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18
The Sunday Salon 4.18.10: On Books, Blogs, and Marketing
2010 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
I’ve been stewing about this for a while. In the last several months, I’ve seen a handful of blog posts with negative statements about marketing and bloggers who “market” their blogs and blog-related projects, and the Twitter conversations about this topic seem endless. It seems that, for a certain subset of the blogging community, “marketing” is a four-letter word, and the bloggers who eschew it are somehow more authentic or noble than those who embrace it. It also seems that many bloggers don’t really know what they’re talking about when they’re talking about marketing.
Marketing gets a bad rap. People hear “marketing,” and they start thinking about slimy used car salesmen in bad polyester suits.
But here’s the thing: at its core, marketing is simply about creating awareness.
Yes, marketing is often about creating awareness of a product or service, and that awareness is the first step in a strategic plan to get people to buy the product or service (that’s the SALES step, which is different from marketing), but marketing is key. Marketing is about affecting how people think about something, and you have to affect attitudes before you can affect behaviors. (You have to make me aware of the new item on the menu, and you have to affect my attitude about it, before you can get me to buy it.)
But marketing is not always about a product or service. It is not always about leading up to sales.
Marketing is about creating and affecting awareness, and it’s not just businesses who use marketing. Non-profit organizations, charities, schools, etc. all use marketing to make the public aware of them and to affect the public’s perception of them (hopefully in a positive direction) in order to gain support, funding, you know the drill.
And we, all of us who talk about and review books on our blogs, are engaged in marketing every single day.
Sometimes this is obvious, as when we participate in blog tours or review books we receive from publishers as part of the marketing campaign (the effort to create awareness) for a new or forthcoming title. Certainly, we are marketing when we feature guest posts, interviews, and giveaways for books we believe in. That’s one of the benefits of being a blogger and having an audience—we get to throw our weight behind the books and authors we believe in, and WE ALL DO IT. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s the same idea as sitting down to lunch with a group of your friends and telling them about this book that they just HAVE TO READ (and that’s marketing too, folks) but you’re sitting at a really big table.
What we don’t always acknowledge is that even when we’re reviewing backlist titles, classics, or less well-known books, we are STILL engaging in marketing. The act of posting information about these books—about ANY books—in the public forum of the internet is an act that, by its nature, changes the public’s awareness and perception of them. If you post about a book that even one person who reads your blog has not previously heard of, or if your review changes even one person’s mind about that book (making them either more or less inclined to read it), you are engaging in marketing. (And yes, even negative reviews are marketing; you are still affecting attitudes about the book, just in the opposite direction than most marketing efforts attempt to.) We may not think of our reviews of backlist and less popular titles as marketing because we’re not posting them in partnership with a publisher, publicist, or author who asked us to do so, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t.
With book blogging, books are most often the product we are marketing (read: creating and affecting awareness for), but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, our blogs are the product. And sometimes, WE are the product.
And that’s where it starts to get hairy. I get it that many people don’t like to think of themselves as products. It can feel icky.
But if you use Twitter, Facebook, Ning, or any social networking site to discuss your blog or your book reviews, you are MARKETING your blog. Even if you just post links to your blog on that site or include your URL in your member profile, you are marketing your blog. When you comment on other blogs (an act that is likely to introduce others to you and your blog), you are marketing. It’s a passive form of marketing—allowing others to discover the link without your directing them to it—but it is still marketing. Your simple presence on something like Twitter is an act of marketing in that it creates a public awareness of you (and often your blog) that would not otherwise exist, and how you interact there continually affect and shape the public’s perception, regardless of whether you’re being strategic in those interactions or not (and, for the record, I think that most of us are not).
If you are a blogger who is also a writer, and you are trying to get published, and you include information about your writing projects on your blog or you discuss them on Twitter, you are marketing yourself as a writer. You are creating awareness of your writing in hopes that it will cause someone to act differently (in this case, by looking at your writing and maybe publishing you). Even if you are not knocking on doors, emailing, or tweeting directly to agents, you are passively creating awareness of your writing and of yourself as a writer, and that’s marketing.
Those of us who participate in blog tours and work with publishers, publicists, and authors to coordinate book reviews and related features are often engaged in the act of marketing ourselves. We first have to make these publishers, publicists, and authors aware of us (often done passively, just by having a blog that can be found on in the internet, but sometimes more actively by engaging on Twitter, etc.), and then we have to affect how they think about us by writing solid, well-crafted reviews and being reliable. We build relationships with them and hope they come to think of us as the go-to bloggers for specific kinds of books, bloggers who will write honest reviews and present even our negative opinions well.
And guess what? The way we want to be perceived by the people with whom we interact and cultivate relationships? That’s our personal brand. And WE ALL HAVE ONE (even when it includes a distaste for marketing and branding).
You may not think you have a brand,—and I’ve seen MANY bloggers make disparaging remarks about branding and marketing on Twitter, which, hello, is a PUBLIC FORUM in which you affect how others perceive you— but if you have a public presence anywhere, you have a brand because your presence alone gives people a reason to think about you, and how they think about you—the image you project and the way you are perceived—is your brand.
Even if you do not have an online presence, you have a personal brand. All of us who work in public, who cultivate a professional image, who have relationships within our industries, and who work to be thought of in a certain way by our peers, have personal brands.
And this is all to say that marketing and branding are not, by their nature, bad things. We all do them all the time, even when we are publicly disparaging the very concepts.
I don’t care what you choose to do with your blog or how you choose to interact on Twitter. I don’t care what kind of image you cultivate or whom you form relationships with. I don’t care whether you work actively to market your blog, yourself, and the books you believe in or if you just post them publicly and allow people to discover them.
I just think it’s high time that we acknowledge what marketing really is (and what it isn’t) and get beyond the naive idea that one can have an online presence without engaging in any form of marketing.
I work in marketing. I like it, I believe in it, and I think it is vitally important to think about how our actions come across in public. But really, I’m just SO OVER hearing people talk about how much they hate marketing and branding when they are having the conversations in VERY public forums and using the conversations to create awareness (hello, marketing) of their dislike for it, which, whether intentionally or not, attracts a certain audience and shapes perceptions. If you’re talking about how much you hate marketing, you’re doing it because you want people to be aware that you hate marketing, and you want to be thought of as someone who doesn’t engage in it. You are marketing your personal brand as someone who is anti-marketing. Oh, the irony…
And, as my mother would say, that’s your little red wagon to pull.
But I’d encourage you to start thinking about it.
You have a brand. That’s a fact. And you can either take control of it or allow other people to shape it for you. This doesn’t mean your interactions need to be calculated and strategic (in fact, I’d argue against that), but it does mean you should spend some time thinking about what your blog means, how you want people to think about it (because they DO think about it), and how you want people to think about you.
Anyone who has a professional life (and being a student DOES count) thinks about (or should think about) these things all the time, and bloggers, whether we hope to use our blogs as a platform to something else or not, should behave professionally if we want to have any hope of gaining legitimacy in the industry and being thought of us real contributors who work, each in our own way, to keep the written word alive.
Beautifully put! Having just spent the week on the road at book festivals and book clubs, I can tell you with great confidence that a novelist must believe in and participate in his or her own marketing effort.
There is less magic in the process than I once thought and much more hard work than I ever imagined. But I keep “marketing” because I want to keep telling stories that the reading public will hear.
Amen, sister.
What a great defense of marketing. I’ve often wanted to ask bloggers who write on their blogs that they hate marketing why they even have a blog that exists in the public space. If you hate marketing so much, then write down your thoughts in a journal and don’t let ANYONE read it.
I must have missed all these conversations. Great post though. And of course we’re all engaged in marketing.
I wholeheartedly agree with this blog. Beautifully put and I couldn’t have said it any better!
The ‘blog’ up there, make that ‘post’ (even though I also really like the blog
). I seem not to be quite awake yet on this sunny Sunday afternoon.
You are so right and I too hope that bloggers will behave professionally, especially at trade events.
Well said. Thank you.
I don’t want to start a debate here, but I have to put it out there that there is a distinct difference between marketing one’s blog in a professional way and harassing people to follow said blog. We would all like readers, and we would all like to have good relationships with publishers, publicists, and authors. Book bloggers are in the distinct position of being able to offer marketing to those publishers while gaining readership at the same time. Let’s just all remember to blog with integrity and class. Had to get that off my chest. Thanks.
Applause!!!!!!!!!!
Marketing = advocacy, I don’t see many berating those efforts. I suppose this is because of the motivations behind it all but, still. I imagine the debate should focus more on motivation than nomenclature. Though even then I don’t see much need for debate, who am I to question a person’s motivations. To each their own I say!
Great post, as usual, Rebecca. I have been seeing some anti-marketing sentiments here and there, and have been thinking much of what you said, but you said it much better than I could have.
That’s an important distinction and one that I wish could go without saying. But yes, you’re right that there’s a way to do it professionally, and then there’s harassment. I hope we’ll begin to see more of the former and less of the latter.
Fantastic post, Rebecca. I love the way you phrased everything in this. I never really thought of my blog as marketing but I got hired in a marketing job because of it – it really is the same thing. I think people tend to equate marketing with advertising, and it’s really not the same thing. I love how you said cultivating a professional image is the same thing – so true! It’s something that I do sometimes struggle with personally but it’s worth it.
My husband has a MBA in marketing, so I can say that your blog post explains marketing very well– that it is brand management (i.e. books) and not just the act of selling.
BTW I’m new to twitter, and I’m already surprised by all the chatter that goes on and how it can reveal people’s thoughts and personalities, if that makes sense. A lot of publishers and authors are on twitter now, so I’m sure they are bound to notice what goes on there.
Once again, another thought-provoking post.
I think that can be the most ironic part of it, Valerie. Book bloggers and publishing folks have A LOT of interaction on Twitter, and I always wonder what the industry people are thinking when bloggers start ranting about how much they hate marketing and don’t want to be a part of it. It’s a huge piece of the puzzle, and if you don’t get that, you probably cut yourself out of a lot of opportunities.
Totally agree. I think maybe those folks are confusing marketing with over-marketing- the people who spam everyone to death. Or they feel that they don’t want to be “owned.” I get that. But that’s something else.
I definitely “market” the books that I love. Not because I’m getting paid but because I love those books and want everyone to love them too. I promote the blogs I like. The things I like. I don’t think you can have a blog without marketing something. Even a lifestyle can be marketed.
Keep on that soapbox, you’re gathering a crowd!
Those who haven’t already read it might like to read Malcolm Gladwell’s THE TIPPING POINT, in which he addresses various personality types and their roles in marketing.
(yes, I realize I’m creating awareness –> marketing <– Gladwell's book. That's what I do).
Dawn, I *heart* you.
EXACTLY.
I think for most people the word ‘marketing’ has become synonymous with ‘whoring out,’ and while hazily I knew it wasn’t, I never had a working definition with which to refute it. So, thanks!
Glad to be of service.
Excellent post! I love how you’ve defined marketing as creating awareness, and I think that’s exactly what many of us are here to do — create awareness of authors, bloggers, articles, posts, reviews that we think highly of and want to introduce to others.
This conversation has been going on in other parts of the blogging world, too, and it’s interesting to see how it’s communicated and received here. You’re an excellent spokesperson, Rebecca.
Very well put and so true. I never feel bad about posting links to reviews or interviews I’ve done to get more people aware of books (or CDs etc) that I found particularly enjoyable/ impressive etc. I just wish I got more comments because I KNOW people are reading and I’m on/off about should I continue or not. I love writing, reading, music, the arts and everything I cover.
I also read your year of reading deliberately which I think I’ve always tried to do. I’m a reading snob to a degree. I think it’s important to vary one’s reading. But when I started to review more books, I found I would say YES to books that frankly just aren’t my type for instance I feel I’m wasting my time reading something really light when I can sink into a Jonathan Lethem, Cavalier and Clay (TBR for a LONG time) or The Children’s Book (ditto)
Quality over Quantity.
I totally second that! *Loud applause and cheers*
Hey, you do good rants too!
I think the anti-marketing brigade simply have a very outdated perception of what marketing actually is–and you do a great job of addressing that.
The dot com implosion of the late 90s/early 00s has cemented a very specific (and inaccurate) definition of what marketing is all about in the minds of many people, but we’re now far removed from that wayward era.
It always amazes me when people who use social networking services, or indulge in blogging, to whatever extent, simply refuse to acknowledge that they’re effectively marketing Brand Me. Regardless of whether or not a tangible product involved, every status update, tweet or blog post is reflecting your personal brand (and being evaluated by someone who’s making a judgment of value).
Those of us who “market” ourselves or our blogs are simply more aware of the consequences of what we say and do, have made an effort to understand our audience and have made a decision to fine-tune our output accordingly. That this can be considered a bad thing just boggles my mind.
I have no problem with marketing whatsoever, and I know that my blog is actively engaged in marketing myself and the books I review. Plus, I wouldn’t mind finding a full-time job in marketing…
But anyway, I made a slight marketing slam the other day when discussing TINKERS, the newest Pulitzer winner. As a book blogger and follower of the publishing scene, I hadn’t heard of the book. It was published out of a small independent press that probably didn’t have the money for a large marketing effort. As much as I love the big name books, I also like when the smaller books, driven solely by story and not a giant publishing house, make it big. These books tend to be lost in the sea of “big books” and giant marketing departments that flood our senses everyday.
So yes, I understand that by winning the Pulitzer Prize, that was the biggest marketing move for TINKERS yet. Me talking about it was a marketing effort, as well. And I have no problems with marketing (again…job would be nice
, However, at the time, that was my perspective.
I’d go a step further and defend the slimy used car salesman. He may be a weasel, but he’s the go-to guy for moving cars off the lot.
Too often I see & hear people blame the ambiguous evil of Marketing for the failure of a book to sell (including, quite tastelessly, authors). And (sorry, publishing) this is far from the only industry to have that same complaint.
Sorry, I realize your comment was more directed at people accusing bloggers of self-promotion (and, really, why wouldn’t we market ourselves?! If we just wanted to write our thoughts without anyone reading them, a journal is £1.99 at WH Smith). But I’ve got a long-standing pet peeve with the anti-”Marketing” folks of the world.
Also, I work in marketing. So anyone that disagrees with me can safely discount everything I just said.
Well said! If all a person wanted to do was record their thoughts on books, then they could journal them. Clearly, they want their thoughts out in the world.
Well put. I think, to some of us, it just feels…well, not right…to leave raves about books or products without acknowledging that the book or product was obtained without cost and for the purpose of having it promoted.
Thanks to the FTC, we HAVE to acknowledge it when we receive books for free, but I’ve always been an advocate of transparency, even prior to the regulations.
Mark, “Brand Me” is such a great way to put it!
I don’t see anything wrong in marketing your blog. If you can make it a successful business like Perez Hilton, TMZ or The Huffington Post and make money, go for yours.
Well said. I do think when you are putting your thoughts out there in a public forum like a blog, you had to admit that you are marketing in some way, shape or form.
Wow, this is a great post. I learned from owning my own Copyright Business the importance of marketing. There are not many businesses out there that just deal with copyrights and the effect they have on artists in the digital age. It has been a very hard road marketing it. I have no problems with people marketing their blogs. Why have a blog if no one reads it? How are people going to read it if you don’t get it out there?
I agree with all your comments and support your view point. At some point in life everyone markets something. Have you ever just found the hottest lipstick and just had to share? Same thing. Anything you recommend to someone even if it was asked of you is considered marketing.
I am really glad you did a post about this. I am going to share it will all my bloggy friends.
Til We Read Again,
Bobbie
Excellent post Rebecca! There are times when I feel as though I should feel guilty for wanting to market my blog. But I have to remind myself that I want people to read my blog. That’s the truth! If nobody was reading it, I would stop. Unlike others, who truly may be blogging only for themselves, that honestly is never why I started. Marketing and branding have always made since to me, and I shouldn’t have to ever apologize for it!
So true! Great post!
It’s interesting for me to think about marketing because I think about it from a blogger’s perspective and a journalist’s perspective. For old-school journalists, the idea of marketing themselves, their stories, and what they do is really uncomfortable. It’s not something they like to do, and I understand why. It’s only recently that society has started to think about the idea of the journalist as a person with personality, as more than just a cog in the machine of a news production process. I think if journalists thought of marketing the way you’ve explained it — creating awareness of their work — it wouldn’t be as uncomfortable.
As a blogger, I’m comfortable with using my blog as a way to market myself as a writer and journalist. It’s something I don’t love doing, but it’s something that gets done (if that makes any sense). I am curious about how I’ll go about marketing my blog at BEA and the Convention, seeing as that’ll be the first time I get to spend any time with a big group of bloggers/authors/publishing folks.
Interesting post!
I could so use a workshop in personal branding.
And in case you’ve never stopped by, my site, QuentinFinch, is like Digg for the bookish. A great way to create awareness about your blog and blogs you love!
What a great post! I think you’re right on.
Yay Rebecca! I totally agree. Like Natasha, I’ve felt like other bloggers think I should feel dirty for marketing my blog but that’s my problem, i guess, because I will never not market my blog. we agree!
I couldn’t agree with you more!
One of the things that I was trying to get across (and failing to do so!) in my recent contraversial post was that I actually love the way Americans market their blogs. I wish that that others weren’t afraid to do it.
I think branding and marketing the right image are very important. Unless you are only using your blog as a personal reading diary I don’t think there is any point creating wonderful blog posts if no one actually going to read them.
Jackie, I think part of the recent hullabaloo about your post came from the fact that people ASSUMED you must have meant negative things when you talked about Americans marketing, because most people have these crazy negative ideas about marketing. So I get how the misunderstanding happened. For what it’s worth, I also think people REALLY overreacted.
You are eloquent, as always. I’d really like to do a little look-see on these people who ridicule self-promotion. I bet they are out there doing the same thing we are. Seriously, if we don’t want people to visit our blogs and don’t do anything to draw followers, why are we here???????
An informative and well thought-out post. Bravo!
As usual, very well said
I really hope my discussion with Eva and Amy about “serious blogging’ and my blog post on that whole Raven Stole the Moon tour didn’t contribute to the fuel for this post1 As someone who plans to get an MBA in marketing, I definitely think it has a lot of power for good- that’s why I love the Classics Circuit and the Spotlight Series- so much possibility to do good through word of mouth!
I do think everyone with a blog markets it, but I also think some people take it more seriously than others (not making a value judgment there at all). For example, a lot of people have blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter pages, and gravatars all of which jive with each other. That is definitely an amazing way to secure your own brand, but I also don’t think all bloggers do it. I think everyone DOES do marketing of some sort, but I think it also depends on the blogger’s hopes for her blog how she chooses to do it.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with marketing your blog. I think if you take pride in something, then you should be allowed to share that
[...] at the Book Lady’s Blog is meditating On Books, Blogs, and Marketing. It seems that, for a certain subset of the blogging community, “marketing” is a four-letter [...]
Very well said! I couldn’t agree more. Every action affects somebody’s perception of us, as do the content, style, and feel of what we say and do. Of course that still hasn’t motivated me to get off my tush and actually finish actually designing my blog (read: header) but that is a whole other story!
Aarti, it’s something I’ve been thinking about blogging on for many months now. You’re right that bloggers do it to varying agrees, but we all do it, and even when we don’t have the blog, Facebook, Twitter, gravatar combo, we have personal brands—they’re just less controlled than others.
Excellent post, as usual Rebecca. I like how eloquently you explained the fact that we ALL market our blogs, whether we mean to or not, because while I understood that to be the case, I really never think about my own marketing. I am definitely in the more “passive” category of marketing, but I am okay with that, and I love that we all market what we believe in – books. That is what we are here for, right? And marketing ourselves, at least for me, is just the icing. Some people are more involved in the publishing industry than others, and that is when the “serious” marketing comes into play. But really, we all just need to put our best face forward when we write, talk, and comment about our blogging and act with professionalism. We are all passionate about books, and to share that passion we need to act like adults.
So, anyways, what I am trying to say is that you rock, and I think this post cleared up a lot of things for a lot of people.
Heather, that’s the best compliment you could give me about this one. Thanks!
Great post, Rebecca! You are so articulate. I love that you removed the evil mask and talked about marketing in such an informative, educational manner.
I just think it’s so wonderful that we all have the opportunity to market something that has such an overwhelmingly positive effect on society. I mean, really, does it get any better?
How crazy is this: I just submitted my outline for the Marketing Panel at the Book Blogger Convention and my first items for discussion is “What is marketing and why should bloggers do it?” Then I hop over here and see this post.
You did a great job explaining things and you’ve definitely given me more things to consider regarding the panel!
Well said, especially your thoughts on personal branding and our blogs. It’s certainly very important, especially at trade events, that we present ourselves in a professional manner. In many cases, it’s just a matter of good manners and remembering that what you say online is VERY public!
Do you think it could be as simple as a latent distrust of just the word “marketing”? Some lizard-brain association with marketing and manipulation and naked profit-seeking?
I, like some others have already noted, don’t understand how someone with a public blog can get on their high horse about marketing. Smacks of a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to me.
I think your lizard-brain analogy is perfect. Yes. People mistrust all marketing because some marketing is bad (case of one bad apple spoiling the bunch). It bears discussing.
Rebecca,
Thank you for writing this great article. I could feel the steam coming off the page as I read it.
I’m a book blogger whose aim is to create a professional site to help book bloggers blog better – and to explore whether one can monetize a book blog.
As I suspect that most bloggers actually want people to visit and read their blogs, I find it hard to understand why they disparage those who market/promote/network their blogs.
I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the answers are to be found as part of the cultural backlash against marketing.
For me however, I say let’s all paint our wagons neon read and haul them up the highest hill!