Sunday, May 20, 2012
Can blogging increase book sales? Uh, no.
Hi readers and writers,
Yesterday, I moderated a panel on "Blogging to Increase Sales" at the Biographers' International Conference, held this year at University of Southern California. My panelists were Beverly Gray of Beverly in Movieland blog and author of Roger Corman, An Unauthorized Life; Scott Martelle, author of Detroit: A Biography; and Mark Sarvas of the famous literary blog, The Elegant Variation, and the novel Harry, Revised. Each of the panelists agreed that blogging doesn't produce a noticeable spike in book sales. NO, OUR TITLE IS WRONG!
What blogging does is to provide a platform, a way to connect with many potential readers interested in your subject, and a road to publication. These are all valuable services, but not ones that directly link to sales. Yet, the audience still was interested and eager to learn the ins and outs of blogging, how much, how often, how tantalizing, how snarky, how you-relevant, how historical, how up-to-the-minute, how well written? We discussed all that and more. Like the rest of the workshops at this super meeting, it was well worth attending.
I recommend the conference next year and into the future if you're interested in writing about lives or even if you will only use biographical material in passing in your writing. A lot of the sessions were more general than just about biography.