Recently, I blogged about The Ugly Side of Online Marketing, when the debate over online marketing promotions heated up between virtual book tour promoters and an anonymous author at Backspace.

The author thought online marketing would make a big difference with sales. But what the author  told readers is this:

The author's article pinged my curiosity. I wanted more details: what social networks the author used, when they used them, how they used them, time spent online, who helped develop the online strategy, if the publisher was an active participant in promotions, were reasonable goals and objectives set…

Working anonymously through Karen Dionne, a founder of Backspace – the author agreed to share more details about this online promotional experience.

It is with great pleasure – and special thanks to the author – that I share this interview with you today.

Tell us about your online marketing strategy for your last book. Did you blog, podcast, guest blog, blog at Amazon, social network, Stumble, Digg, etc?

I blogged, guest blogged, blogged at Amazon, podcasted, was interviewed by books bloggers and book review websites, joined Facebook, and Twittered. I also joined social networking sites and writers organizations associated with my genre. Some of these featured my novel in their monthly newsletters; others featured my blog posts or articles on their website pages. I ran contests, contracted for M.J. Rose’s AuthorBuzz service (with which I was very satisfied), and did direct mailings to my personal email list of over 5,000 people.

I concentrated all of this effort in the month my book released and the two immediately following. The result is a fairly extensive Internet presence. If you Google my name, the first five pages of hits are exclusively me. Google my name coupled with the name of my novel, and you’ll get 24 pages of hits. Google my last name alone, and you’ll find me on the second page, superseded only by four very famous people with whom I share a last name. That’s a lot of exposure.

How did your online efforts work in conjunction with your publisher's PR/marketing efforts?

My publisher printed an impressive number of advance reader copies, and my in-house publicist sent these and follow-up galleys to reviewers, both print and online. My publisher also paid for front table placement at major bookstores in the United States and Canada. 

Because of the favorable bookstore placement and excellent distribution my novel was going to receive, the goal of my online promotion campaign was to do everything I could to make both my name and the name of my novel widely known, so that when people saw my book in stores, they’d be more likely to pluck it off the shelves.

My publisher did no direct PR for the book that I’m aware of – certainly nothing that resulted in any press. All of the interviews, articles, and features both online and in print were obtained by me – a situation that is not at all uncommon, I’d like to add.

Why did you feel like it was important to do an online marketing campaign? Did you consider hiring a service to do it, or was the plan to do it yourself?

I felt I could reach many more people using the Internet than I could in the real world. Also, I’ve been building an Internet presence for 10 years, and am very well-connected in an area that’s peripherally related to my book. I know how to use the Internet, and believed I could do an effective job of promoting my book online without hiring a publicist.

Do you feel like you went into your online plan with reasonable outcome expectations? Why or why not?

This is a difficult question to answer. If my book had sold spectacularly, then I’d say yes, my expectations were reasonable because they were fulfilled. If the book had sold poorly, I’d answer no. But the truth is, there’s no way to measure the effectiveness of an online campaign against actual sales, so it’s impossible to say whether my expectations were reasonable or not. There were disappointments, but these were because I didn’t fully understand the limitations of online promotion.

 How many hours did you spend a day working on online promotion? How did that compare to time you normally spend online?

For three months, all of the time I normally spent online and more was focused on Internet promotion; 3 to 8 hours a day. Much of that time was spent writing articles and guest blog posts, and answering interview questions. I’m acutely aware that whatever is posted to the Internet remains forever, and so I invested many hours crafting my answers. This interview, for example, took me 9 hours to write. That probably seems excessive, given that it’s anonymous, but these are still my words, and as a writer, it’s important to me that they accurately express my thoughts.

Do you feel like you spent too much or too little time promoting online?

 I definitely spent too much time promoting online. I know this because after two months, I was so burned out and exhausted that even now, months later, I still have to force myself to answer my email. During that period, family time suffered, and my writing time was non-existent. Some might argue that this is the price of having a book published; that authors need to suck it up and accept it as part of the deal. I agree, but with limits.

Besides spending too much time promoting online, much of that time was wasted by spending it in the wrong places. After the initial flurry of promotional activity died down, I was able to track the outcome of individual interviews. The results were shocking. After an interview posted to a website claiming thousands of unique visitors per day, exactly one person followed the link to my website. If this is at all typical, then I can only conclude that the results from the smaller sites were even more dismal.

I know some will say I’m missing the point; that the objective of all this activity is to build the author’s long-term Internet presence and establish a brand. But to a newly published author, “online promotion’ is synonymous with “sales.” It has to be. If the author’s first book doesn’t sell well, there won’t be another, and the author won’t need to worry about their “brand.”

Did any of it work for you? If so, in what way?

The bright spot in my Internet marketing campaign came when I discovered there are websites from which the content is shared automatically via RSS and other feeds. The problem with the book blogs and reader-oriented websites I had been focusing on is that they are essentially dead ends. Once content is posted, it doesn’t go anywhere. It just sits for a while, then disappears.

By contrast, articles and blog posts made at the major online magazines and newspapers show up at dozens of other websites within minutes. The content I placed at these resulted in a much wider spread. With a single, well-thought-out article, I was able to reach a very large audience of potential book buyers who were already interested in the topic of my novel.

Sites with this kind of lateral spread are a much more effective marketing tool for authors than bookcentric blogs, and I wish I had realized their importance sooner. If the Internet is a large city and the author a businessperson with a product to sell, these websites are billboards at major freeway interchanges. I spent far too much time canvassing quiet residential neighborhoods putting up posters on telephone poles.

You recently wrote an anonymous column for Backspace titled, "Internet Schminternet: How Authors Are Being Scammed by the Lure of Online Book Promotion." Why did you feel like it was important to write this?

I wrote that article in response to a comment from a publisher claiming they were helping their authors by teaching them how to market themselves on the Internet. When I read that, I saw red. The Internet is not a panacea that’s going to cure publishing’s ills. Authors are already shouldering the lion’s share of promotion, and I hated the idea of publishers putting even more on their authors when no one even knows if Twittering and social network sites sell books.

I wanted to urge authors to think carefully about online promotion, to question what they were being told. Don’t do what everyone else is doing just because everyone says you should be doing it. Promote your book, definitely, because in most cases, your publisher is going to do very little. But authors need to decide in advance how much they can reasonably manage, and hold to it. They need to work smarter, not harder, and not get sucked into trying to do it all.

I used the word “scammed” in the article’s title deliberately because it’s a provocative word that I knew would get people’s attention. If authors don’t stumble over that word, they’ll see I’m not saying authors are being scammed by Internet promotion per se – just that if they buy into the idea that creating a massive Internet presence will translate to sales, they’re being taken in as I was by the lure of Internet promotion.

Why keep your name anonymous here and for the Backspace post?

Anonymity gives me the freedom to speak honestly, without concern about how what I say might reflect on my novel or on my publisher. I know that choosing anonymity dilutes the impact, but being able to speak the truth as I see it is more important to me.

Do you think if more authors spoke out – name and all – that it would help publishers improve the way their publicists deal with authors, or how these publicists handle their jobs?

I don’t think the problem is a lack of desire on the part of publicists to work with the authors who are assigned to them. Publicists are overworked, and that situation is only going to get worse due to recent cutbacks and layoffs. Authors rising up en masse and saying “Wait a minute; you have to stop doing this and do that instead” just isn’t going to have much effect. The forces at work in publishing right now are beyond the both authors’ and publicists’ control.

I do think it’s important for new authors to understand that it’s highly unlikely their in-house publicist will help them promote their book. I know that sounds like cynicism talking; I didn’t believe it, either, until after my novel published, even though my agent warned me in advance this was the case.

No one at the publishing houses will admit to this situation, of course, and so editors and publicists regularly make promises to their authors they know they can’t keep. (Or in the words of a bestselling author on this subject: “They lie.”)

Whether authors compensate by hiring an outside publicist or do the work themselves is up to them. Either way, it’s critical for them to understand that relying on their assigned publicist to publicize their book is a mistake.

If you could change five things about how your publisher does publicity, what would they be?

1.  Communicate
2.  Communicate
3.  Communicate
4.  Communicate
5.  Communicate

If my publicist had been up front with me about what she was and was not going to do for my book, together we could have planned a strategy that made the most of our efforts. I could have made wiser decisions as to how and where I’d spend my promotion budget, and there would have been fewer missed opportunities due to a lack of communication. Instead, my in-house publicist was at best disingenuous; at worst, dishonest. She stopped answering my email updates 6 weeks after my novel published. I knew she was busy, but an acknowledgment need only take a few seconds. If she was no longer actively working for me, she should have told me. Cutting me off without explanation was not only unproductive, it just wasn’t right.

As an author, is it important to you to use the Internet to brand yourself and your work, perhaps without looking so much at sales numbers as your professional presence online?

My answer to this question might bring the wrath of many on my head, but I think this idea of authors building an Internet presence is overrated. Whether a Google search yields 5 pages of hits or 30 simply doesn’t matter. No one’s going to Google your name or the name of your book unless they’ve already heard of you. When they do search for you, naturally it’s essential that they arrive at a meaningful destination. But 9 times out of 10, the link they choose from the list of hits will be your website. As long as your website includes links to important reviews and interviews, shows up prominently in search engines, and offers a means to contact you, that’s all that’s needed. The rest is fluff.

I want to pull a quote from your post. …An Internet presence doesn't sell books. Books sell books – good books, that is – books which can only be written by creative, talented authors who are not wearing themselves out with online promotion. It's books that create a fan base and build authors' careers, not blog posts or Twitter feeds…. If you are not using online media for promotion, how do readers find you – especially if your publisher isn't doing a lot to help you out?

Again, I want to emphasize that I’m not saying authors shouldn’t promote online – just that they should be smart about how much they do and where they do it. If an author enjoys Twittering and hanging out at Facebook, I’m not denigrating that. And for authors with small publishers, or self-published authors, all forms of Internet promotion by necessity take on a much more important role.

That said, it’s easy for Internet-savvy authors to forget that there are thousands of book buyers who aren’t online. Sales are made in bookstores every day to readers who’ve never gone to the author’s website, never read an online interview, never saw the book trailer.

New York Times bestselling author Brad Meltzer tells a story about how the Barnes and Noble national sales representative once asked him to guess which Barnes and Noble store sold the highest number of Brad’s books. Brad guessed Washington D.C., a logical choice, since the bulk of his novels are political thrillers. Nope, said the Barnes and Noble rep. New York City? Brad guessed next, reasoning that as the center of the publishing industry, and with its large population, New York must be a big book-buying town. Wrong again, said the rep.

The answer: The Barnes and Noble store that sells the most Brad Meltzer books is located in a small town in Florida, just down the street from the furniture store where Brad’s mother works.

The majority of book buyers still discover new authors the way they always did: by word of mouth, and my experience proves this true. Even though I’ve stopped actively promoting online and my novel is no longer on the front tables at bookstores, I’m still getting emails from new fans. They heard about my book from someone who read it, liked it, and thought they should read it too. These new fans write to say how much they loved my novel, then tell me it’s now on their recommended reading list.

That’s how authors build the fan base which will ultimately ensure their career – by writing books that people read, enjoy, and recommend to others. It’s not quick, and it’s not easy, but it’s the only form of book promotion that truly works.