The value of a blog post for book promotion

Morris Rosenthal, author of the book Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts , writes about the effect that the viral replication of its incredible flowcharts, across the internet, had on actual sales. Our own post was here a few days ago . The FonerBooks website received approximately 90,000 extra visitors for the week, who downloaded some 14 GB worth of material. Our $10/month hosting service stood firm under the load and continued to perform amongst the top 10% of web servers, and I haven’t been contacted about any overage charges on bandwidth yet. His referrer chart shows 24k visitors from Gizmodo, 9k from Lifehacker, 7k from BBG, and then 4k from Google’s feeds. URL shorteners obscure the origin of some visitors. Of these visitors, however, only a tiny fraction turn into sales. Most venues credited Morris and linked to his site or the book’s Amazon page, others did not. Bloggers tend to link to the blog they read about it instead of Morris’ website. About 25,000 of the visits went directly to the PDF version of the charts. Nor is it the first time the charts have “gone viral.” Like anything on the Internet of great general usefulness, it gets periodically rediscovered. “The funny thing is that I launched my viral book promotion blitz SIX YEARS AGO, in 2003!” he adds. Read Rosenthal’s post for an exhaustive rundown of what happens to your work — and your book’s success — when it infects the blogosphere . The bottom line seems to be that benefits are real but small, at least for authors of technical works: if you aim for viral promotion, encourage links to places people can buy it, but don’t pay professional marketers to organize viral/free stuff for you. Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts: Troubleshooting PC Hardware Problems from Boot Failure to Poor Performance, Revised Edition (Paperback) [Amazon]

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The value of a blog post for book promotion