Recent replies to "Using the web to promote your popular science book"

Reply from shan gao

shan gao — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:57:43 -0000

Dear Sara,

I set up a personal website www.quantummotion.org to broaden the reach of my recent popular science book God Does Play Dice with the Universe. More and more people have read the free draft of this book from my website.

The following is a brief intro of the book on my website:

Science has made a mighty advance since it originated in ancient Greece more than 2500 years ago. Yet we still live in Plato’s cave today; we think everything around us moves continuously, but continuous motion is merely a shadow of real motion. Now an unusual popular science book God Does Play Dice With the Universe, which has just been published, may lead us to walk out the cave along a logical and comprehensible road. After passing Zeno’s arrow, Newton’s inertia, Einstein’s light, and Schrödinger’s cat, the readers of the book will reach the real world, where every thing in the universe, whether it is an atom or a ball or even a star, ceaselessly jumps in a random and discontinuous way. In a famous metaphor, God does play dice with the universe. This reveals a startling new picture of the world, which Einstein could not believe but you can understand. The new discovery may finally solve Zeno’s paradoxes and the quantum puzzle. A single particle can indeed pass through two slits at the same time in the double-slit experiment. It needs not be divided, but only needs to move discontinuously. As the eminent quantum physicist Bernard d’Espagnat commented on the back cover of the book, “Its very existence is at any rate, an excellent illustration of the extent to which physical data force us to depart from commonsense ideas when we try to depict reality ‘as it really is’.” The book is now available on Amazon. More information can be found on the website http://www.quantummotion.org/

Best wishes,

Shan Gao

Reply from Dave Reay

Dave Reay — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 12:11:21 -0000

I’m guessing – because I don’t have the sales figures – that my website GHGonline.org has helped promote my books. I post to my blog on Firstscience whenever I get the chance, but finding the time for this is a problem I’m sure we all face with book promotion.

One great innovation that strikes me as something we could all make use of is that of having our book-related talks filmed and then posted online (like this one)

A decent digital camera is all you need for this and, if it appears in the right places, could reach many times the number of people who come along to the ‘live’ version.

Reply from Euan Adie

Euan Adie — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:57:34 -0000

Saw a post on Panda’s Thumb today relevant to this thread:

Here’s an interesting opportunity: Lynn Margulis, the controversial scientist, is going on a ‘blog tour’ to promote her new imprint of science books called Sciencewriters Books. What does that mean? She’s going to hang out for a little while on a few blogs and chat and answer questions. If you’ve wanted to have a conversation with the author of the endosymbiont theory and critic of neo-Darwinian theory, here’s your chance.

Reply from Chris Turney

Chris Turney — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 06:44:01 -0000

This is great stuff. I’ve tried several things on the web, including a popular science website and writing a blog for FirstScience. Like Dave, I’ve also started putting short narrated films on YouTube. Wherever I can, I’ve put a direct link to Amazon so people can buy it. I haven’t got any stats so have no idea how much this helps!

Reply from Jennifer Rohn

Jennifer Rohn — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:41:30 -0000

Incidentally, what is the actual evidence that previous online publication does more good than harm? There are certainly anecdotes about ‘blooks’ getting picked up by major publishers after the fact, but online publication also disqualifies work from a number of fiction competitions and I have also heard anecdotes that publishers/agents don’t want to see anything that’s been previously aired.

Any stats or studies out there? The scientist in me would love to know more.

Reply from Jennifer Rohn

Jennifer Rohn — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:37:17 -0000

On LabLit.com, we support unpublished fiction writers who use science or scientists in their fiction by publishing their work (or extracts from longer works). So far the response has been great.

And just a quick plug for Nick Evans, a British physicist who’s written a novel about his world and is offering it for free online. You can read a brief Q&A about him and his book, and find links to the novel, here.

If anyone knows of a struggling ‘lab lit’ writer, send him/her my way!

Reply from Paul Wicks

Paul Wicks — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:31:29 -0000

One other thought; I’m a top 1000 reviewer for Amazon.co.uk and I often review colleague’s books. Generally the Top 1000 / 500 reviews go to the top I think.

Reply from Brian Clegg

Brian Clegg — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:09:25 -0000

Book groups are a great idea. A member of a book group in my local village asked if I’d anything they could read, so they went for my book on Light, Light Years – seemed to go down well, and the had me along for a Q&A session in exchange for a pint. Admittedly, not exactly Richard and Judy territory, but it’s a start!

Reply from James Long

James Long — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:06:41 -0000

How has Dave’s amazon.com guide been promoted? I notice it has received 186 views in ~8 months… which is frankly not a lot for such a hot topic. I think it’s an excellent guide and has a clear appeal; by contrast, my blog, on which I say nothing of real interest and certainly nothing very topical, received about 1000 views in the same time frame.

Dave, I think you could really increase your views (and hence sales) by just getting a bit of blog loving going on – if people linked to your page, you’d quickly see more traffic.

(Sorry if this is all very obvious – I was just surprised to find such a useful page on such a topical subject only getting 186 views in 8 months.)

Reply from sara abdulla

sara abdulla — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:21:51 -0000

Brian, your ‘infinity’ idea is genius, and a new one on me. On another matter, I was lurking on the psci-com discussion list yesterday (for those in public engagement with science) and saw a canny mention of authors’ or publishers’ websites offering support material for reading groups. There should definitely be more of this. Why should fiction get all the book group fun, eh?

Reply from Brian Clegg

Brian Clegg — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 16:49:41 -0000

The biggest thing I’ve done is to set up the popular science website (www.popularscience.co.uk) to make my (and other popular science authors’) books more visible, and to advertise talks, events etc. In the past I’ve also used Google searches to some effect. For example, my book A Brief History of Infinity came out in November (2003), so I emailed as many companies as I could find on Google with the word “infinity” in the title asking if they’d be interested in using the books as a Christmas/Holiday gift to special customers etc. One US company bought 150 copies.

Cheers,
Brian

P.S. – Sara, where’s your photo?

Reply from sara abdulla

sara abdulla — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 12:57:56 -0000

Wow. What great ideas both. Henry—you’re right, sharing full text online ahead of print is very popular in SF, with Cory Doctorow leading the way. Dave, you’re on YouTube now? Does your total media domination know no bounds?! Did your Amazon guide pay dividends, do you think?

Reply from Dave Reay

Dave Reay — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 22:20:14 -0000

I’ve just started making short films on all things climate change for YouTube and similar. So far, the only thing I share with Attenborough is my first name!

Reply from Henry Gee

Henry Gee — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 16:23:47 -0000

Hi Sara—as you know I have written an SF novel called The Sigil. It is currently doing the publishing rounds, but I also sent it to some SF contacts. One of them, Vonda McIntyre suggested I upload it onto the iFiction site ran by SF author and computer scientist Andrew Burt. My agent supported this idea enthusiastically so I did so, and The Sigil is available here for free, and it is beginning to get some interest (I’d be interested to learn what people think about it). Indeed, I seem to be getting feedback to the effect that prior online publication may enhance the chances of future print publication: publishers value word-of-mouth as a way to judge the market. Not quite straight science publishing, I know, but the phenomenon could be more general.