Social Media

The nature of book publishing is changing, in ways big and small. In fact, the very nature of what a book ‘is’ is shifting. But that’s not what I’ve been thinking about these past few days. No, my exploration today is about authors – and what the author of the future needs to do in order to be good partners with their publisher.

Wow, did I just say that? You bet I did. Partners. Because the nature of how books are conceived, written, and brought to market, is being dramatically re-invented.

For authors, one of the risks of doing promotional events is sitting at a table stacked high with books and reading to an empty room. Even in this era of social media, getting out into the meatspace to build an audience is vital for authors. But not only is it demoralizing when the book you've poured your passion into is met with a shrug (or worse), it's a big waste of time—time that could have been spent, say, promoting a more successful event.

What's an author to do? Andrew Kessler—entrepreneur and author of "Martian Summer," his first-hand account of shadowing NASA's 2009 Phoenix Mars Lander mission—thinks he has an answer.

Here's your strategy landmine for the day: The web browser is dying off. It may be difficult to fathom, but in a few years, no program we use on our tablets, phones or computers will resemble the web browsers we're using today. Digital services, social platforms and most importantly, digital content are all steadily migrating away from the web browser and into the world of apps.

As a social media manager, my content consumption habits tend to get wildly out of control if I’m not careful. And a lot of readers face this same issue.

When we first started looking into TeleRead’s reading habits, we learned that a great majority of you continue to rely on word-of-mouth to find new e-books. In the digital age, weeding through the crowded muck can be overwhelming, to say the least.

So to help ourselves—and yes, you too—we’ve curated a quick list (in no particular order) of our favorite heavy hitters on Twitter

October 15, 2012 - Two months after being forced to shut down by Amazon Payments, Unglue.it is relaunching today with a new payments provider, Stripe, and ungluing campaigns for five books.

Author J.K. Rowling drew more than a million Harry Potter fans for a live global webcast during which she shared never before heard tidbits about the world of Harry Potter, including back story details, as well as her next writing project and Pottermore.

I know many writers are hesitant to the idea of blogging. It feels like just another social media chore, but nothing can be farther from the truth. In fact, blogging is probably the ONLY form of social media that 1) draws from a writer’s strengths and 2) doesn’t try to fundamentally change our personality.

Yes, as a social media Jedi, I will tell you that it’s a good idea to tweet and learn to use Facebook, but I’m also going to tell you something you already know.

We’ve written a good bit about the use and abuse of fake ‘user reviews’ recently, and we couldn’t help but share this bizarre story of a “crowdsourced” effort to sink a certain Amazon bestseller—all organized and executed by people who hadn’t actually read the book in question.

The reason for this anti-PR stunt is a little unusual. The book, titled “Tinderbox: How the West Sparked the AIDS Epidemic and How the World Can Finally Overcome It“, is by (almost) all accounts a well-researched tome that traces the history of the AIDS epidemic.

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.