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I attended the Harriette Austin Writers Congress last weekend–had a blast visiting with friends–and I picked up some bits of news of interest to book bloggers.

The workshop was on what authors require to do to survive, and hopefully thrive, in this tough marketplace. And one of the things the presenter thought they needed to do was to have a strong web phlegm.

To support her theory, she threw out some stats that, frankly, shocked me.

If you click on this link and go to slides four-seven, you will see some stimulating figures. In slide four, check out the online advertising figures for seven major publishers.

If you go to the bottom of that chart you will see that buyers of full-grown books are made aware of the books they buy, most often through bookstore real estate. Those front tables and end caps are purchased by publishers at a pretty hefty reward. And it seems to be a good plan for those publishers to keep paying for those displays. They sell books.

But now go up and look at the advertising section. Note that online advertising is value more than TV, radio, and newspaper advertising combined.

Now compare the lines that say Book review (not online) and Online: enlist review. Does anyone else find this interesting?

Now look at one more line. Recommendation from a friend.

We book bloggers are in a position to offer books. Our blog visitors are our friends. Publishers want us to review and recommend their books.

Lately there has been a lot of rumbling in the kidlitosphere about bloggers getting paid to give one's opinion of books and about blog tours and blog promotions hurting sales rather than helping them. I’m going to post some more thoughts on some of this over the next pair of weeks. In the meantime, look at the next three slides on that slide show I linked to above and then answer me one question–if you were a publisher and Natasha Maw offered you a targeted banner ad to run on her blog, would you buy it? Go look at Natasha’s website categorize and consider her traffic. Look at her content and read her comments.

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