D.S. Leach Consulting, Inc.

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. 

Where did our blog go? It's right here....

Posting to this blog has been quite a problem what with the day job in legal publishing, working on my Jazz@Rochester blog, posting occasionally on behalf of a group I'm involved with that is seeking to raise funds for students of dance at SUNY Brockport, and the occasional post on a newer law technology blog on which I'm a co-author.  We thought that it might be a good idea to take the blog off the front page and move it somewhere else (among other changes to the D.S. Leach Consulting site).  We hope to be able to post more often when we have something to share or that won't fit in our other online publishing outlets (they seem to be growing).   

Touring the blogosphere . . . another virtual book tour under way

At the beginning of the week, we embarked on coordinating another blog book tour on behalf of our friends at WME Books and their author Sybil F. Stershic, who has written this wonderful book  Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care, which lays out from the inside-out, how to build loyalty, increase employee satisfaction, and create a winning team of motivated workers who in turn motivate your customers.

Over this week and spanning into next week, the tour includes the following wonderful bloggers:

• On June 1st, Kevin Burns posted a review in Burns Blogs Attitude.
• On June 3rd, Lisa Rosendahl posted a review of Taking Care on her blog HR Thoughts, using these eleven words to sum it up: "The way your employees feel is the way your customers feel."
• On June 4th, Chris Bailey posted a review of Sybil's book on his blog Bailey Work/Play: The Alchemy of Soulful Work
• On June 5th, Toby Bloomberg of the Diva Marketing blog will be posting an interview with Sybil.
• On June 6th, Becky Carroll, the blogger behind Customers Rock! will be posting a review and the results of an interview with Sybil.
• On June 9th, Paul Hebert will be posting a review on the blog Incentive Intelligence.
• On June 10, 2008, Phil Gerbyshak will be posting an interview on the blog Slacker Manager.

By the way, you can check out the tour page by clicking on the widget that I built and installed in the lower left panel. 

This time the tour is much more confined than the one we did in December.  Seven bloggers over a bit more than a week.  It's going quite smoothly and there has been some wonderful content already.

Just what is a Virtual Book Tour? We're finding out . . .

Not every author wishes or is able to do an expensive book tour, driving or flying around the country promoting their book at appearances and signings at bookstores and elsewhere. Out of that fact was born the "virtual book tour" (also known as "blog book tour"), which has the author and his or her book traveling from blog to blog, writing a post here and being reviewed in another post there during a defined period of time.

Our company is helping our business associates WME Books with a virtual book tour (VBT) for a book published by WME in November. This is our first foray into the "virtual book tour" and it is a work in progress, but quite exciting as we work through the process and make it work for this particular author and book. Dr. Reid's book, Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Journey to Business Success, is about reaching inside yourself to discover an inner samurai—a warrior that will guide you on your journey to entrepreneurial success. Primarily written for women entrepreneurs going through changes in their life (Susan calls them "accidental preh-hers"), the book is a mystical, informative and inspiring exploration of that concept.

The virtual book tour concept has been around for a few years and it is a great way to get an author's work in front of thousands of new potential readers and, hopefully, drivr sales of their book. By researching the book and its author, we have identified a number of bloggers who focus their writing on subjects that dovetail with that of Discovering Your Inner Samurai and asked them to participate. Soon, those who have joined the tour will be participating in one of several ways (although they are not the only ways that are possible), such as:

• Writing a review of the book and publishing it on their blog,
• Doing an interview of Dr. Reid via email or by phone and posting it in written form
• Doing a podcast interview of the author and posting it, or
• Inviting the author do a guest post on their blog about the book or its subject.

Over a number of days, we'll schedule their posts to appear and will link to them from multiple places to maximize the effect. In the left panel, you'll see a draft of a "badge" I developed for Dr. Reid's VBT. You'll see that on some of the other sites that WME maintains. Click on that and you find yourself on the VBT's page on the WME Books blog and follow the tour from there.

Building Relationships One Link at a Time

Our friend Seth over at Cup 'O Books recently did a very kind thing for us here at D.S. Leach Consulting, he wrote a post on his blog letting his readers know about us and what we do.  But there's more to the story than the nice act of one of our friends, because why we know Seth and what he did provides an instructive lesson in what blogs can do for a business. 

As you may know, Greg is somewhat (the irony is intended) of a jazz fan; Seth is as well.  It is unlikely that their paths would have crossed, even in the small town environs of Rochester, except a few years back both Greg and Seth discovered each other while blogging the 2005 Rochester International Jazz Festival (and there was more than Seth...there was also Ken).  It's a typical situation in blogging.   You do a search to see what other people are writing about something of interest, in this case the RIJF, and find that there are others doing what you're doing.  You let others know what you've found and a network and conversation starts.  In 2006, we  met in person at one of the first shows of the RIJF and with Ken have seen a few shows around town since that one.  We have some plans about blogging the 2007 RIJF that we'll be talking about soon, I hope.  Dianna and I saw Seth and Ken again when John Nugent played recently at the Grille at the Strathallan and talked a bit about D.S. Leach Consulting.

What I'm trying to say here is that a blog (in fact several) has helped to forge a relationship in the real world by introducing two people who have common interests and now we are doing what we can to help each other out in our businesses, as well as going to hear some great jazz together.  In addition to being a teacher and writing his posts on books, reading and life in a personal and always compelling voice, Seth has a book consulting and book buying and selling business that you can link to through the Cup 'O Books site.  In the not to distant future, I hope to be interviewing Seth as part of my work with WME Books on the A-Ha! Authors Helping Authors blog (and I have my eye on one of Seth's recent posts for posting to that blog as well).  This conversation is just beginning....who knows where it will lead!