TIP: Face to Face beats Facebook every time

For those of you who've heard of WIRED cover girl Julia Allison, it is a marvel the speed and agility of her entrance into traditional and online media.

So what does this have to do with books, says Mr. Obie Joe to Ms. Obie Joe? Well, for those authors who wish to sell their books via personality and author platform remember this: for as much we love online marketing to cultivate and keep an audience, especially via blogs, Facebook and MySpace, nothing beats face to face when building a new relationship, market, or media stream.

When Allison -- with no discernible skills, talent, or products -- moved to New York in 2004, she went online. Set up a blog about her shopping, her boyfriends, her vacations. Predictably, her site hits were countable. Given that her goal was to become a cult figure, she needed not only readers, but people to talk about her and her musings. "Discover a niche, position herself at its choke point, and stay there until people start to notice."

She wanted gawker.com to be her friend. She tried every castle window: sent tips, links to her articles, left comments, e-mailed the editors. The turning point, though, was as low tech as it gets. Allison crashed the Halloween party thrown by Gawker's owner, Nick Denton.

Shazam. Gawker wrote about her, sometimes unkindly, sometimes with respect. But all publicity is good publicity.

Allison's choice for a face-to-face was brilliant. "Timothy Ferriss, whose skill at reaching bloggers helped turn his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, into a best seller, says it can be effective. "It's a matter of ensuring you have the channel with the least competition," he says. "Email is by far the most crowded channel, followed by phone. The least common is in-person."

The long-tailed book tour

Some of us at Obie Joe Media got our starts as magazine writers. Every month we wade through dozens of magazines, and often the torrent of words washes over us without much impact. Sad to say.

One article was the exception. Written in early 2005 by one of our favorite editors -- Chris Anderson of Wired -- the article really stopped us cold. We even went to the trouble to cut-and-paste it, on the computer, and thumbtacked it to the bulletin board.

For booksellers, "The Long-Tail Theory" gave new insight into the way readers find new titles. The way we saw it at Obie Joe Media, it meant the playing field was equalized for every book. It used to be one thing to build audiences, mostly through hype and paid advertising. Today, you promote a book via the participation, and building, of a community around the book. A friend’s (actual or virtual) recommendation means more than any other ad or hype you saw elsewhere. Find the niche of your book, connect to a community who adores that niche, snuggle in, and your book just found an audience.

“This is the difference between push and pull, between broadcast and personalized taste. Long Tail business can treat consumers as individuals, offering mass customization as an alternative to mass-market fare,” writes Anderson.

Which is our roundabout way to say we are all very thrilled to pass along our recommendation for www.BookTour.com. Not only is Anderson involved, but a fellow Baltimore hometown guy who is generous with his time and creativity -- Kevin Smokler is also on board. Some of the principal concepts of the Long-Tail Theory are there:
Help Me Find It
Make Everything Available
Particularly for our authors new to this game, BookTour.com is going to be the chocolate on the pillow while on that long journey to find and engage audiences. For readers, too.