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How do you write a blog about a book that is fiction? What will the subject of the blog be about? Is the blog going to give away the entire content of the book? There are alot of holes in your suggestion on “Why Publishers Should Blog.”

To write a blog about every single book a publishing house releases every single season is simply insane. Only a person not in the trenches and outside the publishing industry loop would suggest it.

Think about it, you would need someone to read every single book, then second, you need that same person to blog about the said book. A publishing house like Random would need thousands of dedicated readers and bloggers to do just that, it’s simply not economical (especially these days), since there is no science behind marketing books. There is a science for marketing blogs though, but most bloggers do it from the heart, they don’t get paid to market the things they talk about. Companies trying to use blogs to market their products will fail, even Googles corporate blog and Amazon’s are dogs.

Maybe it’s a great suggestion to the Movie industry, who spend millions on marketing for that first weekend, but like you have mentioned, publishers don’t put much behind books, it’s simple get it out there, and see if it’s a brick or hit.

There are many ways to market and promote a book to readers, and booksellers, and yes, blogging could be part of it, and could help greatly for a few titles, but to suggest a blog for every book, that’s just stirring up BS…

But let’s play with this another way. As a sort of finance person, I get the dollars and cents approach. Publishers aren’t, generally, running charities. They have to pay bills. So okay, bill paying. It seems to me that making your product attractive is a good way to increase sales. Because while I get the whole hit-based notion of profitability, it’s dependent on the hit. Those are hard to predict.

So you need to consider a more steady sort of revenue stream (also known as the Long Tail). That’s another topic.

However, the customer/producer dynamic has changed dramatically, and, as noted, publishers of all levels get the notion of SEO. Those that do it well are getting top results for author and title searches. And the average person doesn’t necessarily distinguish between various types of sites — my theory is that the reason most people don’t say they’re reading blogs is because they don’t know that the site they frequent is a “blog”.

Sorry, long-winded tonight. But my point is that as a top arrival destination for readers, it is incumbent upon the publisher to deliver the goods. I mean, it makes no sense at all if someone makes the effort to seek, find, and click through…only to find information about the book that is off-putting. Dollars and cents based businesses know that the way you sell to online audiences is not business as usual. They’re investing heavily (and sometimes badly) in social media strategies, but the fact that they get it to that degree is instructive.

So where are the publishers, a dollars and cents business, in this mix? I get back to the Cluetrain Manifesto. This sort of “make it worth my time” thinking didn’t start yesterday or last year.