TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

By Paul Biba

There are several videos at this link that are worth watching:

Video footage from last week’s 140 Character Conference is now online, so you can watch the panel where Macmillan’s digital marketing team, Ryan Chapman and Ami Greko, teamed up with publishing ronin Richard Nash to discuss the impact of Twitter on the book industry—with some unexpected conclusions, such as: “Twitter won’t save publishing; publishing will save Twitter.”

By Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords

Claudio Soares, a Brazilian author and literary blogger, has launched an intriguing multimedia online publishing experiment involving Twitter, CommentPress, videos, music and ultimately, Smashwords.

A couple years back, Soares published his novel, Santos Dumont Numero 8. The story revolves around an aircraft inventor who numbers each of his inventions with "Santos-Dumont number 1" through "Santos-Dumont number 22." Mysteriously, for some superstitious reason, the inventor refuses to use the number 8.

The book follows eight main characters, seven of whom are intent upon unlocking the truth behind the mystery, and one of whom, I assume, is intent on keeping the reason a secret.
Soares has broken the novel into pieces, and is serializing it from the unique perspectives of each of the characters, each of whom has their own Twitter account. In an interesting twist, the characters will interact with their Twitter followers. This has the potential to create an immersive experience, not just for the community of readers that congregates around the book and its characters as the story unfolds, but for the author as well.

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By David Rothman

How to use Twitter for books marketing—or, to be more precise, relationship building? We passed on some tips earlier, and now Kat Meyer, the star of the TeleRead post, shares additional thoughts. For example, how do you pick people whose posts you want to follow?

Related: Mari Smith’s hashtag tips, to which Kat points. This # stuff is one way to group Tweets related to the topic of your book—or to the book itself. For my novel, the phrase is solomonscandals. Yep, the obvious: the use of the title.

By Paul Biba

This is from the press release. I wonder how it will work out:

“Ratha, female leader of the Named cat clan, paused on the meadow trail, one forefoot raised.”

When Clare Bell sends that sentence through Cyberspace on March 14, she’ll be launching an experiment: a story told 140 characters at a time using the rapidly growing Twitter social networking platform. Bell writes the Named series, young adult science fiction about a developing civilization of sentient prehistoric cats.

Bell has been making creative use of the Twitter platform, which allows members to send status messages limited to 140 characters in length. She recently posted a prequel to her newest book, Ratha’s Courage, and her feline characters make humorous comments on everything from last year’s Presidential election to human Valentine’s Day mating rituals.

Bell’s experiments with Twitter encouraged her to write a short story specifically for posting on the service. Although she isn’t the first to experiment with Twitter fiction, it’s still mostly unexplored territory, and Bell had to figure out how to create a story that would work within the very short messages allowed by Twitter. She considered telling the story entirely in dialog, with each character having its own Twitter username, but finally decided a straightforward narrative would be easier to follow in such short segments. …

Bell intends to collect and post each day’s tweets on a website, so that readers who join in the middle can catch up. Daily story updates will appear on the “Ratha and the Named” Facebook page.

By David Rothman

TeleRead’s Twitter Champ just might be Kat Meyer, in Tucson, Arizona, who’s done those incisive Q&A’s with Smashwords’ Mark Coker, Stanza’s Neelan Choksi and others.

Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, now up to 54,807 followers, still a fraction of Barack Obama’s 379,716 before the First Keyboarder apparently abandoned Twitter for more conventional media. Unlike Obama, Kat can’t hold White House news conferences.

Thanks to Twitter, however, more people will know about Kat and maybe do business with her. She is author of The Bookish Dilettane Blog, as well as a book sales and marketing professional with past experience at Harcourt, the University of Arizona Press and elsewhere. I’d be shocked if Kat did not write a book at some point. Check out her Tweets—her Twitter entries—to see a pro at work.

A virtual coffeehouse

Whether she goes on to a book or not, Kat knows how to draw a crowd in a book-related context and could well serve as a good example for many other writers and publishers who prefer a low-key approach.

Kat avoids obnoxious personal ballyhoo, using Twitter as a coffeehouse, where she chit-chats and talks up friends. Followers are tempted to to click on her Twitter profile and blog-link there—and perhaps go on to Google her work samples, including, I’d hope, the TeleRead Q&A’s. Twitter lets her choose between sending a message to one friend, a group or all 1,500. In effect it’s a mix between a one-to-one instant message and mailing list without many of the usual list hassles. Twitter users can post and read from the Web or via programs for a number of devices, everything from iPhones and iPod Touches (try the Tweetie app) to desktops (Twhirl and Tweetdeck, for example).

But how to get the world to notice your own e-books or p-books after signing up for Twitter or another social network? Social nets can involve more than just messages back and forth, but in the message area, I’ll pass on a few tips to use when communicating with friends, clients and people potentially in both categories. The current recession makes networking all the more useful. There are even job-related networks such as Linked-In, and Facebook is after the same career-related business even though it began life as a social network for college students and still is largely for personal users.

Book-specific tips

For book-specific advice for Twitter and other social networks, check out Bring Sexy Back to the Book Party in the Digital Age,  Laurel Touby’s excellent presentation from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last month. Chris Brogan offered his own share of good tips on blogging and social media, a session now viewable on the Web, where he discussed the new currencies of attention and trust, his terms. With Twitter, the goals are similar.

Laurel herself founded MediaBistro, a media professional site, which, yes, is on Twitter just like her. She sees online "book parties" as especially valuable because "your message is spread  by word of mouth" and the results are measurable. What’s more, the conversion can remain online for years. And you’re building a community. "The audience wants to interact with the author," Laurel said at TOC, "but they also want to interact with like-minded souls, just as they would at a traditional book party. And those relationships people have reflect back in positive ways onto the author, onto the book, onto the publisher who brought them together. It’s a beautiful and virtuous circle."

To find useful people in your book’s area of interest, you can try Twitter’s search engine—also good for topics—or Twellow.com. Go ahead; guess and check out names. The right trendies just may be on Twitter. None other than Daniel Schorr, the 92-year-old NPR news analyst, who at time has succeeded by sticking to his beliefs and not being a trendy, recently started Twittering and is a convert with 4,128 followers.

Some Twitter wisdom from Publishing Trends

Meanwhile my diligent friends at Publishing Trends (subscription information) have compiled a handy list of Twitter-oriented tips, and I suspect that Laurel and Kat would agree with most everything in PT’s detailed Twitter guide. Ahead are highlights, just a sample of what you’ll find in the actual newsletter from March 2009.

1. "Developing your Twitter presence." "The number-one tip from people we talked to: Publishers shouldn’t be afraid to get personal on Twitter, and their tweets shouldn’t sound like marketing." Chris Brogan, the social media expert, told PT: "The best people using Twitter are the ones who talk back to people, not just the people who are talking about their dumb stuff." Look for companies whose Tweets please you, then think about similar tactics and strategies, Chris says. Ron Hogan, who started the Beatrice.com literary blog and now blogs for MediaBistro’s Galley Cat and produces workshops and conferences for writers, says publishers should "let the person running the account put a personal spin on their posts, not just announcing every press clipping or YouTube clip that comes down the pike." Same advice would apply to others. Twitter’s length limit is too short anyway for extended ballyhoo in one place—just 140 characters or perhaps 20 words or so. Use Twitter for chat and informal pointers to other Web pages. The percentage of business conversation depends on whom you’re in touch with. Just don’t overdo it. Blog headlines are okay if people expect ‘em.

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