Social Media

Social media offers great ways to spread the word -- and find a narrow audience of like-minded readers. In practice, however, this approach may not be sustainable for busy writers and publishers. All this could change, however, if the shared social content is less about book promotion and more about sharing the actual book.

You may have noticed #BBLive15 floating around the Twitterverse yesterday as publishers shared their take on the newest publishing event from Book Business. Yesterday marked the launch of the first ever Book Business Live: Executive Summit on Digital Publishing. We gathered more than 70 publishers from trade, education, and academic publishing segments to discuss some of the most pressing issues in the industry -- from managing organizational change in the digital era to maximizing data collection and analysis.

Yesterday I read a great post by Jane Friedman, advisor to authors on all things publishing, that had some helpful tips for authors trying to attract a wider audience on social media. You can read the full post here, but I thought I'd share some quick takeaways that publishers can use to improve their social media efforts.

Goodreads may have picked up tricks from their corporate parent since being bought by Amazon in 2012, but beta testing new features was apparently not one of them. The social network added new relationship options on Friday. Ostensibly intended to better define how authors and the hoi polloi interact, the new options are causing more problems than they solved.

Where under the old setup you could be a friend or a fan of an author (or both), the new system offers "three ways you can choose to engage with author pages on Goodreads" : friend, follow, or favorite.

Penguin Random House UK has turned to Yahoo-owned microblogging platfrom Tumblr to recruit for its new entry-level marketing programme The Scheme, as it looks to reach talent who may have never considered a career in publishing. 

Eschewing the traditional recruitment process Penguin Random House is asking applicants to respond to seven questions designed around seven qualities each must have to be successful in The Scheme.

Amid the cacophony of a year-end media blitz that bombards us with listicles of the greatest scientific discoveries, the top papers, and the cutest animal stories, we seemed to have missed an important and serious contribution to our understanding of social media and its relationship to scientific publishing.

I was alerted to this paper the old-fashioned way-in conversation with a cardiovascular researcher-which I found rather odd, because research on social media typically attracts the attention of those who promote social media. Indeed, I can find no mention of it among those who follow bibliometric and sociometric research.

In 2011, artist and programmer Cory Arcangel created a bot which retweeted people claiming to be "working on my novel": "cooking dinner, drinking a glass of wine while working on my novel." (@VivaLaBelle1985, 6/12/12). "Working on my Novel and watching Scary movies :)" (@Donelljackson, 3/10/12). So far, so enjoyably Twitter. Now Penguin Books is publishing a selection of these tweets on paper under the title, yes, Working On My Novel. 

The message today is that you are nobody if you don’t have sky-high numbers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and probably Snapchat and Tinder.
Oh, fer pete’s sake.

That’s what tells you that I’m qualified, talented and experienced and would do a great job for you? That’s how you measure my 20-plus years as an award-winning journalist and voice to millions of American radio listeners? As the kids like to say: are you for serious?

Whether you're marketing a product, a service or your own ideas, there are three strategies you can use to publish content across social-media platforms, depending on whether the content is owned, curated or promotional. 1. Owned Content: With an "owned content" strategy, you're writing original material on a periodic basis. This approach helps generate interest and demand for products or services. Ideally, these products or services can be tied to a good deal of unique content, which starts to solve users' problems while also pointing them to potential solutions.

Do tweets sell books?

It has long been a question for publishers and authors, who have started relying heavily on social media to promote books as they search for new ways to reach readers in an uncertain retail market. Authors with large Twitter followings, like John Green and Paulo Coelho, have become publishing powerhouses.

Now, the Hachette Book Group is testing whether a tweet from an author can directly trigger a sale. Hachette, which publishes best-selling authors like James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Malcolm Gladwell, announced on Monday that it would partner with Gumroad