Blogs sell books: Writers take note

Blogs sell blooks.



Lots of books.



That's now a proven fact of the publishing world.



Even better, is the fact that blogs sell books that are self published, by print on demand publishers.



The combination of those two phenomona are transforming forward thinking bloggers into successful published authors.



One such real world example, of a blogger book success story, is the statistically oriented baseball book called the The Hardball Times Baseball Annual.



Written by a group of baseball bloggers, the book is self published by Lulu.com. The book currently sits at #10 on their all time best seller list.



Not only is the book available in the traditional hard copy format, but as a lower priced e-book as well.



The success of the book is the result of the efforts, of the blogger authors, and their promotional and marketing techniques.



Guess what!



The promotional and marketing heavy lifting has been done in the blogs themselves.



Posts have been written about the book, and excerpts placed on the blogs, as the proverbial free samples.



The main blog for the book is the growing group baseball blog known as The Hardball Times.



One of the authors is noted baseball blogger, and friend of Blog Business World, Aaron Gleeman of Aaron's Baseball Blog.



Aaron has marketed the book on his own blog; as have all of the other authors. By posting about the book on their blogs, The Hardball Times Baseball Annual is being discussed and linked by even more bloggers.



That list of bloggers mentioning the book now includes me.



I guess that's proof of the value of blog book promotion all by itself!



As a successful self published book, The Hardball Times Baseball Annual will soon be available through book selling giant Amazon.com and in brick and mortar bookstores everywhere.



The bottom line for the authors was promoting and marketing the book through their blogs.



The lesson for other writers, hoping to sell a self published or any other type of book, is to blog about it.



Blogs provide the single most powerful means of getting out the word about a book.



Coupled with the flexibility of a self publisher of print on demand books, bloggers can become best selling writers.



By not going through the traditional publishers, bloggers can market and promote their books in any way they choose. One technique is through blogging their book.



Once the book gains a bit of momentum, as a direct result of the blogging efforts, other avenues of promotion and marketing open up immediately.



Nothing gets success like success.



That initial success is from bloggers using their blogs to get the book moving.



***Update*** November 22



Aaron Gleeman is now reporting that The Hardball Times Baseball 2004 Annual has moved up from #10 on Lulu.com's all time best seller list.



The book now sits at #6 all time at Lulu.com.



Credit that constant rise in sales totals to the marketing value of blogs.