Sipping from the Firehose: Using Online Tools to Monitor and Create Content for Book Publicity (Part I)

I use a lot of online tools in my work as a publicist, some of which are extremely valuable while others not so much. As I know a great number of authors read my blog, I thought that it might be useful if I went through a few of these and discussed their benefits and potential shortcomings in the context of book promotion and information gathering.

The first thing that you should know is that no one tool is going to be able to do everything you need it to do. You’ll need to use several. Secondly, even the best tools depend on their user, so you’ll need to know how to use them well. With that in mind, I’d like to start with the essentials in information gathering: RSS readers, Google Alerts and regularly targeted web searches.

The web is an organic, growing thing. It’s constantly changing and interdependent. One tiny post on an obscure blog in the darkest corner of cyberspace can result in an explosion of remarks, retorts and referrals from a million different points – a potential conflagration of information. How do you keep track of it all? RSS readers.

RSS – “Really Simple Syndication” – is a system through which web users can subscribe to multiple websites and read their latest updates consolidated in one place. It’s an amazingly cool and useful tool for anyone who has a number of different sites they enjoy reading. So how do you take advantage of RSS? It’s simple.  The first thing that you’ll want to do is look for a RSS Reader or aggregator. This is the tool through which you’ll read all of your subscriptions, and there are tons out there. Some of them work as desktop applications and others are web-based, and you’ll have to decide which is right for you. Just do a web search. I use Google’s web-based Google Reader. It’s incredibly simple and since it’s web-based it doesn’t take up any room on my already crowded hard drive.

Once you’ve signed up for a reader, you’ll need to start subscribing to the websites you’ll want to monitor. Visit your targeted website and look for the orange and white RSS symbol. It’s usually either next to the URL address or located somewhere on the website itself. Depending on your reader, you should be able to just click the symbol and subscribe automatically. Once you’ve subscribed, you should be able to read any further updates directly in your reader.

You may wonder where you’ll find the blogs and websites that cover the sort of material that you’re interested in. There are a number of different ways to do this. The first way is to do a few basic web searches on your topic. Since we’re talking about books, I suggest that you Google terms like “litblogs”, “book reviews” and your particular genre, like “horror” or “steampunk”. You should find quite a few sites, all of greater or lesser relevance. In addition to general searches, you can use specialized blog search tools. There are many out there, like Icerocket and Twingly. One of the best known is “Technorati”. Technorati monitors and aggregates information related to blogs. You can search and find dozens of blogs on a variety of topics quickly and easily. Technorati provides data that can tell you how popular these blogs are as well through a measurement called “authority.” Authority counts how many other blogs have reacted to posts on your targeted blog, reactions being blog posts that link to the targeted blog. The idea is that a frequently referenced blog is more authoritative than one which few people recognize or react to. My own site ranks a modest “145″ at the time of this writing. That’s not too bad, but let’s look at some others for comparison. Bookslut, one of the best known book review sites on the web, weighs in at 1,062 reactions. Fantasy Book Critic, another niche blog focusing on speculative fiction like my own, rates in at a comparable “197″. Using Technorati to find popular blogs that focus on your sort of material is a good way, but perhaps not the best, to start to build your subscription base. A supplementary method – but one that takes a lot more time – is to find a few popular blogs on your topic matter and then subscribe to the sites that they link to. After a while you should be able to build up a comprehensive database of blogs. If you’re a sci fi or fantasy fan, reviewer John Ottinger recently assembled an great list of litblogs focusing on speculative fiction at his blog Grasping for the Wind. Check it out.

Depending on your reader or aggregator, you should be able to sort and organize your RSS subscriptions by topic (”books”, “popular culture”, “science fiction”) or any other critera you can think of.RSS subscription can save you a lot of time, but only them to your best advantage. Subscribe to those sites that normally feature the topics that you’re interested in, and monitor your feeds at least once a day. Be judicious about cancelling subscriptions that aren’t useful or germaine, or you’ll become overwhelmed.Another great advantage of RSS Readers is that with most of them you can actually search for specific keywords within your subscriptions, so once you’ve got a good database built up you can look for mentions of your book or name and quickly go to those relevant posts and respond to them as needed.

Even with a masterful list of RSS subscriptions you should never assume that you have a complete overview of what’s happening on the web. That’s where our next tool comes in: Google Alerts.

There’s no question that Google has dominated the field of internet searches. It’s fast, reliable and fairly complete, and Google even offers free tools to make your information gathering that much easier. One of the best of these is “Google Alerts.” Google Alerts allows anyone with a free Google account to plug in up to 1,000 search terms and receive daily or even as-it-happens email alerts of when and where a keyword is mentioned. Begin at http://www.google.com/alerts. You can even customize whether you just want mentions Google News or blogs or whatever in your alerts. It’s that simple. However, like RSS subscriptions, Google Alerts can become overwhelming unless you handle them correctly. The first thing you’ll want to do is to choose the right search terms. If you use something too general like “books” you’ll be overwhelmed, so choose carefully. The second thing you’ll want to do is to establish a special folder in your email client only for Google Alert updates. If you do this, then you can search through all of them once a day and respond accordingly. Like your RSS subscriptions, you’ll want to avoid the temptation of checking these things constantly. They can really burn a lot of time this way. When you do check your alerts, be sure to check where each is coming from: you may discover new blogs or websites to consider for RSS subscription.

While we’ve spoken here about two rather specialized forms of information gathering, you shouldn’t forget about web searches. You can use your usual web search engine to do some amazing stuff if you only take the time to check the advanced search features. Limiting your search results by date, excluding occurences of specific words and focusing on certain kinds of content are all ways that you can do this. If you’ve just been using your search engine for basic searches then you’re probably missing a lot of information. Again, I use Google, but no matter what kind of search engine you’re using there are always ways to narrow your focus.

While we’re talking about search tools there’s one you should really know about, and it’s called Addictomatic. Addictomatic searches across live web resources (blogs, Twitter, YouTube and more) and generates one page with all of the results in a neatly ordered format for your perusal. It’s a great tool to get a top-down look at the recent material on the web, but like the rest, it shouldn’t be used exclusively.

NEXT: Content generation