"The 4-Hour Workweek" author Tim Ferris addressed the crowd at Mediabistro Circus today. One of the topics that came up was how he marketed the best selling book. From Chris Ariens at WebNewser:

Ferriss talked about how he marketed "The 4-Hour Workweek," now in its 41st printing, starting online then to print, then TV and national radio and then longform print. A Today show booking, the holy grail for most authors, put Ferriss' book at #12 on Amazon.com for a few hours. But a mention on Robert Scoble's popular blog put him at #3 for the whole day.

Ferriss says its that kind of Web traffic and the recommendations from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon that will can make or break a new book launch. "I'd rather be on the homepage of Digg than on the homepage of The Wall Street Journal," said Ferris.

Ferris says he spent $25,000 to get the word out about "4-Hour." "I spent $18,000 on a PR firm which was a big waste of money." The other $7,000 was spent on sending galleys and meeting in person with influential bloggers. "Buy them alcohol," he advised.

Now that's strategy! Forget the PR firm, just get a lot of bloggers drunk. Seriously though, we know Ferris has done much more than that, but we couldn't help but chuckle at that advice. Does it work for PRNewser? No comment.