Social Media

Buzzfeed has gathered images of the most awe-inspiring, quirky, and just plain cool bookstores throughout the world. If you haven't visited these bookstores yet, you should definitely consider making a special trip. An international bookstore circuit might be just the way to close out the summer!

In most publishing houses, marketing and publicity are separate departments. And they should be. Even though each is tasked with book promotion, their methods and responsibilities are actually quite different: Publicity reaches the consumer through the media, and marketing reaches the consumer directly. But just because they're different, it doesn't mean the two departments can't — or shouldn't — work closely together. In fact, in this ever-changing marketplace, they need to work together like never before.

Random House, Inc., announces the relaunch of TasteBook, the online food community and custom cookbook creation site. As the newest member of the publisher’s consumer websites, TasteBook was acquired by Random House late last year. Since then, TasteBook has undergone a major redesign and change in price structure. The new website features a personalized homepage, which allows members to instantly follow and connect with friends while sharing recipes. The homepage also includes a “Recipe of the Day” feature and “TasteBook Recommendations” that share even more recipe ideas with members. TasteBook also introduces a new price model for custom cookbooks, lowering the price of a 25-page recipe book by 30 percent to $24.95. Additional recipes can be purchased for $.20 each and added to the book at any time.

We scan the hashtags so you don't have to!

For Matthew Quick, author of The Silver Linings Playbook — the novel that became the Academy Award-winning film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro — success as a fiction writer came slowly, then gradually and then all at once.

Quick (who, in the interest of full disclosure, is a friend and was a college roommate at La Salle University in the early 1990s) took some time in March to talk to Book Business about his whirlwind life since his book hit the silver screen.

NEW YORK, NY (April 24, 2013) — What makes books sexy? With “Fifty Shades of Grey” a worldwide literary phenomenon, Bookish (www.bookish.com), the popular site for readers, has launched a feature package devoted to sex in literature. The special includes exclusive contributions from celebrated authors and personalities:
 
·      Acclaimed sex therapist and writer Dr. Ruth Westheimer reveals how “Fifty Shades of Grey” and similar reads impact real-life couples, and advises men that they should start behaving more like a good read if they want to be considered a good lover.
·      Eric Van Lustbader, bestselling author of “The Ninja” and current author of the legendary “Bourne” series, discusses the art of writing a great sex scene.
·      Award-winning novelist Deeanne Gist explains why her “inspirational romance” titles are filled with passion – but always stop short of the bedroom.

 Publisher–generated online communities, such as HarperCollins’ InkPop, Gollancz’s SF Gateway and Hachette’s Pick a Poppy, are set to almost double over the next two years, according to research by Bowker which was unveiled at yesterday’s “The Campaign Revolution: New Models for Reaching Reader Communities” seminar.

The report, presented by Jane Tappuni, business development director at Publishing Technology, showed that two-thirds of UK and US publishers already host reader communities, and that figure is set to rise to more than 90% over the next two years.

Today, it appears that Google, despite selling the Frommer's name, has retained the brand's social data and is integrating it with what is now called Zagat Travel. “Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest.” PaidContent writes. “These thousands—or more likely millions—of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.”

The move became known when Google changed the name of the Twitter handle @FrommersTravel to @ZagatTravel today…

A distinct sense of déjà vu kicked in Tuesday afternoon as I read a series of outraged tweets decrying the news that Elsevier, the giant publisher of scientific journals, was buying Mendeley, a cloud-based social media research platform popular with academics for such tasks as organizing citations and managing access to articles.

The aggrieved tone was almost exactly the same as the backlash that erupted a few weeks ago when Amazon bought GoodReads — at the time, the largest independent reader community on the Web.

Lemony Snicket is a man who knows about fear. And he's taking over our Twitter feed this Friday to prove it.

His A Series of Unfortunate Events books were filled with deliciously dark slaughter and amusement. His ongoing series, All The Wrong Questions, is crawling with creep and cretinous creativity in the town of Stain'd-By-The-Sea.

And Snicket's latest book, The Dark (illustrated by Jon Klassen, author of I Want My Hat Back and This is Not My Hat) is about a boy named Laszlo who confronts The Dark in his own house.