The workshop was on what authors need to do to survive, and hopefully thrive, in this tough marketplace. And one of the things the presenter thought they needed to do was to have a strong web presence.

To support her theory, she threw out some stats that, frankly, shocked me.

If you click on this link and go to slides four-seven, you will see some interesting figures. In slide four, check out the online advertising figures for seven major publishers.

If you go to the bottom of that chart you will see that buyers of adult books are made aware of the books they buy, most often through bookstore real estate. Those front tables and end caps are purchased by publishers at a pretty hefty price. And it seems to be a good plan for those publishers to keep paying for those displays. They sell books.

But now go up and look at the advertising section. Note that online advertising is worth more than TV, radio, and newspaper advertising combined.

Now compare the lines that say Book review (not online) and Online: book review. Does anyone else find this interesting?

Now look at one more line. Recommendation from a friend.

We book bloggers are in a position to sell books. Our blog visitors are our friends. Publishers want us to review and recommend their books.

Lately there has been a lot of rumbling in the kidlitosphere about bloggers getting paid to review books and about blog tours and blog promotions hurting sales rather than helping them. I’m going to post some more thoughts on some of this over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, look at the next three slides on that slide show I linked to above and then answer me one question–if you were a publisher and Natasha Maw offered you a targeted banner ad to run on her blog, would you buy it? Go look at Natasha’s website grade and consider her traffic. Look at her content and read her comments.

Publishers have shrinking marketing budgets. They are going to start looking at stats and comments and targeting their online dollars more carefully. No blogger needs to worry about that. If you don’t want to spend the time on your blog that Natasha spends on hers, no one is going to make you. If the publishers stop sending you books to review, you can still buy books to blog about or get them from the library. There is nothing wrong with just having fun and fellowship discussing books with other book lovers.

But if you build a following like Natasha’s, and if you want to sell advertising, who should complain about that?

Why should PW be allowed to sell advertising space to publishers while bloggers are looked down upon for doing the same thing? Why should bloggers be accused of lying in their reviews if they sell advertising to publishers?

The only part of the equation that I think might change in the future is this part:

Are bloggers paid to participate in the blog tour?

No — paying anyone to cover any books would be unethical.  (Paying for ads is a perfectly ethical practice, of course, but with PR, coverage — good or bad — should come free).   To clarify — since this can get confusing – with blog tours (or with radio or TV tours), publishing houses aren’t paying bloggers (or radio or TV hosts) to cover a book; we’re paying someone to schedule the tour:

I do agree that it is unethical for publishers to pay bloggers to review their books. I do, however, know that reviewers for School Library Journal and PW and The Horn Book are paid. They don’t write their reviews for free. These magazines charge for advertising, but they do not charge for reviews. The magazines hire and pay their reviewers,  so the publishers don’t directly pay for reviews.

So if a group of bloggers banded together to create an online reviewing “magazine” they would expect to get paid and it wouldn’t be unethical for them to get paid. In that case, they would have to work like the print magazines. The blog review company would make money off the ads they ran and then the company would pay the reviewers they hired. The publishing company would not pay reviewers directly, and they would have to accept that some of their books would receive no reviews and others would receive less than stellar recommendations.

So while I think that most book bloggers will never get paid for their reviews, I do think that a few quality Internet sites will rise up and sell advertising and pay their reviewers.

The thing that makes the Internet so exciting and so unpredictable is that everyone can afford to publish here. What will set apart the bloggers that make money from the rest, will be quality of content and traffic. If you have an eye for setting up an attractive site that is easy to navigate and filled with great content, you are likely to rise to the top. You will build up a community of readers. We have some blogs on our tour that are in the top one percent of blogs (of all blogs in all genres)  in regards to traffic. Publishers are going to start looking at those numbers, I think. and start picking and choosing which blogs they send their advance reading copies to and which blogs they want to advertise with.

Not that we have to make money off our blogs. Blogs are fun and don’t have to make money. But for those who want to make money, I think more opportunities are going to open up.

It’s not really important that we connect with thousands of people. If we have a few favorite friends who come over and comment once in a while, we’re happy with that. Blogging, for me, anyway, is very satisfying even on the small blog I have that only has a handful of faithful readers. 

But here’s the thing–if you’re going to blog, why not blog well? If you’re going to take the time to write for an audience, why not do what you can to get your blog posts to the largest audience possible?

Alexa measures the traffic on something like thirty million blogs.  Thirty million.

OK several million of them are probably ones that someone started and abandoned right away. But of the twenty million that are left–how do you plan to stand out in such a crowd? How do you plan to connect with your intended audience? Have you got a plan for growing your blog traffic?

One way to figure out how to be more effective is to go to Website Grader and check out how you’re doing. Check your site against other blogs you like. And then work on the things it tells you to work on. If it dings you for too many images, ignore that if you want. Book blogs have images. It’s what we do. But pay attention to the google page ranking, to the DMOZ and yahoo directories and to the alexa traffic figures.

This blog has a grade of 93. I’m happy with that seeing as how we only had our first tour last August and I’ve not devoted a lot of energy into posting on the blog between tours. But I’m going to see if I can’t do one thing a week to improve my traffic. I figure if I submit my blogs to one directory a week, or if I work on meta tags, or links each week, I will be able to improve my rankings. We’ll see.

I’ll try to talk some in the coming weeks about how we can put meta tags into our posts and how we can improve our traffic ratings. I’m no expert, but I plan to research this a bit. If you come across any good articles on how to improve website traffic, feel free to leave a link for the rest of us.

Here is the fix if you want to make the tags work in Firefox as well as IE.

In your stylesheet template (at least it’s there in my WordPress blog, I don’t know where it is in any other blogs) you find the this:

* {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

and replace it with:

html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe,
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre,
a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code,
del, dfn, em, font, ins, kbd, q, s, samp,
small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var,
b, u, i, center,
dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li,
fieldset, form, label, legend,
table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
}

I have no idea why it works or what it all means. So use at your own risk. I did it and my blog didn’t disintegrate before my eyes. And, lo and behold, in Mozilla the hspace and vspace tags now work.

But I often see pictures with no vertical or horizontal space around them:

Blah, blah, blah…We spent about 24 hours in number two slot, and another day shuffling between two and three. Today we’re still showing on the page in the twelfth spot.Doesn’t Groovy just look like she’s on top of the world in that shot? Who cares that she wasn’t number one. Groovy knows the recognition will come when the time is right just as the swallows always come when the time is right.

But what I liked best about this tour was the amount of energy so many of you had. We had some great three-day posters, and even the one-day bloggers seemed to really like the book instead of just posting because they had to.

I’m glad because this book was lovingly crafted and it delivers on its promises.I’m happy to see at Amazon that it’s picking up a lot of positive reviews. If any of you want to copy and paste your reviews over at Amazon, btw, that’s a good way to help authors you like and it’s also a good way to attract people to your blog. You can set up a profile where you give your web page address. Then when people like your reviews they can click on you to find more of your stuff.

Here’s a picture with a little vspace and hspace:

Blah, blah, blah…We spent about 24 hours in number two slot, and another day shuffling between two and three. Today we’re still showing on the page in the twelfth spot.Doesn’t Groovy just look like she’s on top of the world in that shot? Who cares that she wasn’t number one. Groovy knows the recognition will come when the time is right just as the swallows always come when the time is right.

But what I liked best about this tour was the amount of energy so many of you had. We had some great three-day posters, and even the one-day bloggers seemed to really like the book instead of just posting because they had to.

I’m glad because this book was lovingly crafted and it delivers on its promises. I’m happy to see at Amazon that it’s picking up a lot of positive reviews. If any of you want to copy and paste your reviews over at Amazon, btw, that’s a good way to help authors you like and it’s also a good way to attract people to your blog. You can set up a profile where you give your web page address. Then when people like your reviews they can click on you to find more of your stuff.

If you want to have a little space between your picture and you text:

You add hspace=”15″ vspace=”15″ into your html. Hspace is for horizontal space and vspace is for vertical space and you can change 15 to whatever you want.

The code above looks like this:

<img src=”http://kidzbookbuzz.com/pictures/Swallows_c.jpg” alt=”swallows — fitzmaurice” hspace=”15″ vspace=”15″ width=”275″ height=”400″ align=”left” />

Easy as pie and I think it makes the post look less crowded.