Booksellers Blog

This morning, an article from The Associated Press crossed my computer monitor: Forget stores, Book fairs are enjoying profits. Book fairs are a lot of work I know that many independent bookstores do book fairs, using various models. And I know that other stores would like to do them, but can’t justify the labor and [...]

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 [...]

I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz about Twitter.  It’s the new “shiny object” in the social media space. And you may have noticed that I did not list Twitter as one of the “tools” in the online marketing “toolbox” in my earlier post. In fact, I deliberately stayed away from any mention of Twitter–because while [...]

As I was writing yesterday’s post about determining what it is that you want to achieve, I kept hearing a little voice in my head. “Ann,” it said, “the goal is just to sell more books. ” I’d ignore the voice, and start typing another line. “Increase attendance at author events.” “No,” the voice said, [...]

As I was reading my RSS feeds this morning, I came upon a reference to an October 2008 report from Rubicon Consulting titled: Online Communities and their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril.. Two key findings from the report appear in the introductory blog post titled “Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth [...]

There is much discussion about ROI, or “Return on Investment” for social media activities such as blogging. For booksellers, the investment is primarily time — a resource that we all know is too scarce.  In a later post, I’ll write about various ways of measuring ROI, but I think that there is also a benefit [...]

Relationships, and content — that’s how. You hear the term “Social Media” a lot these days. To most people, that’s a vague term that has something to do with the internet and things called MySpace or Facebook. Some people think it’s a fad, or irrelevant to anyone over the age of 20. This week provided [...]