The virtual book tour

Following yesterday's post on authors meeting their readers on Myspace: Publishing companies have figured out the economic interest of blogs.

According to the ever-reliable NYT , instead of the traditional (and expensive) book tour on which promising authors embark to promote their latest book, publishing companies are now pushing the majority of their authors to get invited into some of the many literary blogs.

From a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense: the strategy is virtually costless and can be extremely effective: literary blogs have their own niche (no sci-fi author would discuss his or her work on a romance-only blog) and some bloggers have a devoted following: a good word can increase sales tremendously, especially since, on average, apparently, only 6,000 copies of new books are sold in the US. A few hundred sales more, or less, can make a huge difference for the author's and the publishing companies' bottom lines.