DISQUS

What is a blog? The typical answer is that it is an online journal, but from a technical perspective, it is essentially a user interface (UI) for a website or a portion of a website. I believe there are dangers in trying to stretch the blog technology too far. The blog UI directs people’s attention to the newest information and discourages looking at older information. In addition, the blog UI encourages search engines to give preference to the newer posts. This works well for a journal, but it doesn’t work as well for other things.

The fact is that there was nothing to prevent us from posting works in progress on the Internet before. The important thing is being able to make money from the work we do. When we make content available for free, people are more likely to read what we have written, but that does not mean that they will feel the need to pay us for our efforts. Kindle doesn't change that. It is just another computing device that is connected to the Internet.

After the one for Dangerous Book for Boys, this video is a disappointment, but it is still better than many of the book promotion videos I have seen. Aside from the expense of creating a quality video, I think publishers using video to promote books is great. Those who can use it well will end up several steps ahead of the competition. Video grabs the attention of the viewer and quickly tells the viewer what he will get out of buying the book.

It is a little easier to show the advantages of having the book with a book like these shown in the video, but video that can show the reader why a book is important to him will sell books.

I have not tried a blog tour. I am able to monitor my book sales on a daily basis, so it would be possible to get a rough idea of the impact of a blog tour on book sales. That could be an interesting experiment. I think blog tours work, but I am uncertain how well they work.