Booksellers Blog

Today’s guest post is by Patrick Brown.  Patrick is the webmaster and blogger for Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA.  Before joining the staff at Vroman’s, he worked at Book Soup in West Hollywood, and briefly at Skylight Books in Los Feliz.  He has written book reviews for Publishers Weekly and was a regular contributor to the popular literary blog The Millions. Read more from Patrick at Vroman’s Blog.

The Vroman’s Approach to Blogging

At Winter Institute this past month, there was a lot of curiosity about blogging and new media, and plenty of confusion and skepticism, too. Several people asked me how to start a store book blog, how to find the right person or people to write it, and even once, how to hire “someone like you.” I took this last question more as “How should I think about staffing my store with people who get the web?” Ann has just run a series of posts right here that answer many of the questions plaguing bookstores – Should we have a blog? How can we start blogging? What will we write about? – I thought it might be useful to show how we at Vroman’s have put many of the things Ann is talking about into practice, what has been successful, and what hasn’t.

Let me start by saying that there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to bookstore blogging. Depending on the size of your store and your level of comfort online, you may have to take a different approach from the one we’ve taken. This post is more to demonstrate how we at Vroman’s try to think about how to use the web, and why we’ve come to think of it that way.

Let’s start with the question of staffing the position of blogger. I am the Vroman’s webmaster. I update our website, write the store blog, and maintain our MySpace and Facebook pages, as well as a group on Goodreads, a Tumblr blog, and our Twitter feed. I also send all of our marketing emails, and make the store’s promotional videos. I’m part of our promotions department, and I usually host five or six events a month, as well as assisting with large events like the LA Times Festival of Books or offsite events. I think it’s important that, regardless of the size of your store, to think of the person or people writing your store blog as being marketers rather than IT people or tech people. When I began this job, I was familiar with blogging, including book blogging (I’d written for a book blog for a while), but I certainly wasn’t a “techie.” I didn’t even really know any HTML.

If you are a bigger store, and you can afford to hire an internet marketer (I think that’s a better title than webmaster, even though I do like the sound of that “master” part), there are ways to compensate for creating a new position. When I came on, I took a lot of work off the plate of our promotions director and the assistant promotions director. This freed them up to plan more events, take on more offsite events, and, most importantly, to spend more time claiming co-op. Perhaps the internet marketing position could be combined with whoever is doing in-store displays or signage, or maybe with a graphic design position. I’ve found that there is more than enough work for me every week. In fact, there’s a long list of things I need to do that I may never have the time to get to.

If you are a smaller store, I think a team approach to blogging is an excellent way to go. This is the strategy employed by Harry W. Schwartz on their Inside Flap blog and by Sam Weller’s on their blog. Seth Godin has pointed out that the most successful blogs online are all group blogs (Boing Boing and The Millions are both excellent examples of group blogs). If you get three people together who can write, each of them can be responsible for one day each week. That gives you three posts a week, which is pretty good. Eventually, your readers will get to know each of them and their unique personalities. If you have people on staff that maintain personal blogs or contribute to blogs, they are obviously excellent candidates, in that they will be familiar with the form of a blog post and possibly with the blogging platform you choose to use as well.

The key to blogging is generating content as often as possible, rain or shine. A group effort can make this a lot less daunting. If these bloggers are going to be doing other things – receiving books, processing returns, working the register or the sales floor – you need to schedule an hour a week for each of them to blog. Chances are they will be thinking about their posts before this hour, but they will need that time to actually sit down and write. While every bookstore is stretched thin (I’ve worked at several and none of them had tons of time or energy to spare), pretty much all of them can afford an hour a week. Maybe there’s a task that your bloggers are currently performing that could be shifted to someone else.

Once you’ve got your blogger or bloggers in place, the question of what to write about comes into play. The answer to this question depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. I usually try to post something every day. Some days, this might be a collection of links that I think are interesting. Some are about books, but others are just amusing or worthwhile sites. It is very good to link to other blogs, so that they will see that you’re sending traffic to them, and possibly link to some of your content. At least once a week, I try to post something a bit more thoughtful – a review of new book (or an older book), an interview of some sort, an opinion piece about something important to me. I’ve written about how riding the Metro to work changed my reading habits, a critique of the NBCC’s Good Reads list, a list of the greatest living short story writers (according to me), and why I thought Oprah sold out independent bookstores. These posts take a little bit longer to write, but they are your best bet for generating traffic, as they are more likely to be picked up by search engines, and far, far more likely to be picked up by sites like Boing Boing, The Morning News, and Kottke.org. A link from any of those sites can send your traffic soaring.

But does a post have to attract a lot of attention to be successful? Does it have to directly sell a lot of books to be successful? That depends on how you define success, and it depends on what you want to accomplish online.

I gauge the success of a blog post based on the number of comments, links, and general discussion that it generates, not the number of books that it sells. By my standards, my most successful post, by far, was a piece I wrote about The Catcher in the Rye and the concept of certain books being “gateway drugs” that turn you onto reading at a young, impressionable age. This post was prominently featured on the New York Times Paper Cuts blog, a very prestigious link. Donna Rifkin then quoted me in an article she wrote about Herman Wouk: “But the Wouk novels I found around our house were different. They were for me what blogger Patrick Brown on the Vroman’s Bookstore website has called “gateway drugs,” books that instigate a lifelong reading habit.” This article ran first in the Los Angeles Times, but was later syndicated in the Chicago Tribune and dozens of other major newspapers around the country. The post was written as an afterthought, simply my thoughts on a post written by the excellent blogger Anne Hudek at the Good Magazine book blog. It took me probably half an hour to write, and yet it is one of the five most viewed posts in our blog’s history (behind a podcast with David Sedaris and, randomly, that arbitrary list I made of the greatest living short story writers). It generated more exposure for the store than all of the advertisements we ran in local papers last year. I don’t think we sold a single copy of Catcher in the Rye as a result of the post, but again, that’s not the point. It was the best advertisement we ran all year, and it was completely free.

There’s another lesson hidden in my Catcher in the Rye post – in order to blog well, you have to read other blogs. This is really one of the only ironclad laws of the blogosphere. A blog is part of a conversation, not a broadcasting device. Listen to what other bloggers are saying, what the people in your community are talking about, and what issues are important to them. The chances are that your customers have blogs where they are talking about your store. What are they saying? Is there a way you can participate in a discussion with them? Ann has compiled an excellent and very comprehensive blogroll of bookstore blogs right here on this site. To that, I would add that you should actively participate in the neighborhood blogs for your area (I’ve been interviewed by the local blog for our area of Pasadena, and I comment on other local blogs). These are your customers, and this is an excellent way to “market” to them in a friendly, non-intrusive way that will enhance their opinions of your store.

To conclude, I thought I’d recommend some excellent blogs for those who might not be all that experienced in the blogosphere. If you read these blogs, as well as the blogs that are more specific to your city, town, or region, you’ll be going a long way toward making your store’s blog better.

• Maud Newton. This is a book blog written by Maud Newton. It is both highly literary and very personal. If you don’t know Maud Newton, you don’t really know book blogs.

• The Elegant Variation. A terrific, high-minded literary blog written by the LA-based writer Mark Sarvas.

• The Millions. Mentioned above, an excellent group literary and culture blog.

• Jacket Copy. This is the book blog of the LA Times. About a year ago, they hired the excellent Carolyn Kellog to be their lead blogger, and their blog has really taken off since then. I think they’re a little bit ahead of even the New York Times blog Paper Cuts at this point.

• Kottke.org. A great site for all that’s right about the internet. Written by Jason Kottke, this isn’t a book specific site, but he references books quite a bit. Always useful for inspiration.

• The Morning News. This is a great site that aggregates links from around the web twice a day.

• Boing Boing. Written by a team of bloggers, this is the premier culture blog on the web, in my opinion.

• Author blogs. These are excellent sources of links for upcoming events. Occasionally, an author will have a really terrific blog that stretches beyond updates about their tour (Tod Goldberg and Julie Klam are both great examples of this).