Book publishing faces an embarrassment of riches this fall, when new volumes from Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Robert Ludlum and other blockbuster authors will drop nearly simultaneously. With so much firepower unleashed on the New Releases shelf, how do the houses make their titles stand out from the clutter?

The exposure publishers like best — a TV appearance for an author — is less of an option, according to David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster. “There are too many new books to fill these slots on news, cable and magazine shows,” he said. “So you have to think outside the box.”

At Simon & Schuster, for example, publicists and marketing directors have been reaching out to bloggers to boost Robert Harris’ political thriller “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”

“This isn’t something I was doing a year ago, but I think it’s a huge opportunity for us now,” said marketing director Leah Wasielewski. “I got a fantastic response from some bloggers, and it makes sense because this approach allows us to target consumers directly and gauge their interest. You go right to the source.”

Among the sites that Wasielewski contacted were Bread and Circuses, which deals with the later Roman empire; Prettier than Napoleon, a blog on literary and legal issues; and Mental Multivitamin, a literary site. All three generated reviews of “Imperium,” she said.

Hmmph. All I know is that I didn’t get any review copies, despite my previous dipping into the blog book review activity with Time Warner Book Group, two years ago. Where’s the love, Simon & Schuster?

Anyway, this is a further evolution of the publishing biz accepting blogs as just another marketing outlet, perhaps more malleable than most:

But while many authors routinely use the Internet to communicate with their fan base through personal blogs and websites, some publishing executives, such as Daniel Menaker, editor-in-chief of the Random House Publishing Group, are just now beginning to understand the medium. “For me the Web is like a teenager’s room,” Menaker said. “It can be very messy, and you don’t quite know how to bring order to it. But you can’t ignore it. You have to deal with it.”

The author reach-outs to readership come off as more personal. Offering up excerpts of works in progress, for the purposes of eliciting feedback, has been catching on with some writers. Shooting for a similar unfiltered relationship between publishers and readers is a little trickier, because publishing houses don’t establish loyal audiences, per se — their authors do. So what would endear them to their customers?

Bingo! Free pre-release review copies. No better way to have passionate readers — as book bloggers presumably are — than to feed their addiction. In the long run, this benefits publishers tremendously. I’m a little surprised the state of this marketing strategy hasn’t advanced much over the past two years, though. Maybe the prospect of a new-release glut like this season’s accelerates the trend.