Bookmarketing: Leveraging Social Media -The Learning Curve Scramble

I had to laugh out loud at a comment made re this PW article by a friend and former colleague,

Pete Nikolai, "Is anybody listening? So many people are working so hard to say so much when so few have time to listen, read, view... http://is.gd/1IY8B ."

It kind of sums up the frenzy we're all in... our world has definitely and forever been altered and changed, ...and drastically...and, seemingly overnight!

The "big houses" and booksellers are retooling and many have gone through rounds of cost reducing cuts and lay-offs... trying to adapt, adjust, refocus, realign...as described by the most positive attempt at corporate-speak spin...

But, the realty is...we are here now. And, authors & publishers are scrambling to make the most of the new access... and, access we do have available...

"Technology, science, and inventions have progressed at an accelerated rate during the hundred years of the 20th century, more so than any other century."
http://inventors.about.com/od/timelines/a/twentieth.htm

Among the "greatest recent inventions" are ones that have been communications related... telegraph, radio, telephone, television, home computer, internet...

And, more recent "everyday use" technologies have been built on these... bottom line, we now have unprecedented access to more information and the ability to "communicate" than ever before... the glass is at least half full!

Spotlight on: Social Media: Twitterpated: Religion Authors Dive into Social Media
-- Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2009 3:47:00 PM

"It’s only been two years [since the book release-predictions made in 2007 how-to guide Plug Your Book, Steve Weber], but the entire e-landscape has changed. Facebook, which was barely mentioned in Weber’s chapter, has zoomed to dominate the social networking scene—especially among the core book-buying demographic of 35-to-54-year-olds. In the last six months of 2008, that group expanded by 276% on Facebook and is now doubling every two months. Twitter, still an unhatched egg in the nest back when Weber was writing, has exploded to more than 4.5 million users."

"One of the greatest advantages of social media is that they put authors in the driver’s seat of book promotion, capitalizing on their personal and business contacts to generate word-of-mouth buzz for their books. Social media is something they can—and should—exploit themselves, rather than waiting around for a publisher to promote the book for them."

"If authors and publishers are still learning how to use Facebook to their advantage, the wunderkind Twitter presents even less charted territory. Some authors use Twitter in much the same way they use Facebook..."

"One of the next frontiers of social media is going to be its impact not just on how books are publicized but on whether they’re acquired for publication in the first place."

"One of the most useful features of Twitter is the recent creation of hashtags, which are keywords around which various conversations occur. Hashtags help Twitter followers organize themselves around a topic or leader—for instance, #iranelection or #twilight. For publishers, hashtags are a potential gold mine of information about book buzz, since they reveal who is talking about a book and author."

"One thing that most publishers agree on is that social networking is here to stay, although the individual sites like Facebook and Twitter might lose ground to yet-to-be-invented technologies."

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