Journal Entry
Early Reviews
In the comments to an early Sly Mongoose review, I was asked by Ken of Neth Space:
I’m curious about what you think about reviews going live so far in advance of publication. I know that some like PW and Kirkus influence things like library orders and such. But with a blogger/fan review may have a better chance of actually influencing sales if the book has been released (at least this was Cory Doctorow’s conclusion in his recent Locus article). Or do you think that is offset by the building of pre-publication buzz for your novels.
As far as I can tell, there is no right or wrong answer here, just opinions (unless someone has some hard numbers associated with a marketing study). I’m really just curious to see how authors feel about this.
Cory had a great point about when to post books due to people not preordering, but I am in a position where I think early buzz is good. Plus, BoingBoing isn’t a book review blog, it’s a general interest technophile/interestingthingophile blog, different audience and different patterns are probable.
Sly Mongoose is getting early buzz thanks to early reviews, friends, and people reading it ahead of time and talking about it. Ragamuffin I hardly passed around much ahead of time, it was in a finished form only just before it was printed, and when I finally got my crap together to get ARCs and copies out to bloggers, it was on or after publication. As a result, I can see search traffic about the book peak 4 months after publication in my search logs, and even then it was a slow spreader after that, with the book disappearing off shelves quickly at the three month mark, and then becoming of interest with this sudden last minute Nebula nomination and Prometheus nomination almost 8 months later.
One of the reasons I send out ARCs and try to get my name out to bloggers and non-usual book review places is that I’m trying to supplement the usual process of magazines/newspapers/traditional media, and so I think one of the things that can’t hurt is to let the bloggers talk about the books as they encounter them, not try to replicate the other route, but try something different.
All the early readers of Sly Mongoose have been totally psyched by it, and I want to keep that energy going, not still it and wait for the appropriate time.
So I really don’t particularly mind when the reviews come out now we’re getting close to publication. We’ve got about 9 or so weeks to go, please, by all means, don’t be shy about talking about the book…
Filed under the topic Journal on May 28th 2008 at 1:42 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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1. neth on May 28th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Thanks for the interesting response. I tend to also believe that the building of buzz prior to release is beneficial. Of course I’m also a fan, and the novelty of reading a book early wears off rather quickly, especially when looking for someone else who’s read the book to discuss it. I often struggle with how far in advance I’ll read a book provided though lately I’ve been busy enough that it hasn’t been too much of a problem.
2. Chris Gerrib on May 28th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Well, my Sly Mongoose review is done, but I’ll let TCM Reviews have it first, so it will probably be up next week. Then I’ll go to the other blog sources.
3. Erin on May 28th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Interesting points all around. I tend to agree re generating buzz based on what I’ve observed so far with Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds, but it remains to be seen how that will pan out in actual book sales.
4. Mike on May 28th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
As a librarian I typical prefer blog reviews to those of “official” publications. A stack of RSS feeds is certainly preferable to a stack of magazines sitting on my desk. Typically speaking most blogs still cover more ground “genre” wise than PW or Kirkus.
5. Thomas M. Wagner on May 28th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
I’d have had a review up for SM by now, but for some odd reason I’ve had a hell of a time prying a copy out of your publicist at Tor, who is usually very easy to work with. She says she’s sent me some more stuff this week, so I’ll have to wait to see what the package contains. Tor can be very erratic about what ARCs they send out, I’ve found. I’ve already gotten Ed Lerner’s Fools’ Experiments, a November title, but there is a lot of recent stuff I don’t get unless I email them so much they finally just send it to get me to shut up. C’mon, publicists, you’re supposed to publicize!
6. Tobias Buckell on May 28th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Thomas, I think we’re low on ARCs because Sly is getting a lot of requests (like when Vinge’s last book came out I couldn’t get my hands on an ARC… not that I’m Vinge popular, mind you, but… you know what I mean?)…
Kick me out your snail mail, I have a couple copies left (literally, 2). I’ll make sure you get hooked up.
7. Tobias Buckell on May 28th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Mike, that’s really interesting!
8. Chris (The Book Swede) on May 29th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Nice question, Neth! And good answer, Tobias! I think early buzz does help, but I’m also aware that sometimes it can be a bit early to work.
I don’t think the early buzz for The Steel Remains will hurt it one bit, though, and the people like Pat (Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist) and Robert (Fantasy Book Critic) who review it nearer the release date will only remind people of the earlier buzz
If a book, like Rothfuss’, makes a successful post-pub buzz in the US then it’s bound to do pretty well when it reaches the UK.
~Chris
The Book Swede
PS: I’ve used “buzz” too many times and made little sense! I also was interested to see that some librarians prefer blog reviews. Makes me happy…