On Web, A Most Novel Approach

For some established icons such as E.L. Doctorow, John Irving or Toni Morrison, the established round of reviews and readings at major festivals is promotion enough. For pop-culture mainstays like Grisham, Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, fans are primed and waiting for their next efforts.

Many other authors -- the media personalities, the pundits, the politicians, the self-help gurus -- "are actually selling their book long before they sell the book," says Richard Pine, a literary agent for three decades and co-founder of InkWell Management. These people, he says, are establishing who they are and what they have to say and are building an audience years before they actually have a book on the shelves.

This reader familiarity is the biggest factor in sales, according to repeated studies carried out by Hildick-Smith's firm. About 60 percent of respondents in surveys say the decisive factor in their decision to purchase a book is that they are already fans of the author.

But most authors are much more like Corrigan. Or, say, Monica Holloway.

The Los Angeles-based mom got good reviews for her first book, a 2007 memoir called "Driving With Dead People." Her second, "Cowboy and Wills," about her autistic son and his dog, is coming out this month. She's hired a consultant to help with Internet publicity. She's got her own Web site (which she pays for), hired a company to put together a trailer for the book, and commissioned someone to write background music for it. She's worked hard to make sure the red on the Web site matches the red on the book cover, ensuring a professional appearance. She's started blogging on the Web site of her publisher, Simon and Schuster, and is networking to set up book club appearances.

"It's all Internet, Internet, Internet," she says of the promotional process. "It's crazy, you emerge from this place of solitude in writing and then switch into the hot glare of 'market yourself now!' It's very uncomfortable, and you try to get past it with some sort of sophistication."

Book trailers are one of the newest promotional outlets. Everybody's got them, little video commercials for their books, something like movie trailers. Grisham's are 20 seconds; Corrigan's is about two minutes.

John McWeeny, chief operating officer at TurnHere Inc., a media production company based in San Francisco, has seen his company make "hundreds and hundreds" of these videos since it got into the business in 2006. He's hired mostly by publishing companies, he says, but a bargain-basement video for a writer working solo would cost about $2,000.

"We're not shooting talking heads in studios," he says. "We're capturing a story about the author, often on a location relevant to the content of the book. It's a way to convey the meaning of the book in moving images and sound . . . and relative to the cost of a tour, it's extremely inexpensive."

So all these shiny things that go fast are really fun to produce, and some are even fun to watch. But do they move units any better than the old-fashioned author signings in a local bookstore? Do they help a book sell more copies, or merely keep pace with others in the marketplace?

Nobody really knows, a range of publishers and industry watchers say. There is not a clear-cut means of connecting Web site traffic, say, to results in sales, and some experts warn new authors not to go overboard.

"There's so much you can do for free in Web promotion that it's just crazy," says Christopher Jackson, executive editor at Spiegel and Grau. "There's been a lot of money wasted in publishing on slickly produced author Web sites that, in the end, really didn't lead anywhere."

Annik LaFarge, a prominent Web site designer based in New York, works with high-profile authors such as Mitch "Tuesdays With Morrie" Albom to help them stay in touch with their fans.

"I get calls several times a week from writers asking me to help them with their projects, but I encourage a lot of them not to do that much," she says. "Unless you have the time and money to invest in it and do new things with the site and keep filing new content, it may not be worth it. . . . The main problem is the cacophony of the Internet. It's difficult to make any sort of impression at all."

Pine, the literary agent, says his best advice to authors is still "write the best book you possibly can." After that, he says, put your name and face out there, no matter the odds. He names Stephen King as "the king of taking a chance on things digital," and salutes Corrigan's seat-of-the-pants success story.

"If you don't try it, you don't know if it will work," he says. "Her videos could have not worked just as easily as it turned out they did. But she got out there, threw herself in the game and look what happened."