Huffington Post Reviews Blog Shock Horror

When I hammered the best (IMHO) bits of the first two years of this blog into a book for a self-publishing workshop thingy I was giving over at Dubai's uber-funky hangout The Archive, the last thing I thought was that it would aspire to the lofty heights of a review in the Huffington Post.

Well, it has. You can read that very review here.

When you've finished, you can buy the book here for your Kindle or here for your iPad or other tablet. The good news is that it'll cost you the brave sum of $0.99...

How To Sell To UAE Bloggers

I'm doing quite a lot of 'how to'ing recently, am't I? Don't worry, this isn't a book post...

This advice doesn't come from someone that runs amazing professional 'blogger outreach' programs because I don't really do very much of that. It comes from the other end of the horse - the blogger at the receiving end end.

While it's lovely to find you have been added to the Cision media distribution list and positively feted by PR people, many of the approaches seem to miss some reasonably basic thinking when it comes to seeking the engagement of people with blogs, popular Twitter accounts or much-liked Facebook pages. So these pointers might be helpful for future approaches.

1) Bloggers are people too.
I almost fell into the trap of labelling this one 'bloggers are not journalists' but this misses the fact that journalists (no matter how it goes against the grain to admit this) are also people. Little I have to say about approaching bloggers doesn't also apply to approaching journalists.

So by saying we're people too, what do I mean? I mean, for instance, that it would be nice if the approach were individual to me rather than generic. Saying you enjoy my thought-provoking blog is all very nice, but that hardly tells me you actually give a hoot or have ever read anything I have written.

If you had, you'd be aware that I'm much more likely to bite you than let you pat me on the head.

I am naturally going to feel more interested in helping you out if you've been a regular reader/commenter on this blog. Even a few words referring to why you think this blog would be interested in your new perfume line for dogs - ideally linked to some content I have posted here - would let me know you've at least had a stab at mapping the relevance of what you do to what I do. Shared interest is good. Irrelevance is bad.

2) Bloggers aren't there to cover your products
I know, it's amazing isn't it? But the majority of what I write in this blog is peculiar to me and the world around me. Inviting me to the Armani hotel to attend the launch of a new range of bamboo shopping trolleys will not have me gushing and bright-eyed at the prospect of going to such a wonderful place. I have never written about bamboo shopping trolleys before and have exhibited no interest in these items in the past (although now I'm quite sure Klout will include it in my areas of expertise and I'll own the category in search).    I don't write about products or review products. Ten minutes spent browsing the blog would mark me as a non-target for shopping trolley launches.

Fashion and food bloggers are more susceptible to these types of invitation if they relate to fashion or food and if they are somehow interesting and/or innovative. Food product launches are not likely to cut it. Fashion bloggers are (sorry guys, but you are) incredibly spoiled and will need something out of the ordinary or a great relationship having been established.

3) Bloggers have day jobs
There are few people in the Middle East making money out of blogging to the extent they don't have to earn money by doing something conventional like, say, working. So a Tuesday afternoon event is likely to be out of the question - an all-day gig mid-week, even if it's exciting and deeply tempting, will likely not cut ze mustard. We have jobs to go to. That means if you want to organise an amazing all-day event targeting bloggers, you'll probably have to work on a Friday. Altogether now? Aaaahhh.

4) Slowly slowly catchee monkey
An individual approach that is contextual will be much more likely to reap rewards than scatter-gun event invites. A great example here is how Nokia's PR agency, d'Abo & Co, used my recent highly public Twitter meltdown with my HTC Android mobile (there's nothing like a mobile perma-crashing and telling you it's 'quietly brilliant' every time it staggers back to its feet to get a chap's goat) to slip a Nokia Lumia into my life. It was a risky strategy, they had to have had real confidence in that product - but, having the expectation I'd hate the Lumia I actually loved it and didn't mind saying so. I don't feel beholden to them for lending me a mobile, but I did think their timing and smart approach was very well managed. I don't mean to be difficult, but I am generally brand antithetic. Some bloggers I am sure will love brands. Love 'em to death. Positively fawn over  'em. Let me know when you find one, eh?

So it's a matter of monitoring conversations (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever) and mapping out your influencers (who IS an influencer?) before making an approach that is generally, as with any conversation, led by a contribution of some sort. Give forward to earn a place at the table.

By the way, most UAE blogs have relatively small readerships.

5) Build a community by being a member of the community
What is an influencer? A Klout score? Number of followers? Number of comments? You need to establish some metrics to decide at what level of influence it's worthwhile bringing someone onside - because you'll need to invest in the relationship. It's not a one-hit thing, the key word is the R one - relationship. Approaching a person, inviting their involvement and engagement with you, facilitating that engagement and maintaining a respectful (ie not 'we're targeting product messages at you because we think people listen to you') dialogue. That way you can bring influencers on board, typically one by one, and maintain that conversation to the point where you actually could organise a tweetup or other event and people would be happy to come. That'll take time and investment, but it's so much more effective than pumping out generic materials in the hope that bloggers will slavishly act as botnets for your product messages.

That's my 2p worth. I genuinely hope marketers out there find it useful.

We're Back, Baby!

delete (Photo credit: M i x y)

You can only begin to imagine the look on my face when I pootled over to the blog yesterday to put up a post for the day (I was going to whinge about the new Salik gates, for what it's worth) and found the cheery words from Google (in Arabic, of course, because they insist on showing Arabic content to someone whose account preferences specify English) that my blog had been deleted. To give Google some credit, it was thanks to Google Translate I was able to find out what the hell the note the Space On The Internet Formally Known As My Blog (SPOTIFKAMB to IT people) meant.

Deleted. Gone. All of it.

It took a while to sink in. This blog has become a part of my life in ways I would never have thought possible. I've been feeding it words like a remorseless Tamagochi since I started it (as a frustrated writer who missed journalism) in April 2007, when I posted about the Arab Media Forum (This here post, in fact) to a readership of approximately three. I've been posting more or less regularly ever since - a body of work that stretches back, I realised as I made my way to the Blogger Forum to try and get some help, six years now. In all, over a thousand posts from rants about mendacious food companies through half-baked observations on the state of our media to book plugging now populate this dusty corner of the Web and I have become quite fond of it.

Every day a few hundred or so people pop by to hang out and most of them use the ashtrays and everything. Some posts have attracted thousands and thousands of readers - the ones where I expose the crap people put in their food and drink are posts I am particularly proud have attracted such attention, because I think it's important more people are made aware that Subway bread contains gunk, Aquafina is tap water and other great truths.

Why did Google do it? They never do tell you, but an educated guess (fuelled by some panicky reading yesterday) would be some sort of spammer/hacker exploit that meant a number of blogs (the UAE Community Blog and SeaBee's 'Life In Dubai' were also affected and a number of other blogs were complaining of unfair deletion about the same time I was) got trashed.

A number of people kindly suggested on Twitter that I migrate to Wordpress. Thanks for the suggestions, but it did feel a little like when you tweet about a PC problem and all the iZombies come crawling out to intone 'Buy a Mac' in their little, dead zombie voices. I like that blogger is the Barney of the blogging world, a sort of Little Tikes easy to use thing in nice, primary colours. Wordpress is far too complicated for me and I have neither the time nor inclination to build my own templates and other stuff. I gave up playing around under the bonnet of technology years ago and have no hankering to go back.

I did come away from the experience with the definite feeling that Google's fighting a 24x7 bot-war against the hackers, spammers and other manifestations of absolute evil. Occasionally that results in a few carbon based life forms getting squished. The only thing I can say is they unsquished me pretty quickly - so thanks to Nitecruzer, the entity that seems to do most of the management of anguished bloggers at the Blogger Forum. He could perhaps be politer, but this is a man tested with a constant dialogue with pissed off bloggers, so you can see how he might be occasionally inclined to testiness.

Anyway, drama over. Back to the usual hooning around and complaining about stuff... Move on, people, there's nothing to see here. Come along, now. Let's be having yer. And take those shinies with you...

A Mountain Of Book Reviewers

English: Open book icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Honestly, you've no idea how many book blogs there are out there. After trawling through them for a few hours, they start to morph together into a plastic gloop of Blogger and Wordpress templates, a putty of garish backgrounds and glittering widgets that eventually goes the way of school plasticine and turns into a dull, brownish purple.

Yes, we're in promo mode...

I missed a trick with Olives - A Violent Romance, in that I didn't focus early enough on the global online community. That's partly because I had a printed edition of the book which was targeted at the UAE. Later on, I shifted focus from 'traditional' and Middle-East focused online media to book bloggers and reviewers and had compiled a sizeable database of sites after a while. For Beirut - An Explosive Thriller, which will launch as an online-only book (both ebook and print), that online community is even more important. In fact, it's crucial.

That means trawling through, literally, hundreds of book review blogs to find appropriate reviewers. What makes a book blog appropriate? Here's Alexander's handy ten point book blog selection filter:

1) Is the site well formatted and readable?
Purple 6 point text on a cyan background with ebulliently serifed fonts, illustrations that 'crash' on the page and thousands of buttons, awards and widgets? If you find it hard to read, so will visitors. It just takes a quick check for 7) before we move on.

2) Is it updated?
If the last post was in July, we move on.

3) Is it well written?
I'm not talking about the odd literal, but you're putting your work into someone's hands and accepting their review of it. If they clearly aren't able to express themselves, it's not going to be as smart an investment in time as finding someone who - even if they don't like your work - can effectively reason a conclusion regarding that work. The vast majority of book blogs don't fall into this bucket, avid readers tending to be literate, but there are some that do and I choose to avoid them.

4) Does the site review in your genre?
If the last ten reviews have young men with eight-packs on the covers and titles like Love in Wyoming, I can't quite see Beirut floating the reviewer's boat. Olives was easier in this respect as it did wander into romance crossover territory, but Beirut is a pretty hardcore international spy thriller. A nip into the 'Review guidelines' to check the reviewer's preferences and we can both save ourselves some time.

5) Is the reviewer accepting reviews?
Closed to submissions means just that. Quite a few blogs have put this up as the reviewer drowns in the weight of eager, breathless little books scratching away at their skin. Ignoring it just wastes everyone's time. You can always put these in a separate list to check back in a couple of months. Often you'll find 5) and 2) signal that the blogger has decided to go back to reading for enjoyment rather than being hassled 9-5 by authors shrieking 'review my book!'

6) Does the reviewer accept ebooks?
I can't stress enough how much time and hassle is avoided by reading the review guidelines - and conforming to them. And when a reviewer says no ebooks, they mean it.

7) If not, does the site have significant reach?
For about $8, I can put a review copy in anyone's hands, anywhere in the US and Canada. For about £9.99 I can cover much of the rest of the world via the Book Depository. Now the question becomes how many of these outlays do you want to/can you make? And then, when you have a budget defined, where is it wisest to spend it?

How do you tell whether a blog has reach? That's  whole piece in itself, but comments and followers are a start. Bear in mind these days that Twitter and Facebook form a part of any site's 'reach', but as a rule of thumb few followers, lacking likes and a quiet blog are probably not where you want to spend your bucks.

8) Does the site have reach?
Does it matter? Unless you're eking out your print promo budget because of 7) above, you're looking at the cost of an email or two and a Kindle/epub file. If the blog gets 50 visits a day, that's 50 more people that knew about your book than yesterday. A hundred emails will take you a couple of days to send out, but net you 5,000 eyeballs. Anything above that is bunce. Many book bloggers also post to Goodreads and Amazon, so there are also signficant multipliers there. And, of course, you can share the review with your own followers. So reach be damned!

9) Is there a clear review policy?
Most book blogs have clear review policies that are straightforward and common sense and generally my submission package would conform to these. Where this isn't the case, it's important to reflect the policy and make changes. A personal touch is always appreciated, of course. In a few cases where I've come up against stringent and onerous review policies (such as extensive online forms) I've passed.


10) What's the TBR like?
Most book bloggers have a very long To Be Read list and it's not unusual to see reviews three or even six months out. So the sooner you get out to them, the better.


And what about paid reviews, listings and other services? I avoid 'em like the plague and will continue to do so unless I get some very clear recommendations from writer friends that a given service has worked. And so far I haven't.

If you've got a blog and you'd like a review copy of Beirut, BTW, do just leave a comment or ping me @alexandermcnabb.