Twitter Twists for Authors and Publishers

Twitter is a great tool to launch a book campaign. A foundation that can support the walls of the more detailed, strategic marketing effort to follow.

For example, a short blurb giving the title, author's name, etc., gets your book's and your credentials in the minds eye of the readers AND in the search engines (SEO)...PLUS, you can add a link to a more detailed marketing venue such as Facebook, a review page, your website or point of purchase page, etc.!

This is heavy artillery for a little blurb!

More detailed author/publisher Twitter strategy is spelled out by Cindy Ratzlaff in the Business Insider:

5 Twitter Tips for Authors and Publishers Maximum Visibility Playbook Tips


The book is written and ready to publish. So how do you and your publisher spread the word, create excitement and ultimately drive people to take the action of purchasing and reading the book? These days a well-rounded social media strategy must include Twitter. Twitter is a nimble, real-time megaphone ready to create both ambient awareness (“Oh, yeah, I heard about that book…) and advertorial awareness (I read a great review of that book).

Twitter is to a social media campaign what PR is to a book marketing campaign.

Twitter, however, is not a marketing campaign. Twitter is part of a full strategic campaign and acts as a megaphone to blast your message to millions of people and invites them to your website, Facebook page or other venue for a deeper conversation. A book marketing campaign needs distribution, point of purchase display, publicity, an advertising concept and a highly motivated author. With those things in place, Twitter can:

Share the author’s excitement with followers in real time.
Direct people to a link to buy the book.
Blast out late breaking news such as media appearances & live events.
Share excerpts from the book either in short snippets or via a link to a longer passage.
Encourage others to spread the word.

Here are 5 quick tips and techniques that any author or publisher can use right now to enhance a book marketing campaign.

1. Move content. Use Twitter to move content from your Blog and your Facebook posts to your Twitter fan base by installing the Twitter app on your Facebook fan page. This will auto-tweet everything you post on Facebook, with a link back to your Facebook fan page to read any post longer than 140 characters. If you are auto-importing your blog to your Facebook fan page, it will also be tweeted out to your followers automatically, again with a link to continue reading. This serves a couple of purposes. First, it shares content on three different sites, increasing the number of potential readers for every post. Second, it invites Twitter users back to Facebook to become fans whenever they click on the shorten Twitter link. Third, Facebook will have a live link to the post on your blog through Networked blogs. So one post introduces your Twitter fans to two additional

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Publishing Industry On The Cusp of “Transformational Growth”

At least that's what Barnes & Noble chairman, Len Riggio, thinks and I tend to agree with him...and have said so numerous times on both my blogs.

There has definitely been a resurgence in reading, and, by natural extension, bookselling...due primarily to the new digital e-readers and peripheral tech gadgets...but, a surprising growth in printed book technology and sales has also been hooked to all this new digital enthusiasm.

And printed book sales are also up among the younger, eReader-exposed generation.

My related posts on this topic are listed together here (Publishing/Writing: Insights, News, Intrigue Blog) and here (Writers Welcome Blog).

These latest details from Publishers Weekly by Jim Milliot:

Riggio Tells Publishers 'Transformational Growth' Ahead

In an upbeat and optimistic keynote speech about the book market at the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers, Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio said the industry is on the cusp of “transformational growth” led by the sale of digital content, and he urged publishers to produce different kinds of e-books ranging from novellas to books that can be updated. He said it was wrong to view bookselling and publishing as a “zero sum game” in which the only way to grow is to grab market share, with a limit to the number of books people will buy. Riggio said he sees the digital marketplace expanding at a greater pace than many analysts, and said the sale of e-books is adding new customers and is just not replacing bound books. With the addition of e-books, B&N’s long tail is getting even longer, Riggio said. He noted that during the peak two-week holiday period not only did digital sales soar but comp sales of print books rose as well.

As bullish as Riggio is on e-books, he told publishers B&N remains committed to operating its network of stores. He reiterated comments that the bricks-and-mortar stores are crucial to the retailer’s strategy of selling the Nook family of devices and related content. “Our members who own a Nook are buying more than 60% more book units in total, and are spending an average of 120% more with Barnes & Noble,”. Riggio said. Customers have bought “millions of devices,” Riggio said, explaining that some customers come in to a store, browse the shelves and buy an e-book and sometimes buy both an e-book and print book.

He was glad publishers had come to value the importance of full service bookstores and once again predicted that as the mass market paperback fades mass merchants will either downsize or abandon their sale of books. The new bookselling landscape will likely feature, in addition to B&N, smaller format stores and specialty stores as well as independents. Riggio said, telling publishers that he is more confident than ever that booksellers and publishers are aligned.

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How About a 517 Page Single Sentence Book?

This would be a dream for writers who don't like periods. Talk about a flow of words...like a 300 pound man skiing down Mount Everest!

Writers have to really think outside the box to appreciate this concept. It really shouldn't work at all, but does...and does so with acuity.

Mathias Énard’s Zone is such a tome...and a brilliant work by all accounts! Apparently, once you get into this story (or sentence) you don't want to get out of it or put it down.

Holy shitski, I sometimes have trouble with short sentences! So I was flabbergasted when I read this account of the French author, Mathias Énard (pictured), by Dennis Abrams in Publishing Perspectives:

Mathias Énard’s Zone: Brilliance in a Single 517 Page Sentence

It really shouldn’t work at all — Matias Énard’s Zone.

This novel, the story of Francis Servain Mirkovic, fighter in the Balkan Wars, spy, and amateur historian, traveling from Milan to Rome by train, carrying a briefcase filled with names, photos, and information about the violent history of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean – the “Zone,” as Mirkovic refers to it, information that is being sold to the Vatican, has no right to be as brilliant as truth be told it is.

This is a novel in which the only physical action that takes place in the present is when Mirkovic gets up from his seat to go to the bar car, from there to the rest room to sneak a smoke, and then back to the bar car. But it is about so much more than that.

Mirkovic’s life as a soldier fighting for Croatia. His life as a spy. Unseemly sexual encounters. Venice. Paris. Alexandria. Salonika. The Holocaust. The Spanish Civil War. Algeria. Gaza. Troy. The entire bloody history of the Mediterranean, from modern times to the Trojan War. Not to mention a symbolic overlay of Homer and the Trojan War that would be enough to sink any other book. But it doesn’t.

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Publishing, Writing and Marketing --> Getting Good Advice

I have been following Kristen Lamb's Blog for some time now and can say with some authority that her blog is an excellent example of a well-written, thoughtful, educational and...best of all... CLEAR advice blog.

Kristen (pictured) was in international sales and marketing before entering the writing field. She has trudged through the trenches of the writing, editing, publishing and public speaking jungle...acquiring a wealth of knowledge along the way and is now a published author and sought after mentor.

Her best-selling book, We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media , is a must have in your reference library.

About Kristen Lamb (excerpted from her blog):

The Warrior Writer Blog is dedicated to teaching authors tactics to survive and thrive in the new paradigm of publishing. The information presented here is designed not only to improve your writing and marketing skills, but to develop the character strength of the elite writer.

Kristen Lamb is the author of the best-selling book We Are Not Alone—The Writer’s Guide to Social Media. She is currently represented by Gina Panettieri of Talcott Notch Literary. Kristen worked in international sales before transitioning into a career as an author, freelance editor and speaker. She takes her years of experience in sales & promotion and merges it with almost a decade as a writer to create a program designed to help authors construct a platform in the new paradigm of publishing. Kristen has guided writers of all levels, from unpublished green peas to NY Times best-selling big fish, how to use social media to create a solid platform and brand. Most importantly, Kristen helps authors of all levels connect to their READERS and then maintain a relationship that grows into a long-term fan base.

Visit Kristen's website to learn more

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Ebook Growth Varies in Different Industrialized Countries->Reasons Why

Why is ebook growth exploding in the U.S. and U.K. and just creeping along in Japan and France?

Different business cultures? Different distribution systems? Different resale structures?

Some of each, but not in the way you might imagine. If you want to learn a little inside poop about publishing and distribution structures in various other industrialized nations and how they may affect and compare to our own system...then here is an exceptionally intuitive analysis given by professor Ken Sakamura (pictured) in the Mainichi Daily News :

E-book publishing industry needs new model that suits all

E-books have finally caught on in Japan. Mobile phone companies and home electronics manufacturers jumped into the market with their latest products starting in the second half of last year. The so-called method of "jisui" (cooking for oneself) -- or the self-digitization of paper books into e-books -- has become popular among people tired of waiting for new books to be digitized, ironically spawning how-to books about doing it yourself.

I have no intention of arguing whether electronic or paper books are better. Just as the majority of music distribution now takes place online, it is clear that in the long run, the e-reading terminals that can talk to the network will make e-books the mainstream. Over 10 million e-readers have already been sold in the U.S., and according to some predictions, over half the books bought there in 2014 will be electronic.

At the same time, however, readers aren't completely happy with their e-readers. Terminals that use reflective electronic paper can be read under sunlight, are lightweight, and have long-lasting batteries. But their display screens are black and white, and the pages are slow to switch. On the other hand, all-purpose tablets with color displays cannot be read under sunlight, are heavy, and the batteries are short-lived. However, it is only a matter of time before such technical problems are addressed and solved.

What bothers me more at the moment is the extremely varied degrees to which e-books have been accepted in industrialized nations, which, at first glance, appear to be facing this new technological era under similar conditions. E-books that are read on dedicated terminals have become very popular both in the U.S. and the U.K., where in just the past few years, many new books have been released in both paper and e-book forms. In the U.S., there are over 800,000 general books available in e-book form for a fee.

Meanwhile, e-books have been very slow to catch on in Japan and France, although Japan is seen to have the world's largest market of e-books read on mobile phones. As it turns out, however, the majority of these e-books are comics, and particularly those that are difficult to buy in general bookstores, so there is a subtle difference between what is taking place in Japan and the shift from paper publishing to e-publishing seen elsewhere.

For Japanese electronic readers, which have been advertised widely in Japan since the end of 2010, their recent appearance on the market actually marks their second try. The first attempt, which went on the market some years ago as the world's first electronic paper terminal, was pulled off the market soon afterward without so much as generating a buzz.

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Publishing Piracy Intrigue: China Stepping on Japan Copyrights...Oh, and Apple is Bad Boy Too!

Not only is China violating some of Japan's copyrights through it's huge internet search beast Baidu (on it's Baidu library)...but, Apple iPad is also stomping all over portions of Japanese copyrighted material.

And guess what? The Chinese Baidu search beast has made a successful effort at policing it's copyright infringements whereas Apple has NOT! Interesting, no?

This intriguing story unfolds on the Japan & China 'Realtime' Report blogs of the Wall Street Journal:

The publishing business may be in the throes of the unknown, but one thing is for sure: Japanese publishing giants aren’t afraid to pick up the sword – or pen — in the name of copyright protection.

The consortium of four Japanese publishing associations that joined forces to take on Apple Inc. has expanded the reach of their sword to China. The associations requested Baidu, the beast of Internet search in China, to take steps to prevent illegal uploads of copyrighted material on “Baidu Library.” In the absence of effective policing and preventive tactics pirated versions of Japanese manga, anime and novels have run rampant on the free document-sharing service where users can upload and surf files for free, according to a joint press release on Monday. It was signed by the Japan Book Publishers Association, the Japan Magazine Publishers Association, the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan and the Digital Comic Association.

“Authors and publishers have made removal requests to Baidu each time the existence of these ‘digital bootlegs’ is discovered, but there is no end to the illegal uploading of data and the cat-and-mouse-game continues,” said the statement, adding that “Baidu bears grave responsibility for this problem.”

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Libraries and E-Book Circulation and a Kindle Flaw

E-books have surpassed all expectations of popularity and have actually gained prime beachfront status in the book real estate landscape.

Libraries are now lending out e-books and some publishers are trying to figure out how not to be taken too much advantage of...while concurrently maximizing their e-book profit...Harper Collins is trying to accomplish this by limiting library, e-book circulation to 26 checkouts before the e-book goes up in a puff of electronic smoke.

It seems all this new tech has really simplified and made processes much more efficient...but, nobody has figured out just how to make any money from all the new shitsky!

Aimee Levitt , of the St. Louis Riverfront Times, has this to say:

Publisher Attempts to Limit E-Book Circulation, Libraries Fight Back

It's a brave new electronic world we live in, where blogs like this one that you're reading have replaced daily newspapers, e-mail and Facebook updates have replaced letters and phone calls, and the heavy stacks of textbooks that used to weigh down schoolkids may now be replaced with e-readers.

Only problem is, nobody's figured out how to make money on all this yet, and everybody's afraid of being taken for a sucker. That's why last week HarperCollins Publishers announced that every e-book it sells to a library can only be circulated 26 times. Then it will disappear into the electronic ether. (E-books purchased before last week, however, can continue to be checked out indefinitely.)

Librarians, naturally, were not pleased. Two librarians in the Philadelphia area, Brett Bonfield and Gabriel Farrell, have organized a boycott of HarperCollins, which encompasses more than 30 different imprints. They argue that libraries don't have the funds to keep purchasing e-books; depending on the check-out period, a book that circulates 26 times would only last a year to a year and a half, less time than many printed books.

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