Dundurn Press is one of the few Canadian publishers who have embraced blogs and maintain one of their own. I love how insider conversations are now made accessible through blogs, mostly because I used to work in publishing and I miss having those conversations.
The Dundurn Press blog is called Defining Canada. I think it’s a good name because I believe that the stories we tell are what define us. How appropriate is that for a publisher.
Dundurn recently published the results of a small internal poll on staff attitudes to newspaper reviews vs. blog reviews. It’s an interesting story. For the most part, they felt that newspaper reviews were far more credible and had more prestige, yet they were split on which was more effective.
I recommended reading the post.
In many ways I am curious about the small war going on between newspaper reviewers and bloggers. In other ways, I don’t understand the argument. Both newspaper and blog reviews are effective but their purpose differs. We keep comparing the two and I don’t think they are comparable, and I don’t think that we should make value judgements about one over the other.
Newspapers are effective at getting a lot of people reading about the same thing on the same day. Their impact is spread thinly over that whole group, but it is a large group.
Blogs are effective at getting a targeted group of people with like interests reading about the same thing. Their impact is deeper but over a smaller group.
Blog reviews can rival newspaper reviews in terms of number of eyeballs, but it’s usually spread over a period of time–not all bloggers post about the same book on the same day, which is perhaps why their impact is considered individually rather than collectively.
Newspaper reviews on the other hand–in particular the Saturday Globe and Mail–do have a certain prestige for authors. If your book is reviewed you can tell your friends and family to buy the newspaper on that day. It’s exciting, it’s cross-Canada. It’s different than directing people to a blog. People know The Globe.
I’m going to avoid stumbling too far down this path today. My final words are “we should not have one over the other. We should have both.”