Blogging FAQ, Day 7: Will Blogging Sell Books?
image credit: Steve Wampler via Flickr
Of course, it’s the million dollar question: will blogging sell books?
As expected, there’s no easy answer.
If you feature a particular book on your blog, you may sell a few copies. Or you may not.
Does your e-newsletter generate sales of specific books that you feature? Do you track it? I would suggest that once you have built a steady blog readership, your results should be compared. You likely won’t see results right off the bat.
The difference is that blogging may sell books in a way that you can’t track. If you develop a relationship with your readers, if they feel that they know you and want to support you, they may become (or stay) customers. They may never buy the books you blog about, but maybe they will buy other things. If you come to their mind first when they need a book (or just need information about a book), then your blog is working. You have their mind share. If you are able to solve a customer problem via your blog, other readers may see how you handle customer service, and will become customers themselves. The possibilities are endless.
Tell your readers what you want them to do
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask for the sale. I think you should. A big “click to buy” button after every book you feature is something that you should incorporate into your posts. Ask for the pre-order, too. More and more customers are becoming trained to pre-order books when they first hear about them. Authors are encouraging their fans to pre-order. I know that if I don’t pre-order something when I hear about it, I will likely forget about it. If you offer the same ability, you may keep your customers from pre-ordering elsewhere.
If you can, incorporate the “look inside the book” widgets when you blog about a book or author. This allows your readers to check out sample pages and even search inside the book. With the Random House Insight widget (example below), you can customize the “buy” button to go to the appropriate page on your e-commerce website. In this case, I’ve customized it to go to Indiebound, where it will ask the reader for their zip code to buy it at their local bookstore. It’s pretty cool.
I’m sure that some of you have other ideas about how to drive sales of specific books you blog about. If you have a blog and have seen success with this, please share your experiences in the comments.
Tomorrow: Blogging FAQ, Day 8: If we put our staff recommendations on the blog, won’t people buy those books elsewhere?
Previous posts in this series:
- Ten Days of Blogging FAQs
- Day 1: Who’s going to read our blog?
- Day 2: Where do I find the time to blog?
- Day 3: I already have a newsletter, do I really need a blog?
- Day 4: What do I blog about?
- Day 5: How do I know who’s reading?
- Day 6: How do I write blog posts that people will want to read?
Drew Goodman says:
February 12th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
That is the question! Will blogging increase my business, i.e. sell books and other products? Here I would encourage perseverance. Just like building a reader following for your blog, the effects of a blog on your sales will build slowly, perhaps even more slowly than your readership. Does this mean it’s not worth it? Definitely not. Some (or many) sales may be difficult or impossible to track directly back to the blog, as you said Ann. But, by building the blog by using other social media (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, eNewsletters, etc.), and tying them all together, it will have an effect. And remember, if you don’t talk to your customers about books, someone else will. Do you want to take the chance of losing a customer because you don’t engage them online?
Booksellers Blog » Blogging FAQ, Day 9: How Can I Involve my Local Community? says:
February 16th, 2009 at 6:12 am
[...] Day 7: Will blogging sell books? [...]
blogging software says:
May 29th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Good to see relevant information on your blog. I have read some of your posts and they are good. Thanks.