Dude – Blog Your Book!
“So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this — the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.”
- Clay Shirky
Writer’s : Why Not Give Away Your Work in a Blog?
Latest Examples:
Mashable: From Blog to Book: How 6 authors did it -
http://mashable.com/2009/12/17/blog-to-book/
SocialMediaSoapbox: From podcast to publication — the social media success story behind J.C. Hutchins’ The 7th Son http://bit.ly/JEqrQ
No – we are not nuts – we are the dudes!
This really works. In an article on book promotion from www.writerswrite.com, citing a report from the Huffington Post, the example of author Scott Sigler who promoted his new horror novel “Infected” by giving it away as a free podcast audiobook. This was before the book had a publishing deal. The audiobook apparently attracted quite a following which, in turn, attracted the publisher Crown Books. That would be amazing enough for most authors but Mr. Sigler continued to offer the free audiobook despite the fact that Crown had published a hardback version of the book which was on sale in all good bookshops. In fact Sigler went a step further and offered the book as a free downloadable PDF file. “Despite the free online offerings Crown Books sold 3,500 copies of Infected in its first week of sales”, the report states.
The interesting thing is that the novel wasn’t originally considered a likely prospect in terms of attracting interest from a major publisher, given the nature of the subject matter – an ex-football hero infected with a sentient infectious agent. However, what attracted the publishers interest was the huge following the novel amassed through the downloading of the free podcast. “On his own, with no marketing campaign other than word of mouth and his blog, Sigler built the sort of rabid fan base authors — and publishers — dream about”. [And he is still doing it - visit his podcast site at http://scottsiglerwp.mevio.com].
The Crown hardback version of the novel sold 3500 copies in its first week and went on to sell another 1000 a week from then on – “more than three of the books on the hardcover fiction NY Times Bestseller list!” And Sigler is not the only author to do this. Authors Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin have both successfully employed the same methods with their own novels.
Now the dudes at Dude – Blog Your Business are offering you the chance to promote your book in the same way. We can:
- Set you up with a blog
- Post your novel in bite sized chunks on a daily up to a weekly basis
- Publish the book as a downloadable PDF file
- Record your book as an audiobook and podcast it as a series of mp3 downloads.
We are not going to promise that you will be picked up by a major publisher, but we can provide you with probably the most powerful and cheapest method of getting your novel to the attention of the reading public as well as the publishers.
You can, of course, do all this yourself for free – but not everyone has the computer knowledge or time to do it.
For those people that haven’t – we, the dudes, are here for you!
“. . .ten years ago, what could one person do? Today, though, when everyone can be a blogger (as powerful as almost any broadcast journalist with the right story) and when everyone can spread ideas, what’s our excuse?”
- Seth Godin
