There’s an interesting article up at Publishing Trends that discusses the traditional method of dispersing ARCs, or Advance Reader Copies of newly published books. No more are these books going out only to professional reviewers. Now, real people are getting ARCs via a number of different programs (one from LibraryThing). I’m a big believer in word of mouth, and tried to get my first book publisher to send out ARCs to a select list of readers (to no avail, I might add).

I daresay that the internet plays a big role here. With so many people blogging, there’s a much grander audience for those real readers when they really like a book. Not only do they tell the ladies at the salon, but they’ll blog about the book and probably link to the book, creating a real live “book meme” as blog readers follow the link trail to learn more if the book looks interesting, and then blog about it themselves. What do you think? Would publishers be including real readers in their marketing plans without the internet? Should publishers (or those marketing for publishers) pay for blog posts about a book?