No Spin PR » ruthseeley

Virtually attending a literary salon

ruthseeley — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:51:42 +0000

I’m thrilled to have been invited to attend the first #yycsalon via Skype tonight and will be live tweeting it since I couldn’t actually make it to Calgary.

Here are the details – you can follow Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada on Twitter, but she’s hosting, so check out the hashtag instead. And if you’re in Calgary, get yourself on the mailing for the next one – Susan’s going to see if she can’t make the next salon in December (surprise December guest is an Alberta author who won the Bantam/Seal First Novel award who teaches in the MFA creative writing program at University of Calgary – my that’s a broad hint).

Alberta Books Canada is pleased to announce
a new reading series
The Johnson House Literary Salons
in Marda Loop, Calgary
Please join us for the first of these events
Tuesday, November 29th
7 – 9 p.m.
Featuring readings by Calgary authors
Betty Jane Hegerat
Lori Hahnel
Rosemary Griebel
Bob Stallworthy
Followed by a discussion with the authors
Books published by these authors will be available to purchase
thanks to Sue Hill of Monkeyshines Children’s Books
Admission fee – $10 per person
(In keeping with our belief that authors should be compensated for their participation,
ALL monies collected will be paid directly to the authors)
Coffee and tea will be served – please bring your own cup
If you are interested in attending please send an email to susanmtoy@gmail.com with the subject line: Johnson House Salon
You will receive confirmation and the exact address in a return email. Only a limited number of tickets will be available, so please send your request soon.
We look forward to welcoming you to our first Johnson House Salon!

Filed under: book marketing, marketing, public relations, working with authors Tagged: Alberta Books Canada, Calgary literary salon, literary salon, Susan Toy, The Johnson House Literary Salons

Revisionist journalism in a social media age

ruthseeley — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 18:05:07 +0000

I feel compelled to blog about an experience I recently had with the online (self-described) blog of a local radio station. I, am however, going to blog about it without naming names, because I hope to inspire a bit of a discussion rather than point the finger at one mainstream media outlet that employs several practises I consider misguided, uninformed, and downright egregious (or at one reporter). I’d prefer to see what other journalists and consumers of news think about the points I’m raising.

A local radio station reported on a city council meeting in which there’d been significant discussion about the role of council vs administration in determining property tax increases. Since many current members of council campaigned on no-property-tax-increase platforms, it’s an important issue, and the fact that council seemed unsure of whether it could actually push back (administration was requesting a property tax increase higher than the inflation rate) and say, no increases or lower increases adds yet another wrinkle to the discussion.

A former mayoral candidate – someone who almost won the election – tweeted a comment, which was incorporated in the story posted on the radio station’s blog by the reporter attending the city council meeting. The station – or the reporter, it isn’t clear who manages the radio station’s feed, which is an issue I’ll discuss later – then tweeted the article using two local hashtags, one for the city itself (although not the shorter, more recently adopted airport code for the city locals have adopted), the other hashtag commonly used to report on council meetings, activities, and issues. The article was retweeted several times using all three hashtags commonly in use for the city and for council meetings. Unfortunately, the article referred to the mayoral candidate as a former aldermanic candidate.

I immediately posted – or rather submitted – a comment correcting the misinformation, saying that in fact the candidate had run for mayor and came a very close second in the race, not for alderman. I was required to provide my email address when leaving the comment (although I was assured it wouldn’t be published).

I checked the article the next day, and was surprised to discover that not only was my comment not posted on the article, but it had silently been corrected with the information I’d provided and using exactly my wording.

So I tracked down the reporter and fired off a somewhat – but not too – intemperate email about the issue. I suggested that if the reporter was not aware of what was happening to comments on the radio station’s web site, she needed to take it up with the powers that be.

The next day I got an email from the station’s news director, informing me of how well qualified the journalist was (Master’s degree, not a mere Bachelor of Journalism), of how hard she works and how tight her deadlines are, and informing me that the reporter had realized her own mistake prior to seeing my comment, had in fact covered the municipal election and had interviewed the candidate, had corrected her article, and that the correct information had been used when the story aired on the 4PM news.

My comment hadn’t been posted because it would have embarrassed me and confused other readers, since the story had been silently corrected. I was also informed that comments on the blog were supposed to further a discussion, not to correct facts or misinformation.

So let’s talk about the many many different ways in which this may not be the way to go with social media as a broadcast outlet and/or member of mainstream media.

You’re using Twitter and you’re hiding behind a corporate presence without indicating who’s doing the tweeting. @cbcbooks does a great job of not doing this by naming the four people who tweet from their account in their bio and ending the tweets with the initials of the person who’s written them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s nice to know who you’re talking to.Your reporters are using Twitter and consider tweets fair game as ‘quotable quotes’ when writing stories (the comment was not made in person to the reporter or during the course of a telephone interview – see points 6 and 9).
You have what you refer to as a blog on your radio station’s web site. But you don’t follow general social media and blog convention rules, which are that when a correction is made, strikeover mode is used.’You are about to write a Comment on this blog entry’ is the wording on the site when one attempts to comment on a story.
Your comment ‘policy’ consists of a single line: ‘Your Comment (No HTML or coarse/ hateful language).’ My comment didn’t contain either but it didn’t survive to posting stage. You allow reporters to post directly to your blog without anyone referring the content prior to posting. As a former proofreader, copy editor, and fact checker, this strikes me as a very dangerous precedent.
Your reporter him/herself reviews comments and decides whether to post them or not. And your reporter does this silently, rather than emailing the commenter to say, ‘hey, thanks for your comment – I realized my error and had already corrected the story before I read your comment – glad to see someone’s on the ball – there I go, writing too fast again! Is it ok if I don’t post your comment?’ To which I of course would have graciously replied, ‘Absolutely – no point in posting it.’ Instead I’m shaking my head and wondering what the heck they’re teaching in Masters of Journalism programs these days.
You tweet stories that have not been proofread, fact checked or copy edited (I suspect using some form of auto tweet system that auto posts when the blog is updated).
You have no social media policy posted on your web site for your reporters or the general public, nor is it possible to track one down when searching for your radio station or the parent company of your station.
You have a different comment policy from the one that is posted on your site. If you don’t permit people to correct errors of fact and only want comments that expand the discussion, say so.
You’ve made it look as if errors you make on your blog don’t matter; only what’s said on air matters.
You don’t seem to understand that Twitter and the internet count too. What you – as a blogger or as a reporter or as a news outlet – post and tweet is you reporting the news – it’s not all about the 4PM radio broadcast when you make information public prior to air time. I didn’t bother to take a screen shot of the story with the misinformation – but now I wish I had.

So – anything I’ve missed here? Think I’m being over-sensitive?

Uncategorized

Program enhancement via live blogging and live tweeting

ruthseeley — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 19:50:27 +0000

This week I was reminded by Melissa Sweet that the Banff Science Communications 2011 program was in progress. I had noticed it a few weeks ago, but had forgotten about it. Using the hashtag #banffscience, Melissa has almost single-handedly collated and curated information from talks, classes, and blog posts about this program for two weeks. The only reason I discovered she was doing so was because I follow enough scientists and science journalists on Twitter to see retweets and start following her and the hashtag, occasionally contributing an article or two I’d discovered (testimony that Canadian scientists are being muzzled by the Privy Council Office in Ottawa was something I thought these science communications people might want to discuss, for instance, so I contributed breaking news on the silencing of Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Dr. Kristi Miller – here’s a roundup of that coverage). When you’re attending a program as intensive as this one, you’re not always able to follow the news.

Oddly, a Twitter account for the program was created – and as of today, has tweeted exactly once, on August 18. The general Banff Centre Twitter account has provided some information, but has failed to recognize the #banffscience hashtag.

I don’t want to be all judge-y and prescriptive here. But people have been live tweeting conferences and events for years now, and this is the second major failure to take advantage of an opportunity for some almost-free public relations I’ve seen this week.

The Banff Centre programs aren’t cheap (in excess of C$5k) and there aren’t a lot of scholarships available for them. Everyone I know who’s attended any kind of course or workshop put on by the Banff Centre has raved about the experience, and the instructors in this program are top notch. The programs have grown, morphed, and expanded over the course of the last twenty years, getting bigger and better and more varied. In this particular program, the enthusiasm of both the participants and the instructors is palpable (see this tweet from John Rennie, one of the instructors, and this post from one of the scholarship winner attendees).

So far I haven’t seen any mainstream media coverage of this particular program. Instead, there was a Globe and Mail article this week about the Banff Centre, in which the claim that it makes Alberta Canada’s new arts hub is made. There’s no mention of the Science Communications program at all.

So here are some suggestions (and a prescription or two):

If you’re marketing something (and the Banff Centre most definitely is marketing its programs, courses and workshops), make a commitment to do so and follow through on it.
If you’ve established a social media presence, don’t neglect it. Use the power of crowd sourcing in particular and social media in general to tap into prospective volunteers. Inviting bloggers and live tweeters to attend and participate and comping them in to events is probably the cheapest marketing and public relations in which you’ll ever invest.
Seize the day by getting out in front of the hashtag. #banffscience is a great hashtag. It’s a shame the Banff Centre doesn’t seem to have to twigged to the fact that it’s being used. But if a co-ordinated social media strategy was in place, the Centre itself would have created – and used – the hashtag.

Good corporate public relations drives employee retention and attraction. It also drives program participation. Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the Science Communications participants returned to the Banff Centre to take the adventure photography course? Or if some of the folks from the creative non-fiction course took the science communications course? Unique programming only goes so far. Right now, according to the Banff Centre’s stats, 75% of program participants are Canadian. But given the strength of the Canadian dollar and the meltdown in the US economy, plus the fact that many of the program’s instructors are Americans, wouldn’t it be nice to ensure there isn’t a 25% drop off in attendance?

I don’t mean to single out the Banff Centre or its Science Communications course. An international literary festival this week also demonstrated that it doesn’t quite get the value or scope of social media either – despite a Twitter feed and two mainstream journalists in attendance, with only three events running simultaneously they were unable to provide coverage of all three events on Twitter. That’s a shame, as well as a huge opportunity missed. It’s really not all that different from the case study/customer success story tactic, in which the client pays to have a case study developed and the client’s customer reaps the benefits of participating in the case study by getting public relations it hasn’t paid for.

Live tweeting and live blogging events may not drive attendance for your current programming. But it has the potential to drive future attendance in 2012, 2013, 2014, and beyond, at a time when your local, homegrown audience may well be vanishing. Don’t discount the ‘been there, done that’ factor or the fact that the ‘staycation’ may not be here to stay. You may well find volunteers among your existing staff who are willing to live blog or live tweet events. You’re paying them anyway. Their enthusiasm for promoting, organizing, and administering the events you put on will only increase if you allow them to participate by turning them into brand ambassadors and allowing them to showcase some of the skills you may not currently be paying them to use. It could be the cheapest professional development you ever offer them. And if you cast your net more widely for volunteer live tweeters, you’ll be amazed at the coverage you get and the goodwill you create. People will be banging down your doors for the opportunity to participate, not just spectate. Increasingly bloggers are transitioning to paid online and mainstream news organizations. You could be making a media friend for life. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?

Filed under: marketing, media relations, public relations, science communications, Social media, Twitter Tagged: Banff Science Communications, live blogging, live tweeting, social media strategy

Bevolution

ruthseeley — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 18:01:17 +0000

After a great meeting with Susan Toy of Alberta Books Canada this weekend, which built on a conversation I’d had with an indie publisher a few weeks ago, I thought I’d do a quick post on what I’m calling ‘bevolution.’ Bevolution is short for ‘book evolution.’

Susan said to me, there are actually five (or six) sales involved in getting a book from author to consumer. Here they are – followed by an additional four steps involved in the consumer purchase decision when the customer is actually in the store with the book in front of them:

1. Author must sell manuscript to agent or acquisitions editor at publishing company (this is two steps if you have or are seeking an agent – you have to sell your book to an agent, who will then sell it to an acquisitions editor at a publishing company).
2. Acquisitions editor must sell book to marketing department.
3. Marketing department must sell book to sales department.
4. Sales department must sell book to retailers and etailers.
5. Retailers and etailers must sell book to consumers.

Once the book is in the store or on the book etailing site, Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam outlined four more steps in the decision-to-buy process:

6. Front cover.
7. Back cover (including marketing synopsis and blurbs from other authors/reviews).
8. First sentence/paragraph.
9. Random sentence/paragraph from the approximate middle of the book.

That’s a lot of bases to cover. It took almost four billion years for human beings to evolve in anything like their current form. Does that put your career trajectory from unknown scribbler to ‘best-selling author who’s a household word’ into perspective a bit?

Filed under: book marketing, marketing, working with authors Tagged: bevolution, book marketing, bookselling

100 Marketing Stats for 2011 (with some charts and graphs thrown in for good measure)

ruthseeley — Thu, 19 May 2011 23:01:50 +0000

HubSpot’s latest 100 [Awesome] Marketing Stats, Charts and Graphs – some good stuff in here – always nice to have a fact or two at one’s fingertips.

The focus on ‘earned media’ as a descriptor for marketers makes me uneasy as a PR person. But check out the 2/3 of the US of A that’s on the ‘do not call’ list, and the percentage of direct mail that never even gets open. But amount of money spent on blogging doubling in what, two years? That’s got to be good news for corporate communicators. Such as myself. Ahem….

Filed under: Uncategorized

Author/Publisher Checklist for Online Bookselling and Promotion

ruthseeley — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:39:54 +0000

I’ve been threatening to create this checklist for a while, but there’s no time like the present, so here goes.

I’m amazed at how often I have to remind authors and publishers (well ok I don’t have to remind them all but when it’s a book I’m involved in promoting or even just one I want to see do well, I can’t help myself) to cover off the basics.

The online book buying and recommendation process is not the same as the in-store buying experience, and while it’s got some advantages (instant gratification when you’re buying an ebook, for instance; no trek to the store or waiting for a special order to come in the case of pbooks), it’s also got some disadvantages. The inability to browse the entire book tops the list for me – while I’m a fairly conventional in-store browser easily hooked or turned off by the first page and I certainly never look at the last page of a book when considering buying it, I do flip through the book and my eye is often caught by a phrase or a paragraph that influences my decision to buy. Cover, paper colour, quality and show-through as well as typography influence me. I rarely buy books I think are ugly. When buying online though, I’ll let content override style if content’s available. If not, you’ve probably lost the sale.

Far too often though I notice publishers (whether traditional or self publishers) haven’t taken advantage of the ‘look inside’ feature on Amazon’s various sites. Borders offers a Google preview feature. At Barnes and Noble it’s ‘see inside.’ Chapters Indigo and Waterstones don’t offer this feature, and I can only hope they’ve got something in the works. And then there’s the matter of coverless books on Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing. So – here’s the pre-release checklist. If anyone can think of anything I’ve forgotten, please chime in in the comment section and I’ll update the list.

Authors: even though it may not seem like your job, you need to be engaged with your own product. If you notice your book is listed but the listing isn’t complete, get on the phone to your publisher, sic your agent on your publisher – just make it happen.

Pre-release checklist for authors and publishers

Publishers

As soon as the book you’re about to release is finalized, get the cover up on online booksellers’ sites.
Apply immediately to activate the ‘look inside’ (or whatever it’s called) feature everywhere you possibly can. People need to be able to browse online and without this feature, they’re dependent on reviews and on previous experiences with the author. If it’s a first novel they haven’t got the latter. And not all reviews are good. It can take a few days for this feature to ‘propagate’ – or whatever the heck it’s called in the online tech world. Don’t delay – and don’t start publicizing the release until it’s up and running. Some people may find it anyway, but you don’t have to make matters worse by promoting a book people can’t begin to judge for themselves.
Get the book listed on the three major book social networking sites, Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari. Make sure a cover image is uploaded for each edition (hardcover, trade paperback, mass market paperback) and for each geographic region (people may not recognize the book if only the UK or only the US or only the Australian cover is posted).
Make sure you add both 10-digit and 13-digit ISBN numbers (having a copy of the book in front of you is helpful for this).
If you’ve invested in a trailer for the book you’re releasing, create a YouTube channel either for your publishing company or for the book and get content up there. You may want to put comment moderation on YouTube – it’s not your grandma’s social networking playground and it’s better to never let comments appear than it is let them get up there and then delete them.
Organize giveways on the book social networking sites for at least some of your titles. Don’t be stingy, especially with first books by unknown authors. In order for word of mouth to work, you’ve got to get mouths moving.
ASK people to add reviews to online book selling and book networking sites. They may do it if you don’t ask but they’re more likely to do it if you remind them to. This is one area in which the online book selling sites have an amazing advantage over bricks and mortar stores – take advantage of it, because it’s the one real advantages you’ve got over the three dimensional in store buying experience.

Authors

Get a decent photo of yourself taken and experiment with converting it to black and white if it’s a colour photo. Choose one you can live with for a while. While it would be nice to have an official photo shoot done, you may not be able to afford this. If you can take a decent self portrait, do it (you’d be amazed how much more interest self portraits generate on flickr than portraits do – presentation of self is fascinating to many). Make a deal with a decent photographer – amateur or pro – to ensure you don’t show up as an egg on Twitter or a big blank on Amazon and Goodreads. It matters. I know Julian Barnes is never going to propose to me. But I buy or read all his books and it isn’t just because he’s an amazing author. It’s also because, based on his photo, he’s someone I’d love to have a conversation with.
While your book’s being edited, make sure you’ve created author profiles on every online site that will be selling your book. That means multiple Amazon profiles – you’ll have to create them for .co, .com, .ca, .au. Don’t reinvent the wheel: use the same profile. This may make the process seem less onerous.
Repeat step 2 for Goodreads, LibraryThing and Shelfari.
Claim your books on the book social networking sites listed in step 3.
If you’ve got a blog or a web site, add the blog feed to the book social networking sites listed in step 3 and push your blog content to these sites.
Add your blog feed to your Facebook page as well and do status updates with new posts as well.
Get someone to take photos of the launch if you’re having one. The photos shouldn’t all be of you – get photos taken of people enjoying themselves at your reading/launch. Video works here too. Then post the photos to your Facebook page, tweet a few of them, blog about the experience (Were you terrified? Did you have fun? Were you artfully keeping your legs crossed so no one would see the run in your pantyhose? How many times did you check to see if your fly was open? Did someone ask a question that startled you, or made you think about the book you wrote or a character you created in a different light?)
Post news about your book – dates it will be available, translation rights sold, foreign rights sold, upcoming interviews, great reviews, interviews that have appeared or that you’re about to do, readings, signings, festivals you’re attending on Facebook and Twitter and the book social networking sites.
Create events when you’re making appearances on Goodreads and LibraryThing – or nag your publisher or publicist or your spouse if s/he’s willing to help – to do so.

What have I missed? Let me know in the comments and I’ll update the post.

Filed under: book marketing, Social media, social media for authors, working with authors

The power of Twitter hits mainstream TV

ruthseeley — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 17:46:02 +0000

For those who aren’t yet convinced of the power – or the merits of Twitter – watch this nine and a half minute clip from the February 4, 2011 episode of Grey’s Anatomy (the really good part starts around the five-minute mark). I’m not embedding it here because I don’t want to violate copyright. But here you have most people’s reactions to Twitter: initial lack of comprehension, disdain and scorn, reluctant agreement to try it, and finally, acceptance, information and knowledge sharing. Since Grey’s Anatomy is a medical show, that knowledge sharing leads not only to collaboration but to lives saved. And yes, it is a TV show, not real life.

Sorry about the subtitles, but English audio’s still available. Please let me know if the link stops working.

Filed under: Social media, Twitter Tagged: collaboration, Grey's Anatomy, knowledge sharing, Twitter and mainstream TV

The Literary Project interviews – me!

ruthseeley — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 20:41:59 +0000

In December of 2010, Gemma Noon of The Literary Project asked if I’d do an email interview with her to talk about marketing and promoting books and authors. I surprised myself by treating it like a real interview, answering the questions in sequence and not revising. I did do the ‘let me just sleep on it’ thing and printed out my answers so I could proofread the hard copy before sending it off. I also added in a link on a relevant topic I happened to come across the day I was answering the questions.

Here’s the interview.

Filed under: marketing, public relations, Social media, social media for authors, working with authors Tagged: marketing books, The Literary Project, working with authors

Media prep, Skeptical Radio, and science-y books for all

ruthseeley — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:37:46 +0000

Several weeks ago it occurred to me that we should have a Canada Reads for non-fiction – and more specifically, for books that appeal to scientists and sceptics (or skeptics, as they call themselves) – to be known as Skeptical Canada Reads.

Naturally I couldn’t keep this idea to myself, and proposed it to the wonderful folks at Skeptical Radio out of Edmonton. Of course, I wanted to do this before Christmas too, because it’s THE season in the book business. I must have forgotten I’m no longer working for a global PR firm with a bevy of assistant consultants at my beck and call (ha!) and enough clout to pitch this to my former firm as a pro bono project (ha! ha!).

Luckily wiser heads than mine prevailed, and the good folks at Skeptical Radio came back to me with a twist on my idea (brainstorming by email): a special pre-Christmas show devoted to great science books (many, but not all of them, written by great scientists). Much to my surprise, I found myself invited to be a guest on the show.

Cue cold sweat. Here’s my dirty little secret: I do know how hard it is to be a spokesperson, and I don’t like being one. Nor, as a PR person, am I supposed to be part of the story – my role is a combination of cheerleader, counsellor, and stage mother. I’m not the star: my clients are. This is why I work so hard on their behalf to develop key messages, ensure they’re media trained, do comprehensive interview preps for them, try to catch all their appearances/read and analyze their media coverage so I can help them do it better next time around.

However, every once in a while it’s good for me to get a taste of my own medicine and a reminder that as I’m issuing ‘say this, don’t say that’ orders and tweaking phrases, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. The good news: I had done a four-page interview prep for myself, and had even arranged the pages so I could see them all without rustling while recording the interview via Skype. The bad news: I was nervous. The worse news: I had neglected to ask that most fundamental of questions, what form will the interview take? So I was little startled when it turned out I was expected to talk for three minutes (Desiree Schell, the host, said she’d prompt me and edit out her prompts afterwards, but that seemed like too much work for her to have do, so I just swallowed hard and told myself I could do this). Apparently I could – she said afterwards no one had ever talked for three minutes straight without being prompted. Wind me up….

Here are the books I talked about:

Massive: The Hunt for the God Particle – Ian Sample
Bright Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America – Barbara Ehrenreich
Bad Ideas?: An Arresting History of Our Inventions – Sir Robert Winston
Newton and the Counterfeiter – Thomas Levenson
Inventing Green* – Alexis Madrigal (due in spring 2011)
The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth* – Stuart Clark (due in spring 2011)
Solar – Ian McEwan
The Honest Look – Jenny Rohn
The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse – Jennifer Ouellette
Written in Stone: Evolution, the Fossil Record, and our Place in Nature – Brian Switek

And here’s the podcast in its entirety (I’m on starting at about 31:00). It’s a great show, with a wonderful variety of suggestions for the serious, the curious, and the hard-to-buy-for on any gift-giving list (don’t forget December babies need birthday presents too). Oh and that word I swallowed when trying to talk about Bright-Sided? That was ‘Calvinism.’ Erm – and I seem to have taken closer to six minutes than three. But mercifully my mispronunciation of both Tycho and Brache got edited out.*

* This cannot be considered proof of God’s existence, but should instead be considered proof that I am, in fact, both loquacious and garrulous.

Filed under: media relations, public relations

Goodreads for authors

ruthseeley — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 17:26:17 +0000

Originally planned in late May 2010 as a comprehensive post on the three major book social networking sites (Goodreads, Library Thing and Shelfari), working with all three sites has led me to change my mind about a single-post comparison of all three. I’m going to break it down into three separate posts and start with Goodreads. Perhaps best-selling authors in late career with full-time assistants have the means to manually upload all the books they’ve read to all three sites, but that’s not us, is it? You can easily export the data you’ve entered on Goodreads to Library Thing and then from Library Thing to Shelfari (but from what I’ve experienced, you do have to do it in that order if you want it to work). Ian Martin at Atomic Fez Publishing talked me through doing those file exports, and I’m hoping he’ll do a post himself on how to do it. [Update: November 23, 2010: here's the post from Atomic Fez that explains how to enter your books into a single database, then export to the other two. Have also realized that I should have been more clear about the fact that this post (in terms of references to 'competing reads') is primarily aimed at fiction authors. Writers of non-fiction can still benefit greatly from using these sites, but the subject-matter competition is far less fierce for non-fiction authors.]

Note that stats are from early June of 2010.

Since this post is designed for authors, let’s start with the ‘why’ rather than the ‘what.’ It’s hard to get up-to-date figures, but take a look at these stats from 2005: 895,755 books published in that year. Of those, 397,900 were published in Canada, the US and the UK. Your book is competing with each and every one of those other books published. Now think about that other very sad statistic, which is that many people read only one book per year – which means your book is competing with more books while the market for books appears to be shrinking. At the same time, there are fewer and fewer bricks and mortar bookstores. Fewer bricks and mortar bookstores means that the opportunity for your book selling as an impulse purchase (assuming the cover is brilliant and it’s displayed in a bookstore’s window) are declining. Increasingly, books are being noticed – and sold – online. That means both authors and publishers need to be online and present. Book social networking sites give you the opportunity to reach your precise target market: avid readers who purchase and read books.

So what the heck is a book social networking site? It’s a web site designed to give readers, writers and publishers a place on the internet to interact, mingle, and share their knowledge and love of books and reading. These sites allow you to create lists of books you’ve read, are currently reading, and wish to read. They also encourage you to rate and review the books you’ve read, and to discuss them. As an avid reader for more than 50 years now, one of the ironies of my life has been that with the exceptions of my years spent working in a bookstore and at university, it’s always been difficult for me to connect in real life with people who share my taste in literature. For years my friends and family told me, ‘I don’t dare buy you a book for Christmas or your birthday because I’m afraid you’ll have already read it.’ Perhaps it’s just my friends and family, but the concept of a gift certificate from a bookstore was anathema to them. I know they felt intimidated, and I just had to accept the fact that even though that wasn’t my intention, if I wanted books I’d have to acquire them myself.

Ironically, connecting with other readers online has been a part of my life for close to 15 years now. Frustrating though it’s been at times (even book chat rooms can be tediously petty), it’s been a marvelously enriching experience. I’ve been introduced to the work of so many authors I might never have encountered. I’ve managed to maintain a knowledge of books published throughout the English-speaking world, not just Canadian and American authors. More important, as time passes and I realize more and more acutely that reading EVERYTHING truly isn’t an option, it’s helped me refine my choices and be a little bit more selective about what I read. It’s the interaction with other readers that’s been key. I’ve decided, for instance, to pass on Colson Whitehead’s work. I tried one, found it a difficult start, and then discussed it with another avid reader on Twitter whose opinion and taste I trust and who’d read the same book I’d attempted. Her advice was ‘pass’ – and so, despite being the kind of person who rarely starts a book without finishing it – I jettisoned Sag Harbor.

Of the three major book networking sites, Goodreads, founded in December 2006, is the biggest, with 3.5 million registered users and 11,000 authors who’ve claimed their books and identified themselves as authors. Here’s the information you need as an author to do this (after you’ve joined the site). Patrick Brown, Community Manager of Goodreads, told me back in June that they add thousands of new users every day. A cautionary note: not all registered users are ‘alpha’ users of a site (defined as logging on to the site every day). We’ve all joined social networking sites of one sort or another and then rarely, if ever, used them. But that’s a lot of potential readers I don’t think any author can afford to ignore in 2010.

The ability to become a fan of a particular author was introduced fairly recently. For that reason, author fan numbers may seem unusually low – they saddened me when I first looked at them, until I came up with my own theory, which is that it’s not just because the feature’s only recently been introduced; it’s because most authors (and most publishers) haven’t yet understood the opportunity Goodreads and other book social networking sites represents. Neil Gaiman has more than 8000 fans; other authors with strong followings on Goodreads include Audrey Niffenegger, Jennifer Weiner, Alexander McCall Smith, Paolo Coelho, and Tamora Pierce.

‘Publishers,’ said Brown, ‘can use the site in a variety of ways, including posting giveaways and encouraging their authors to join the site and make use of it. We don’t have a special account status for publishers at the moment [this feature was recently introduced on Library Thing, however], but a few of them have created some interesting groups. Check out the Graywolf Press group to see one example.’

I’d add – take a look at what Random House Canada is doing with its group site as well. As a member of that group I get email updates whenever they post something new in their ‘Writerly Questions’ series. There are some great interviews with their authors in this series, timed naturally to coincide with and focusing on the release of their new books. These interviews work – in the last six months I’ve read and reviewed Carole Enahoro’s first novel, Living Dangerously Well, and read Steven Heighton’s Every Lost Country as a direct result of reading interviews with these authors.

Then there are the book giveaways, called First Reads. ‘Publishers and authors can use the program to give away advance copies of their books or extra copies of a backlist title to generate interest in a new book,’ said Brown. ‘Through our system, publishers and authors have given away more than 30,000 books since the program was introduced.’ There are a couple of other excellent reasons for publishers and authors to use First Reads. The giveways can help publishers tweak their marketing and promotional materials, as well as determine appropriate press runs by looking at the number of requests received for a very limited number of books. When Andrew Smith set up a Goodreads First Reads giveaway for his first novel, Edith’s War, a total of 1142 people requested a copy. No matter how slow actual sales of your book have been (and let’s face it, publishing is still one of the longest time-to-market product cycles in existence), knowing that people are interested in reading your book(s) is a form of affirmation every author and publisher needs.

The other way publishers and authors can use Goodreads is to generate interest in authors well known in their own countries, but not so well known in others. Given that long time-to-market cycle and the inevitable delays in British authors’ books acquiring North American publishers, for instance, British authors and publishers can do a giveaway of their books that’s restricted to the US or to Canada or to the US and Canada a few months in advance of North American publication. That means by the time the book IS available for purchase in North America, it’s already got readers and fans who’ve rated the book, commented on it – and are far more likely to blog about it and review it on their blogs, mention it on other social networking sites like Twitter, as well as on major online book e-tailing sites like Amazon, Chapters Indigo, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, IndiePride. Never underestimate the power of this kind of advance word-of-mouth recommendation. It may be the electronic version of hand-selling, but it works in much the same way ‘staff picks’ works in bricks and mortar bookstores.

If, by the way, you don’t believe that a lot of bookselling comes down to chance and positioning, let me tell you that the last time I worked in a bookstore, we had a particularly egregious and over-priced book on napkin-folding languishing in our crafts section for nearly two months. Having counted the same eight books two months in a row (prior to totally automated inventory control resulting from the introduction of scanners and bar codes), I was determined to get rid of them for once and for all. I pulled them off the shelf for return to the publisher. I was diverted from the stock room by a customer wanting to make a purchase and flung them on the front counter. Much to my surprise (and before I could even get them properly displayed), they started to sell. Two days later I was calling the other stores in their chain and arranging to have their stock of Napkin Folding for Dummies with More Money Than Sense shipped to my store. I think we sold about 20 of them….

Goodreads is advertiser supported, and membership to the site is free. You can add an infinite number of books read to your ‘my books’ section as part of your free membership (see the forthcoming post on Library Thing for how it differs in this regard). Other ways authors can engage with readers on the site is by blogging on the site (only Goodreads authors are allowed this feature). That doesn’t mean you have to create a new blog – or new content – that’s exclusive to Goodreads. Cut and paste, folks – if you’re already maintaining an author blog or web site, here’s another way to reach millions of potential readers. Authors can create custom polls and trivia quizzes about their books, and they can also use the self-serve advertising platform on Goodreads. One of you Goodreads authors will have to tell me the ins and outs of that feature, but I suspect it’s almost as cost-effective and highly targeted as Facebook ads, so if you know your target market demographics, this could really pay off.

Brown didn’t have a specific country-by-country breakdown of Goodreads members, but said that while the site is English-language only at the moment, it has a ‘robust international user base that remains an active part of the site.’

Goodreads sends a monthly email newsletter to its members. It tends to profile authors who already have huge fan bases, but that could change. Even if it doesn’t, it’s a quick read and will help you, as an author, prepare for your own media interviews and approach them more strategically. Brown said they plan to launch live video chats with authors soon and in spring of 2010 Goodreads hosted its first event in New York City, a literary pub crawl featuring readings by Colson Whitehead, Emily St. John Mandel and Amy King. These events, says Brown, ‘are a fun way to see the impact of all our work. They perfectly fit our mission of bringing people together around a shared love of books and reading.’

Ten tips for authors taking the Goodreads plunge:

do it – if you don’t want people to read your books, why did you go to all the time and trouble of finding a publisher in the first place? Your publisher needs your support and participation, and you are not J.D. Salinger (pretty confident in saying this since his recent death). If and when you become J.D. Salinger, have written and sold as many books as you care to, feel free to terminate your Goodreads/other book social networking membership and revel in your hermit status.
claim your author’s status and your own books
use a profile picture and fill out your profile – you can always edit it later
don’t forget to add a web or blog site of some sort – your publisher’s will do if you don’t have your own dedicated blog or web site
start adding books you’ve read and review a few of them. This doesn’t have to be more than a sentence. Writers were readers before they became writers – remember this.
remember that readers are interested not so much in knowing your favourite colour or what you had for breakfast, but in that mysterious process that results in a book. How you choose your characters’ names, how things changed between draft one and draft 101, scenes you had to cut, scenes that took on lives of their own – this is what readers, not just scholars, crave.
links to particularly thoughtful reviews of your books on your Goodreads author’s blog and your positive comments on those reviews constitutes content. Ignore the negative ones unless you happen to agree with them and plan to remedy the defects in your next work.
it’s not about proclaiming your book (or yourself) Shakespeare’s natural successor. It’s about increasing awareness that you and your books exist. If you don’t build it, they will not come. How many books are published each year? Hundreds of thousands. How many books are in print (the backlist)? Millions and millions. Your latest is just one of them.
remember that the human algorithms work better than the mathematical ones. Just because I look up a book on Amazon doesn’t mean I intend to purchase it or read it – I have my own nefarious reasons for checking some authors’ sales rankings on Amazon. Tracking software doesn’t take into count reasons for viewing a book online that include ‘who is this eejit anyway?’ And really, if I’ve bought a book by an author, I’m not so dense not to think of looking for other works by the same author myself. But if, when I compare books with another Goodreads member or see consistently intelligent reviews, comments and ratings of books I’ve read, I’m going to be far more open to reading books they’ve read and liked that I haven’t yet read.
schedule 15 minutes a day after initially claiming your author’s page and setting up your profile to update content, network with other readers and authors, and compare books. Goodreads makes it very easy for you to find people you already know by importing your email contacts. But be open to networking with people you don’t know. Your email address isn’t revealed to folks you connect with on Goodreads, only to the site itself.

Next post: Library Thing for Authors

Filed under: social media for authors, social networking for authors, working with authors Tagged: authors, book social networks, Goodreads, Library Thing, publishers, Shelfari, social networking