Using blogs (and fake websites) to sell books: From the WSJ (a free feature) “To promote a new biography of the Scottish indie-rock group Belle and Sebastian, Germany’s Holtzbrinck Publishers is offering free copies to music bloggers who have written about the group. “In the old days, you placed an ad in the back of Spin magazine, and it cost a couple of thousand dollars, and you hoped that someone who liked this band saw it,” says Jeff Gomez, director of electronic content and business development at Holtzbrinck, which owns such imprints as St. Martin’s Press and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It’s too soon to tell whether the blogging effort will pay off — the initiative is only a few weeks old — but Mr. Gomez says it is a cost-effective way to reach a targeted audience.”
