Jon Fine

Last September, author Junot Diaz spoke to a standing-room-only audience at Town Hall in Seattle. Within the first few minutes, he gave the city props for approving a $122 million library levy the previous month. That’s how Seattle rolls.

It’s a book town and proud of it. Seattle always ranks at the top of the list of the most literary cities, dueling with Minneapolis and Washington, DC. Amazon and Costco are headquartered here. We thought we’d head to the Pacific Northwest and see what the publishing scene is all about. And what we found was a vibrant literary community with a lot of publishing options. It just doesn’t look like what you’d expect.

Facebook is coming to Amazon author pages soon to help authors further integrate their online social activities with their presence on Amazon.com.

Amazon’s author pages already feature information such as videos, bibliography and Twitter feeds and authors will soon be able to add through Amazon’s Author Central portal their Facebook feed,

“Search drives sales,” said Google’s Gavin Bishop at a much-anticipated Monday afternoon session at the two-day Digital Book World Discoverability and Marketing conference at New York’s Metropolitan Pavilion. Bishop delivered results from a study the search giant did of 250 New York Times bestselling titles from 2010-2012, analyzing 130,000 search queries on said titles across laptops, smart phones and tablets.

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