Diary of a Mad Editor

An interesting item popped into my email earlier — sort of a press release about the forthcoming release of a new book in the House of Night Series, the latest in the teen vampire novel trend. The authors of the series, a mother-daughter writing duo are apparently going on major national book tour for the new book, Tempted. Since I’ve never read any of their books (just like I’ve never read Twilight), I don’t have a clue how many books in this series have appeared so far, but I’m told that the series has sold something like 3 million plus copies so far.

What I find interesting is that the email also contained a number of links to online promotional efforts including a facebook page, a sample chapter(although there was some problem with the website that caused my browser to crash)and a Youtube video:

Why is this interesting, you may ask? Well, I’m interested in it because it demonstrates to me how much the Internet has changed things. While I’m sure the publisher of this book took out the print ads and spent a certain amount of money on other forms of media advertising, publishers don’t have the budgets for the more traditional forms of marketing they used to back in the day so, given that fact, the dwinding influence of newspaper book arts sections, and the growing influence of the Internet on our lives, it’s not really that surprising that there’d be so much interest in promoting books — even likely bestsellers on social networking sites. What I wonder, though, is whether this sort of marketing is all that effective for books from largely unknown authors who haven’t previously sold millions of copies. A thing like this probably has a built-in audience with a fair amount of anticipation from devotees. But say Joe Schmoe wrote the Great American Novel — you think anyone would buy it because he had a fan page on Facebook? Any thoughts on that? Anyone out there who’s not a New York Times bestseller generating serious buzz translating into seriously righteous sales numbers (by "righteous" I mean more than just your family and facebook friends — and I’m only talking about fiction) using any of these networking sites?