Publishers have long hoped that, say, a jacket by Chip Kidd or an author photo by Marion Ettlinger will increase attention and sales by signaling a book is a big deal.  In recent years, as publishing houses have encouraged writers to create a robust online presence, a new team of experts has emerged.  Jefferson Rabb and a handful of others are now the go-to people for book-specific websites and videos, and many authors are willing to shell out big money – usually from their own pockets – for the privilege of working with them.  ...Rabb aims to represent a book’s “gestalt,” as he puts it.  His sites often include original material from the author, as in the one he created for “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet,” Reif Larsen’s much anticipated first novel...  

 

But do book sites really help sell books?  As in so much of publishing, no one quite knows.  “People now latch on to a Web presence the way they once did with the book tour,” said Sloane Crosley, a publicist at Vintage/Anchor...  A survey released last June by the Codex Group, a research firm that monitors trends in book buying, found that eight percent of book shoppers had visited author Web sites in a given week.  It didn’t, however, say how many clicked on the “buy the book” link.

 

Still, a sizable industry has sprung up around persuading them to do so.  AuthorBytes, a multimedia company started in 2003, has built sites for more than 200 clients, including Paul Krugman, Chris Bohjalian and Khaled Hosseini.  They cost from $3,500 to $35,000 – with writers paying about 85 percent of the time.  The staff of 20 even includes three employees whose entire job is updating...  Many book videos are little better than home movies, painfully dull and almost laughably bad.  But others are impressive, full-scale productions.  Naomi Klein’s nearly seven-minute companion film to “The Shock Doctrine,” directed by Alfonso Cuarón with a full crew and shown at the 2007 Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals, has been downloaded more than a million times.