Q&A: Should I market my book on MySpace or a blog?

QUESTION: I've written a book about music, and I want to start promoting it on the Internet. The amount of time I can spend is limited. Where should I focus my effort -- writing a blog, or promoting my book on MySpace?

ANSWER: There's no reason you can't promote your book on MySpace and your own blog, even if you only have a few hours a week.

So first, sign up for MySpace and find the low-hanging fruit there. Find the MySpace members who are in your niche -- those who already belong to a Group that pertains to your book, or people who are friends of authors in your genre or topic area. This is your likely audience, and you can find them without too much digging. If you're unfamiliar, get specific instructions for marketing your book on MySpace here.

After a month or two of generating buzz on MySpace, you can shift your focus to your own blog at your domain. You can recycle some of your content you used at your MySpace blog. As you begin slacking off at MySpace, you can start generating original work on your own blog.

Why focus on MySpace first? MySpace has already cultivated a community that you can mine for readers. There are tons of MySpace members who are passionate about books and music. You're not inventing the wheel; people who are your likely audience are already there, looking for great content. It's free, and you can make it easy for these folks to find you. And once you get the ball rolling on MySpace and you have a base of friends, you'll start getting invitations from their friends, and you'll have momentum.

Attracting people to your own blog is more difficult; you're starting from scratch. Compared to MySpace, it's a much harder and longer process to get traction with your own blog. It can take a long time to see results -- much longer than on MySpace.

Even though it's a bigger challenge, there are strategic reasons for developing your own blog at your own domain. You have total control and flexibility. Someday you might decide MySpace doesn't fit your image. Or perhaps next week MySpace will begin charging fees you think are unreasonable. They could begin censoring content, or they could drop your favorite feature.

So use MySpace to help build your readership and get some easy initial sales. Try to convert your MySpace friends into visitors for your book blog. You can link to your blog from your MySpace profile page. Here's a tactic for driving traffic from MySpace to your own blog: Post the first three paragraphs of your blog posts on your MySpace blog, with a link to your own site. If your content is good enough, they'll come.

I am more bullish than ever about using social networks like MySpace for book publicity. In fact, as far as I can tell, most of the initial sales for my title Plug Your Book have been to people who found me on MySpace. As they say, the best advertising is free advertising.

Finding readers on MySpace is like shooting fish in a barrel. But be careful not to let it monopolize your time. You need to balance it with the control of publishing on your own domain.

My advice on this might be different six months from now because marketing books on social networks is a rapidly evolving scene. MySpace is still the 800-pound gorilla, and it makes sense to start there. But keep your eye open for other opportunities. For example, I just starting getting involved with Gather.com, which skews toward an older audience and, I believe, a more bookish member base. I think it could develop into a strong community for authors and readers. My sense is that Gather's center of gravity is its Books section, while MySpace's core remains music.

If Gather is successful at growing their membership base to, say, a quarter of the size of MySpace, it could become a no-brainer for book marketing. But who knows, in the meantime another site could pop up tomorrow and become "the" thing. Remember, although MySpace has more than a million accounts, it gained critical mass just a few years ago.