It’s no surprise when books that appear to have been word-of-mouth or sleeper hits – The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Gone Girl, The Silent Wife – turn out to have been the subject of well orchestrated digital publicity campaigns. Leading the charge will often be a battalion of book bloggers, primed and drilled by enthusiastic publicists.

Today’s bloggers are far from the stereotypical image of a bored bookshop assistant musing about the Booker shortlist to a handful of subscribers on Blogger. Sites such as booksbiscuitsandtea.co.uk and curiositykilledthebookworm.net are run by social media-savvy bibliophiles with thousands of devoted followers. Book vlogging is also taking off, especially with young adult fiction. Watch the latest “book haul” by the Readables on YouTube to get a taste of things to come.

Bookbridgr, which launched earlier this year, is an attempt by one publisher to harness the power of bloggers, or “influencers” as they are known in marketing speak. The brainchild of Ben Willis at Headline, who commandeered the campaign for The Silent Wife, the site is a meeting place for publishers and bloggers, who until now have had an ad hoc, Twitter-centric relationship. Bloggers sign up at bookbridgr.com and, once approved, can request print or ebook copies of backlist and frontlist titles from Headline and its sister imprints, as well as applying to host online “author blog tours”. Once the review has been written, bloggers “bridg” it to the site.

The titles on offer tend, unsurprisingly, to be from the more commercial end of the spectrum. You won’t find much literary fiction, fiction in translation or literary non-fiction here. Interestingly, bloggers are three times more likely to request a print copy than an ebook. As Willis admits: “Who doesn’t prefer the feel of a physical book?” They also look a lot prettier in a YouTube book haul.