Getting a Buzz On: How Publishers Are Turning Online to Market Books

Getting a Buzz On: How Publishers Are Turning Online to Market Books: "

Getting a Buzz On: How Publishers Are Turning Online to Market Books
May 06, 2005
By Rachel Deahl

�Buzz� is close to supplanting �love� as an overused, devalued�but very effective�term. In the book world, it�s credited with being the reason some titles become bestsellers while others, well, don�t. It was buzz that pushed Curtis Sittenfeld�s late-blooming Prep, which sold slowly when if first hit shelves but picked up steam (i.e., buzz) from good reviews, to move 94,000 copies to date, according to Nielsen BookScan. It�s buzz that has made The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini�s fictional account of an Afghan coming of age in the 1970s, into a publishing fairy tale: Released in April 2004, the literary novel sold an astonishing 500,000 copies last year�and then went on to truly stratospheric success this year, having remained in the Top 15 of The Book Standard�s Fiction Bestsellers Chart since Jan. 16. These kinds of success stories have driven publishers like William Morrow, which recently launched a successful marketing campaign to promote one of its latest titles, Freakonomics, to focus on generating buzz for a book above all else. And to do it online"