Social Media

12 Ways Book Publishers Can Improve Facebook Engagement
April 15, 2016 at 12:14 pm

Publishers know promoting books and authors on Facebook is smart, but it's a lot more impactful when there's high engagement from Facebook users. Why do some publishers earn 1,000 or more likes on a post while others may receive as few as 7? If you want to increase  Facebook engagement, here are 12 tips you…

Does Social Media Marketing Actually Sell Books?
March 23, 2016 at 2:09 pm

What if all the hype about marketing books via social media is just noise? Social media may be here to stay, but are publishers seeing the ROI that they expected? At the end of 2014, Book Business Magazine surveyed the industry and asked the question, “What marketing platforms do you see the most opportunity for…

3 Creative Ways Publishers & Startups Are Maximizing Mobile
February 26, 2016 at 3:14 pm

Mobile smartphone usage has grown at an astronomical rate in recent years. According to Pew Research Center, 35% of U.S. adults owned a smartphone in 2011. Today over 65% of U.S. adults own smartphones. And increasingly, those smartphone owners are using mobile as their primary access point to the web, reports Pew. Considering these trends,…

You Shouldn’t Be Surprised that Reddit Is Publishing a Book
January 7, 2016 at 1:37 pm

It turns out that we are all, at our core, Luddites. The latest proof: The front page of the Internet is publishing a book, on paper. Reddit is collecting some of its best Ask Me Anything interviews — with Bill Gates, Waffle House workers, Spike Lee, nuclear missile operators — in a “beautiful coffee table…

Looking for the Perfect Book Present? Try the Penguin Hotline
December 14, 2015 at 12:31 pm

I have to admit to feeling a bit of skepticism (if not downright cynicism) when my Facebook feed started filling up with posts from the Penguin Hotline, promising me individualized book suggestions to make my holiday shopping as easy and stress-free as possible. So I decided to take it for a test drive.

The Most Popular Book Business Stories from November
December 2, 2015 at 2:32 pm

Here are the most read Book Business stories from November: Self Publishing & Big Five Dominate Book Market, According to Nielsen - In this post, Joe Wikert shares the results of Nielsen’s recent study on the state of the U.S. book publishing market. The study reveals the market share of print books versus ebooks, provides…

Why Social Media Should Become Publishers’ New Testing Ground
November 25, 2015 at 11:51 am

Testing books isn’t a common practice in the publishing industry. It makes sense, considering that for the majority of the industry’s history acquiring a new title relied on an individual editor’s intuition and skill. In the past, the only way to find out if a book would be successful in a certain demographic was simply…

Audible Builds a "Choose Your Own Adventure" Instagram Experience to Promo Locke & Key
November 5, 2015 at 1:34 pm

Though Audible is firmly planted in the aural realm, the company has deployed an ambitious multi-sensory strategy to promote one of its most-anticipated offerings: an audiobook of Locke & Key. The graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez have gone gangbusters since the first issue’s 2008 release and Audible went to great lengths to…

Is Twitter a Book Publishing Company?
October 14, 2015 at 1:51 pm

“Is Twitter a book publishing company? I think it is. It is an open access publisher producing very short books.” Such was the conclusion of Niels Peter Thomas, MD of Springer Fachmedien, during his wide-ranging overview of Germany’s €3.25 billion business and information sector yesterday at The Markets: Global Publishing Summit — an overview that…

Telling a Strange Love Story, Post by Post on Instagram
October 8, 2015 at 2:08 pm

Author and photographer Rachel Hulin is releasing her new novel on a most unexpected platform: Instagram. Hey Harry Hey Matilda follows the story of Harry and Matilda Goodman, 30-something fraternal twins from New England.1 Matilda is an artist in Brooklyn, though she’s begrudgingly making a living as a wedding photographer (she even has her own…