A piece in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago explores how some publishers and authors are trying to use the web to promote books. One way is to offer free electronic copies – of a whole book, in the case of sci-fi writer and Boing Boingian Cory Doctorow, or sometimes just a chunk to the get the reader hooked, as was the case with Murakami’s “Kafka on the Shore,” the first five chapters of which Knopf put online for free. Some publishers are courting bloggers, sending free copies, seeking endorsements, facilitating author interviews. Some are setting up blogs of their own (see the Freakonomics blog). There are currently two fan sites devoted to a fictional actress appearing in Bret Easton Ellis’s forthcoming novel “Lunar Park.”
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I was first. I have been doing that since 1999.
It took years before a serious publisher found the novels I had posted on the Internet (chunks or whole), and published one of them.
So it works… but you must be patient.
In collaboration with my publisher, Raw Nerve, I started a blog http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com for my book ‘Hello World: travels in virtuality’ when it came out last year. The idea was to create a ‘web-view’ – complementary to the book, with the same numbered sections, but with additional material and the opportunity for readers to add to it as well. It’s still growing. I have no idea whether the blog has sold any more copies but it certainly makes my work available to a wider audience even if they never buy the book.
By the by, Hello World is the first book ever to mention Book Crossing http://www.bookcrossing.com and then be released into the wild. There’s currently at least one copy wandering America and waiting to be found…