Pros and cons of social networking
Stop biting those nails. We’ll know soon enough.
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Swivet lists the pros and cons of various social networking sites (in completely normal, non-techy language)including MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and more.
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Scott Karp Publishing 2.0 talks about how to increase your followers on the microblogging site Twitter. Specifically, he talks about ”narcissisistic” Tweets — updates that only refer to yourself / your product — versus linking. This concept (referring only to yourself vs. linking to others) can also apply to blogs. While an author (or publishing house or freelance publicist) obviously wants to promote their book(s), if you only ever talk about your book(s), you risk losing the interest of readers. On the other hand, if you also link to similar blogs / sites, not only do you provide variety for your readers, but you reach out to other bloggers. (When you mention another blog on your site, the other blogger gets a “ping.” Obviously, popular blogs like Boing Boing or Gawker will get zillions of pings, most of which they will ignore by necessity, but many bloggers do keep track of who mentions them and will investigate those blogs.)
Blogs, microblogs and websites
A lot of authors debate whether it’s better to have a blog or a website. Men with Pens posts about the differences between the two (and points out that blogs today look pretty spiffy compared with blogs of yore).
For authors who want to delve into the world of social media, Mike Fruchter posts 35 step-by-step tips to establish a social media presence. Although you need a basic understanding of terms like “domain name” and “blogroll,” the instructions are pretty easy to follow for relative novices.
But why blog in the first place? To connect with readers, of course, but will that lead to increased sales? According to bub.blicio.us, yes — loyal blog readers are swayed by posts when it comes to purchasing decisions. (From personal experience, I can tell you I’ve bought many a product featured on Gizmodo, my favorite gadget blog, and the other day when Boing Boing featured one of my company’s backlist titles, the Amazon ranking shot up to about 500.)
And if you are thinking about a microblogging site like Twitter, GalleyCat points out that the keyword “book” is most frequently typed in between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m.
Morning Brief — Monday, June 23
Hope everyone had a good weekend. Humidity was low on Saturday and I managed to go for a long run without keeling over, so all is well with the world. I did, however, arrive in the office this morning to two voicemail messages saying, “I have a question for you — please call me.” Unless you’re leaving me a message to let me know a loved one has died or I’ve been fired, please, take 10 seconds to set the context.
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Boing Boing reports that Cody’s in Berkeley has closed (as of June 20).
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TechCrunch ranks the “real market value” of the social networks. There are lots of complicated numbers, but it boils down to MySpace being the top-ranked network followed by Facebook. I don’t know about MySpace (having shut down my account on International Shut Down Your MySpace Account Day) but a lot of publishing folk are on Facebook.
Lots of stories about not-haute cuisine
I think I heard somewhere that three things makes a trend (although don’t quote me on that — I could just as easily be making that up) but to use my possibly-made-up definition of a trend, I’d like to bring to your attention a story that I have heard / seen four times in the past few days: cooking with food bought only from dollar stores. First, Alex Cohen interviewed Christiane Jory about her book The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook on Day to Day last Friday. Today, the NYT ran a story How to Survive in New York on 99 Cents that was picked up by both Boing Boing and Kottke. Um, does this mean we’re in a recession? At any rate, if any of you work with authors who can comment about food / lifestyle this may be an angle to pitch.
In somewhat related matters, I often attend Publishers Publicity Association lunches and panelists are inevitably asked how they get their book news / what media they follow. It’s interesting to see that it was today’s Times story that was picked up by the bloggers, while last week’s NPR story on the same topic flew under the radar (in the blogosphere, at least). In case you’re wondering, several hours after her NPR interview, Jory’s book ranked #8,277 on Amazon. (As of mid-day Wednesday, it’s down to #13,263, so it looks like some people followed Day to Day’s story even if they weren’t bloggers.)
How to get publicity by not doing a book tour
As I’m sure you have all heard by now, U.S. customs officials prohibited Sebastian Horsley from entering the country to promote his book Dandy in the Underworld on account of, get this, “moral turpitude.” Let’s not forget these are the same folks who’ve accidentally let terrorists through our borders. And what about the moral turpitudiness of our governor? I mean, ex-governor. I mean, new governor.
At any rate, this has to be the most publicity an author has ever gotten for not doing his book tour — I first read about this on GalleyCat Thursday afternoon and since then most of the litblogs as well as Boing Boing, Slate and USA TODAY have covered the story. All of us in publishing have been wracking our brains about alternate methods of promoting books, but I do believe this is one idea that has eluded us … until now.
Meanwhile, as of mid-day Friday, Dandy ranks #286 on Amazon — way to go Harper Perennial!
