Book Publishers: Learn From Digg, Yelp—Even Gawker

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Digg founder Kevin Rose is a master of promotional tours. Once he established his Diggnation as a popular weekly podcast, he took it on the road. He'd hold a Live Diggnation anywhere and lines would form around the block.

There's a strong payback for intimately connecting with local audiences. Promoting anything—be it a Web site or book—is like running for office; nothing takes the place of face-to-face interaction. And by giving up on book tours because they happen in the wrong venue, publishers are throwing away a powerful tool.

Create stars—don't just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren't very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher's brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

Sure, publishers would have to spend more on promotion. But because they're spending less on an advance—say, $50,000 for a lesser-known writer than the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) they'd spend on a star—they can afford the bigger promotional budget. "It's taken some time for publishers to recognize that a successful site is as strong a 'platform' as a magazine, newspaper, or TV gig," says Patrick Mulligan, my editor at Gotham.

Even better: Tie that rising star to a multi-book deal from the beginning. Then any promotion is an investment in those next two books. It's basically the record-label model, made cheaper and easier via the branding-power of the social Web.

Go electronic from the get-go.
You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.

That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic— even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.

This is as big a mindset change as it is a technology one. Many publishing houses just don't think about digital versions, relegating them to a few poor guys who work in a dungeon somewhere. Some publishers may want to force hardcover sales, but the music industry has learned the hard way: You can't control how people want to consume content in a digital age. Apple (AAPL) enshrined digital religion early on in its iTunes Music Store.

Make e-commerce even easier.
Yes, Amazon transformed how we shop for books. But the industry can go much further. Take the titles far beyond Amazon.com—through one-click widgets appended to blogs, Facebook pages, and other sites across the Web. Link these tools directly to PayPal and Google Checkout (GOOG). Think: one-click purchase, not one click takes you to Amazon.

Take these steps, book publishers, and stay vital.

How can book publishing better tap Web 2.0 tools? Share your ideas in the Reader Comments section below.

Lacy has been a business reporter for 10 years, most recently covering technology for BusinessWeek. Her book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, was published by Gotham Books in May 2008. She is also Silicon Valley host of Yahoo Finance's Tech Ticker.