Social Media

“If you came here looking for a map, good luck,” joked Perseus Book Group's Rick Joyce, noting that figuring out the new world of discoverbility is “not about map following, but about map building.”

While the metaphor might seem extreme, when it comes to marketing and discoverability in the Internet age, publishers really are, like the early explorers, in uncharted territory. This was the theme of opening keynote delivered by Joyce,  Perseus's Chief Marketing Officer to the gathered publishing professionals at the Metropolitan Pavilion for the first Digital Book World Marketing and Discoverability conference.

It was the crime writer, on Amazon, under an assumed name, stabbing his fellow novelists in the back. The plot was uncovered earlier this month by thriller writer Jeremy Duns, who revealed the poison penmanship in a series of tweets. “This is RJ Ellory writing about his own book. And he has done this for them all, and yes, I’m proving it in the next few minutes,” Duns tweeted, before exposing Ellory’s pseudonyms. Ellory confessed, and the ensuing scandal prompted hundreds of writers to sign a pledge condemning sock puppetry.

The Random House Group has launched an ‘emotigraph’ digital campaign, charting the mood and thoughts of the digital world, in order to promote the new novel by Sebastian Faulks, A Possible Life.

Having launched today, the emotigraph will capture and display pictures, text and posts, updating constantly to illustrate the current mood of the digital world based on ‘hashtags’ used by Twitter and Instagram users.

Ripley's Believe it or Not! has released a "container" app which works as a portal to the company's various publications and museums. If that sounds a bit dry—well, this is Ripley's, and the app (developed over the course of a year in partnership with Conjure) is anything but. Users are treated to photo galleries, Ripley's Twitter and Facebook feeds, museum information and (in the near future) downloadable magazines and cartoons. The core of the app's appeal, however, is an Image Recognition (IR) feature dubbed oddSCAN, which Ripley's intends to incorporate into all of its products.

We all know social media's important—but not necessarily how best to use it, and in what context. At the upcoming free Publishing Business Virtual Conference & Expo, a panel of experts explain what's what (and what's next) in a world where traffic to Pinterest jumps 2700% in eight months.

Earlier this month, Slate writer Jacob Silverman wrote that having a likable Twitter persona “epitomizes the mutual admiration society that is today’s literary culture, particularly online.”  In other words, he thinks the Internet is coddling writers and softening critics, to the detriment of Meaningful Literary Criticism.

Literary critics everywhere joined in, creating a recursive loop of criticism about criticism about criticism.

In the week ending July 22nd, according to BookScan, 400 copies were sold of the trade paperback edition of "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. The following week, it was 2,273 copies, and the week after that 3,972. This past week clocked in at 3,177 copies sold. Clearly, Mr. Mitchell, always a well-reviewed and –regarded author, has gotten a whole lot more popular lately.

Goodreads, a social networking site for readers, has grown its membership to 10 million members. Collectively, these users have shelved 360 million books.

The rate of growth has gained momentum in the last year and a half. The site earned its first 5 million members in four and a half years, and doubled its membership from 5 million members to 10 million members in the last 18 months.

Twitter can sometimes seem more like a newspaper or encyclopedia than a social network. Its intelligent user base contributes a wealth of knowledge to the microblogging platform. Experts of various fields tweet constantly, and their followers can learn a lot simply by reading their 140-character updates.

In an essay from newly published The Collaborative Organization, Chris Hart of Random House talks about how companies can translate social technologies into value for their organizations. On Monday, we published an excerpt from Jacob Morgan's book, The Collaborative Organization, on the organizational challenges of social--or "emergent"-- collaboration. At the end of each chapter, Morgan includes an essay from one of the social business practitioners he spoke with while researching the book. This essay is by Chris Hart, VP of IT at Random House Publishing. The value of Enterprise 2.0 tools seems clear from a technical or business analyst