Social Media

Survey the landscape, and you will see authors who are taking marketing into their own hands and successfully creating audiences and loyal followings without help from their publishers. Authors have always deployed additional marketing, but new tools and agencies allow them to enact efforts that are at scale and beyond publishers’ bandwidth...

When the topic of direct-to-consumer sales arises in the book industry, a few key concepts come to mind: ecommerce sites, shopping carts, data analytics, and metadata, to name a few. While certainly important, these technical components of a direct sales strategy are rather worthless if publishers overlook a more abstract concept—that is, a “relationship” with…

The Summer Issue of Book Business showcases leaders who are pushing the limits of how books can be created and shared in order to better serve readers and meet them where they are. The idea of “meeting readers where they are” takes a number of forms in this issue but it seems to coalesce around…

Back in April Penguin Random House announced the relaunch of its website. The move was made in part to further consolidate Penguin and Random House operations, but it was also a significant strategic shift toward marketing titles directly to readers. “We believe that we can serve our authors even better by building strong relationships with…

Bookmate, the social ebook reading service, is launching in Latin America as it partners with Tigo Mobile in Paraguay & Guatemala.

“Wattpad is more than simply a writing platform, it’s really a social media network focused on writing and books,” says co-founder Allen Lau. The positioning is deliberate as it represents the philosophy underlying the monetization strategy at the company, which now has some 40-45 million monthly users. “Most are readers,” says Lau, and “some 1.5 million people have…

Simon & Schuster’s Glommable marks a growing trend in consumer-facing websites that utilize original content to collect audience data.

Bookmarq strives to solve problems of book discoverability and turn occasional readers into avid fans. Here’s how the platform works.

Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Worthy, Regnery, Beaufort and Dunham Books are among publishers test driving a new social media marketing tool for publishers called BookGrabbr.

The online marketing tool allows publishers to give away eBooks or sections of eBooks in exchange for a social share from consumers. The idea is that by giving consumers book excerpts and requiring them to post about it on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, that they will spread the word about the book with their networks and the books will take off virally.

Glose is a brand new take on ebook reading for phones and tablets. Yet, until today, one thing was crucially missing - Android support. Today, the company is launching its app on Android phones and tablets. It is also adding free book excerpts for its entire catalog.

"Things are going well," co-founder and CEO Nicolas Princen told me. "We basically doubled our catalog, our user base is constantly growing. We started with four big publishers, and today we have around 600 publishers."