I Vant to Suck Your Blog: Anne Rice Turns to Blog Marketing

In After the Vampire: Knopf Learns to Sell A New Anne Rice, (subscription required) Wall Street Journal reporter Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg has written another article this month describing how blogs and bloggers can be effective in creating buzz for a new book.

Previously Trachtenberg described how Viacom Inc.’s Free Press imprint was able to generate “hype any author would kill for” using blogs. Now he writes about how formerly Vampire-centric author Anne Rice’s publisher Alfred A. Knopf is leveraging the blogosphere to market her new tome. In this instance, the publisher not only had a new book to deal with, but also a new (and somewhat skeptical) market.

“Christ the Lord” is told from the perspective of Jesus as a child. It’s in its sixth printing, with 375,000 copies in the U.S. and has been number 9 on the New York Times best-seller list. This despite the fact that several religious retailers have refused to sell it, mostly due to the fact that it isn’t based on scripture.

Knopf gave away 4,000 advance copies of the book to retailers, distributors and bloggers. They also bought ad space on blogs aimed at a Christian audience such as RelapsedCatholic.com.

Like the Free Press campaign for “The Number” by Lee Eisenberg, Knopf started promoting early:

“…the book is enjoying a good run on best-seller lists, and some of the credit goes to efforts by Knopf that date back almost a year. In addition, they had to find their way in religious publishing, which has its own infrastructure outside the secular book-retailing industry. “We started working on the book in January because the Christian media marketplace and the faith-based outlets were new to us,” says Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf. “It involved detective work on our part.”

Also note the allusion to the Cluetrain’s Markets as Conversations theme:

“In contrast with her previous books, which saw sales spike right after publication, sales of “Christ the Lord” started modestly but have been steadily building. ‘Invariably, people who read it have wanted to discuss it,’ says Bob Wietrak, chief merchant at Barnes & Noble Inc.”