks,
Chris
One of the hardest tasks of book promotions is identifying people who would be sympathetic reviewers for your books. But librarything makes this easy. Suppose you wrote a book in the same vein of Dino Buzzati. You know that Dino Buzatti is underappreciated and you know that Dino Buzatti has a few enthusiastic fans; why not give them a buzz and let them know about your novel?
Of course, maybe Buzatti fans are the types just to read a book and not tell anyone…. Or maybe Buzatti fans can appreciate a good story but cannot incapable of writing anything nearly as interesting? Just as it is now easier for foot fetish people to find one another on the web, so it will be easier for like-minded literary types to find one another. (Btw, is anyone out there a fan of Felipe Alfau?)
Here we observe an interesting pattern. Books for sale are in print; books for review are in digital form. That is an efficient system (for now at least).
Already, we see the results of Chris Tusa’s efforts: 5 LT reviews, and several book reviews on blogs. Heck, I fell for the bait too!
Questions:
- How quickly will literary people be inundated with requests from publicity machines about the latest Ann Coulter/Tori Spelling “book”?
- What effect will digital review copies have on copyright infringement?
- Will this work only for specialized social networking sites (and not Facebook for example)?
- Will this mean more Harriet Klausner reviews and fewer James Wood reviews?
- Will more people mark their librarything collection as private? Or should we just assume that 99% of the world have no interest in your bookshelf (well, except for Department of Homeland Security).
- Will the share-your-personal-library-catalog model extend to all digital objects Does cataloguing books offer a special kind of pleasure in a way that is not as true for your DVD or music collection?
There are currently two problems with using librarything to send promotional ebooks. First, librarything doesn’t appear to let you input ebooks into its system unless it has an ISBN number. If you are selling ebooks (and not print books), providing sample copies for potential reviewers could backfire if your potential audience were limited to begin with.
For the record, Chis Tusa’s latest book Dirty Little Angels is a New Orleans tale of urban misfits seeking redemption. Chris Tusa is a New Orleans based-poet and literature teacher.
(BTw, feel free to join the TeleRead librarything group).
March 29th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
It’s worth mentioning that LibraryThing also has an Early Reviewers Program that will send out physical review copies to people that express interest in a book.
April 14th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Interesting stuff. Online searchable book catalogues seem to be getting more and more intelligent – I came across another site that offers book recommendations based on your reading profile, and like LibraryThing, can be used by authors to target readers and reviewers. It’s also in its beta phase and is still being developed, but has some really interesting features available already, including loads of book-related videos and forums .