Building trust networks to promote authors and books

In the past year or so we have coordinated two virtual book tours (sometimes known as "blog book tours") for authors publishing their books with our friends and alliance partners WME Books (our first virtual book tour for author Susan L. Reid was held back in December 2007; there was also a recent tour for author Sybil Stershic). One of the challenges in justifying the time and expense of these endeavors for publishers is defining a return on investment.  Admittedly, they involve a substantial time commitment by the author and the cost to the publisher of sending out books and coordinating the tour (or hiring someone else to do so). Of course, you might say that the only ROI that matters is whether there was a marked increase in sales as a result of the tour. These tours and similar uses of social media tools to market a new book or author may not always lead to an immediate influx in sales of the book itself; however, there are other, intangible returns that should be considered. For example, Susan's book Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Journey to Business Success was a finalist in the Business category for a 2008 Indie Book Award and I hope that her tour had some small part (very small part) to play.

I've been searching for ways to articulate what drives these intangible returns; to show how reviews of the books in the participating blogs may have had an impact.  Perhaps one outcome is that they are building a trust network or at least tapping into one. In addressing the controversy of whether blogs can fill the void left as print book reviews in the mainstream media continue to disappear, PersonaNonData blog addressed this possibility, writing:

[W]e are beginning to see the development of trust networks. As consumers of information we are starting to build our own networks of people and entities we rely on to support everything from our political philosophy to our choice in vacation spot. Reading falls squarely into that paradigm and it no longer matters whether a book review is produced to the standard of the LA Times or The NYTimes book section (and many blog reviews do), what matters is the impact the review has on a purchase decision. Those interested in reading are finding bloggers that they "trust" (even of the blogspot variety, a comment which baffles me), and these reviews do indeed "adequately" fill the void created by the demise of some of the larger newspaper reviews sections.

You are also seeing these trust networks arise within the "bookshelf" social networks like GoodReads, Shelfari and LibraryThing, as well as the networks that form through social networking sites and services such as Facebook (which includes some applications that allow people to share what they are reading and offers reviews by other members) and Twitter.

Another similar concept or component of these networks are "trust agents," which Chris Brogan (who is writing a book on the subject with Julien Smith) posits are “people who use the web in a very human way to build influence, reputation, awareness, and who can translate that into some kind of business value."

With a virtual book tour or blog book tour, if you carefully select and secure participation by bloggers who have built a network in the niche filled by the book or author, you can tap into that network of trust and, you hope, provide them a thing they have been searching for. Again PersonaNonData hits it:

What is relevant is what the opinion/review/recommendation means to the consumer. Someone yelling over the back fence to their neighbor that they really liked The Corrections is a "review". And that's synonymous with replying to the Facebook "what are you doing" by typing "I'm reading The Corrections and I really hate it".

The reviews and other content in a virtual book tour are a type of "hey, you should buy this book" being thrown over the virtual fence by a friend.  In the online world where these networks (and networks of networks) are being built, the argument that blog book reviews are not up to the "standards" of those found in the New York Times or other mainstream media misses the point, which is putting people in touch with books (or CDs or what have you...) that will fill their needs, whatever they may be.