The blogosphere is a teeming mass of virality, an echo chamber of ideas, information, news, snark, memes, photographs and video clips pushed far and wide to the outer reaches of the Internet. Done right, a well-run blog can benefit a book publisher by promoting its authors, extending its brand or simply adding to the debate within the industry.

I recently caught up with Rebecca Ford, who runs the Oxford University Press blog, and Evan Schnittman, the company’s vice president of global business development, who maintains his own publishing-centric blog, “Black Plastic Glasses.”

What is Oxford University Press trying to accomplish with its blog?

Ford: While we promote Oxford authors, we try to provide readers with original material to make them feel like they are reading something educational and interesting rather than reading a press release. We also have several columnists who write for the blog who are not OUP authors, but whose posts align with our interests. For example, Charles Hodgson records a weekly podictionary—a podcast about word origins. It is not all about driving content to the blog—though consistent traffic helps. I’m more concerned with creating a viral message and having links to our posts reposted far and wide throughout the Internet.

You’ve also had a few runaway blog hits that have served to effectively market Oxford University products.

Ford: Yes, in spring 2007, Andrew Smith, author of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, posted about four fake culinary icons, and then called for a vote to nominate America’s best fake culinary icon. My vote, for example, was for Aunt Jemima. The post was picked up on all the big food blogs and readers poured in to share their opinion. As a result, we attracted a far wider audience of food lovers. In a similar vein, Ben Zimmer was able to promote our dictionaries program with a post about “long words,” which explained history, etymology, etc. Language bloggers reposted it across the Web, and a flurry of readers came to the blog to share the longest word they knew. In the process, they learned about Oxford’s dictionary program.

Schnittman: I contributed “Looks like a Million to Me,” in which I deduced that sales for the Kindle were 10 times what anyone had guessed at the time. I predicted that Amazon would sell 600,000 units in the first year and Sony 400,000, which in hindsight was high, but not by much. This piece was important for reasons beyond the tremendous traffic and attention it received. It got me thinking about my growing sense that the blogosphere could be a platform to influence the future of digital publishing.

What’s the biggest mistake a publisher can make with a blog?

Ford: Simply reposting press releases, announcing sales and book tours. In the end, the time you put into a blog will reflect in its success. The key question to answer is: are you engaging the community?

Schnittman: Speaking as a publishing industry executive, you also have to be careful about the line that you draw between offering your personal opinions and being viewed as a representative of a company. It’s why I created my personal blog, “Black Plastic Glasses.” I am not always thinking about the future of the digital world in strictly OUP-centric terms, and writing strictly under the OUP blog would have limited my ability to take on issues that Oxford may or may not want to engage in publicly.

Can you give an example?

Schnittman: Sure. As I started thinking about the escalating complications and impact that e-book pricing and digital rights management was creating, I realized I couldn’t write about pricing on a publishers blog. But I could on my own. I launched “Black Plastic Glasses” with a think piece on the complicated and financially ruinous sales model that e-book publishing operates under—and how it may help kill book publishing as we know it. I was as provocative as I could be down to the title “Why Ebooks Must Fail” in order to get the Swiftian point across that we are marching toward an end that no one seems to want to discuss. The impact will be a complete change in how content is acquired and paid for.

Word-of-mouth is perhaps the most powerful marketing a book can have. Are blogs a digital manifestation of this?

Ford: Yes, and I think this is the most important point to make about publisher blogs. Once an article is out there, the reposts and tweets and links can be endless. Not every book starts an Internet firestorm, and we can’t always predict which ones will. But there are times when a post strikes a chord—like Jeff Prucher’s look at words you think come from science, but really come from science fiction, which we published earlier this year. We had endless numbers of links and comments. I often joke that Oxford Word of the Year is the happiest time of year for me because it always sets off a tsunami. Whether our audience likes the word we pick or not, everyone feels they have to comment. It always leads to tons of new relationships with blogs.

More articles from PW's Viral Issue:The Viral Loop

by Adam L. Penenberg

The Networked Agent by Kate LeeThe Listening Game by Megan ZabelSharing Is Caring by Ellen ArcherVirtual Book Tours by Kevin Smokler and Chris AndersonCreating Your Viral Loop on Twitter by Rachel SterneSoapbox: Where Ideas Go to Die, Not Spread by Seth Godin