This September, the Christian Science Monitor published a skeptical piece on lit blogs and their relevance to the publishing industry. Lit bloggers seem to only talk to themselves, the reporter wrote, and it's doubtful whether all their writings amount to book sales for publishers.

Well, Colleen Mondor has written a response to that piece today on a very interesting, new site, Metaxucafe. She relates how she went from getting rude rejections from literary magazines to reviewing for Bookslut, then being published in our soon-to-be-released book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans and having her novel read by agents and publishing houses. Colleen is one of the trailblazers on this new career path, but soon, the path will be well worn, I bet.

From a publisher's perspective, do lit blogs help? When we launched Kuhaku with our distributor in April, we were a complete unknown on the literary blog scene. We made some waves on design sites and in the Japan blogosphere, but we were clueless about lit blogs. Sometime during this summer, Colleen found Kuhaku in a local bookstore, contacted us and wrote a glowing review of our press. While we can't give you an exact number, we can say with confidence that the review gave us a lift. The eight or so online sales we received were directly from the review, but we also saw sales through Amazon jump from a paltry two copies in August to 14 in September (the review was posted on Bookslut just after Labor Day). The president at our distribution company sent us a congratulatory note, and the review is now part of our sales kit for Do You Know.

Lit blogs are now a central part of our marketing plans for Do You Know and future books. And when we're feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves (which, mind you, is not often), we like to think of Chin Music Press as a trailblazer in using the web to build an independent publishing house. So, at least for this publisher, lit blogs have created a new avenue for media exposure, helped us sell books and, by the way, introduced us to five of the 14 contributors in our new volume, Do You Know. I'd say that's pretty relevant.