Making its way around the Twitter-verse and Blog-o-Sphere right now is the book review and ensuing comments on Big Al's Books and Pals for The Greek Seaman by Jacqueline Howett. Now, normally I stick to book talks and reviews, but this is one I had to share. If you haven't seen it yet, please take a few minutes to go to http://booksandpals.blogspot.com/2011/03/greek-seaman-jacqueline-howett.html and browse the comments. Beware: eating and/or drinking while reading the author's responses could cause you to choke from laughter and/or surprise.
Back now?
Good.
For me, this kind of publicity for a blog is a God-send. Who knows how many readers Al just added to his feed (I know I'm one of them). His simple, honest review, has gone viral because of the overreaction of the author and her complete disdain for social norms. I could only wish for this kind of publicity for my small, lightly read blog.
Of course, for Ms. Howett, this publicity is both good and bad. There has surely been an up-tic in the number of books sold, just because people wanted to read the bad grammar for themselves and see if it was as bad as it looked in the blog and comments from Ms. Howett herself. In the mid-run, this kind of publicity will surely hurt sales for a while. In the long-run, despite people proclaiming that they will never read any of her books, this kind of thing is likely to wear out in a few days/weeks. It's possible that if she keeps her head down for a bit and stops responding to comments, Ms. Howett could get out of this relatively unscathed.
I hope she (and other authors) learn something from this because it's a great lesson in publicity one-oh-one.
For more information on Ms. Howett, here's her blog: http://jacquelinehowett.blogspot.com/
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