The Efficacy of Stock Content

Perhaps you have seen the current blog posts about Nalini Singh, who is an amazing author and a Great Blog Voice Experiment participant. It seems that a reader’s blog called Dearauthor.com is interested in seeing how 100 bloggers blogging about a book can change its fate.

I’m all for this, naturally. I’m also all for the prizes being given away. But I’m also mildly skeptical.

This is what Dear Author would like you to post:
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I am participating in a blogging experiment hosted at dearauthor.com.

To enter the contest, put up this blurb, image, and trackback and you are entered to win the following prize package.

$200 Amazon gift certificate
Signed copy of Slave to Sensation
New Zealand goodies chosen by Singh
ARC of Christine Feehan’s October 31 release: Conspiracy Game

You can read about the experiment here and you can download the code that you need to participate here.

SLAVE TO SENSATION
Nalini Singh
Berkley / September 2006

Welcome to a future where emotion is a crime and powers of the mind clash brutally against those of the heart. Sascha Duncan is one of the Psy, a psychic race that has cut off its emotions in an effort to prevent murderous insanity. Those who feel are punished by having their brains wiped clean, their personalities and memories destroyed.

Lucas Hunter is a Changeling, a shapeshifter who craves sensation, lives for touch. When their separate worlds collide in the serial murders of Changeling women, Lucas and Sascha must remain bound to their identities…or sacrifice everything for a taste of darkest temptation.

Excerpt
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Let me say first that I am dying to read Singh’s first single title. I loved her GBVE post, which was set in a similar, futuristic world ruled by psi powers, and I’ve always enjoyed her category romance novels.

However, being a member of a regular blog touring group, a blogger who regularly blogs about books, a writer who has seen the effects of being blogged about both as part of a group and also spontaneously, and a blog reader, I am skeptical of any canned blog content. In my experience, if it walks like a press release and talks like a press release, then bloggers are going to skim over it to get to original content.

There are several blog touring groups that do this: just spew out a bookshot and a blurb whenever they do the tour, and I never read them. Just skim past the post. I’ve heard this over and over again from readers, as well. Some of these “bloggers” only ever post this stock content, in exchange for having their books toured on real blogs.

People want original content on blogs. They don’t mind if you are taking excerpts from other blog posts and riffing about them yourself, or pointing out blogs to them that they should read and providing your own commentary, or what. Just make it NOT be the exact same wording they see on a dozen other blogs. It’s the blogging equivalent of the AP wire, and it gets old pretty quickly.

Many of the members of the group I tour with, The Girlfriend’s Cyber Circuit, work hard to provide original content for their readers. When I had my tour, I spent a whole day answering the different interview questions that the authors had for me. If you followed the tour, you could learn a lot of info that wasn’t available on my website or my blog or Amazon.

So I don’t know. I do know that I get annoyed when I do my regular blog surfing and visit 10 or 20 blogs with identical content. I’m not getting my fix in. I want to read 20 blogs, not one blog 20 times. I also know that when I started doing the GCC tours, I got complaints, both in the comments section of my blog, and in email. I was told point blank by several visitors that they wanted me to stop talking about reading and start talking about writing.

(I kind of giggled at that, because as far as I’m concerned, all good book writers are book lovers. The first piece of advice I have for anyone who wants to be a writer is read. Read read read read read and then, when your bookshelves are in danger of collapsing in on their own mass and going black hole, or your local librarian cowers in fear when you walk in the door because you’ve read everything in there half a dozen times and their budget can’t meet your demand — or both — then you can be a writer.

Yes, I know that most of the people who read this blog are writers, but everyone who reads this blog is a reader. )

And often, it’s hard to provide original content for a book I haven’t read. If I don’t know anything about the author or the novel, it’s not always an easy proposition. I’ve been touring a couple of books in the past month that I’m dying dying dying to read, but I can’t because I’m not allowed to read any books until I finish mine.

I love what Dear Author is doing, and I love that they’ve chosen such a worthy novel. I hope it sells like hotcakes, and I hope that the blog tour has something to do with it. But I’m worried that after the first half dozen times a visitor sees the same post, they’ll skip over to the next blog, maybe even get annoyed by the novel because it’s getting in the way of their regular blog reading.

But maybe this isn’t the purpose here. Maybe the point is to heighten visibility of the novel, even subconsciously. You may not read the post, but Nalini Singh will get stuck in your head (it’s such a gorgeous name, after all… like music!) and then you’ll see it someplace else — maybe in Romantic Times, or on a bookshelf, or a post that DOES provide original content that you read — and you’ll think to yourself, “I heard of that book somewhere else. I’m going to pick it up.”

Which you should. Because it’s going to be awesome. Don’t believe me? Read her GBVE entry. She’s an amazing writer, and that’s what she did with a few hundred words. Can you imagine what she can do with a few hundred pages? I’ve had my Amazon order in forever, and I’m going out and buying it the day it’s on sale, because I have a friend that lives for futuristics, and I just know she would love it.

And I’m not just saying that because she’s on my blogroll, or with my agency, or because she once provided my blog with free creative content. I’m saying it because, long before I knew Nalini, or had a blog, or even visited her country of New Zealand, I was a fan who read her debut Desire, and loved it.

(Full disclosure: Nalini offered to send me an ARC, but I declined because of my deadline. Stupid, stupid stupid! Ah, well. Fourteen more days and that baby is mine!)