Just How Much Sense Does it Really Make to Promote Books Online?

The post's titular question may seem counterintuitive given that today it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to sell anything has to have an online presence--and one might add, that the first truly great online retail success specifically began as a book-seller.

However, it also seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between the time people spend being online, and the time they spend reading books. This is not only a matter of people's disposable time being finite so that time spent on one thing is time not spent on the other thing, but the effect that actually staring into a screen as one copes with the ever-more aggravating experience of navigating the vile post-apocalyptic wasteland that the search engine optimization, cookie pop-ups, adblock blockers, autoplay videos, paywalls, clickbaiters, bots and other assorted Torments of the Damned has made of it (and in a different way, also its increasing transition from being text-based to audiovisually based, as vloggers replace bloggers, etc.) has on our reading faculties. Even those of us who have retained the reading habit, and even the capacity to cope with difficult reading material (and I think it necessary to admit that many have not), are likely to find that we do not get much long-form reading done on those days when we are online much.

Equally we may find ourselves surprised by how much reading we can do on those days when we steer clear of the Web.

The result is that if we are selling books those who actually read the most books are the ones least likely to be online at a given time--and those who are most likely to be online people who do no such reading. That does not in and of itself make online book promotion a complete waste of time--but it does suggest that the return on promotional effort will be that much lower, when already it would seem to be very low to begin with and steadily falling as the Internet becomes ever more of a ruin, with all this implies for those who are endeavoring to promote a book with very little outlay of resources, and very little help from legacy media, like the self-published authors I suspect to be those far and away the group most likely to interest themselves in the topic.