TOC Conference: Using Social Media to Build Book Audiences

by Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 2/11/2009 8:44:00 AM

An afternoon panel at the TOC focusing on book distribution and social networking captured the convergence of user-generated content, highly engaged and connected online communities and print-on-demand technology.  The growth of social media—sites like Facebook, Twitter,  MySpace and others—and their ability to aggregate huge numbers of consumers around a range of interests is both an online phenomenon and an opportunity for publishers.

The panel highlighted the utility of two book-focused social media sites, WeRead, a site allied with POD publisher Lulu.com, that lets readers list favorite books, write reviews and comment on books, and Scribd.com, a site that lets writers upload and publish all manner of unpublished documents and offers its own form of content syndication. Both sites have attracted large communities of readers (WeRead has about 3 million and Scribd claims 50 million readers a month) and offer impressive platforms for both unpublished authors seeking a publisher (or an audience) and publishers looking for a marketing platform or demographic information about the sites' critical mass of readers.

Both WeRead’s Krishna Motukuri and a spokesperson for Scribd outlined the growth and utility of their sites and the various ways they work with publishers and writers of all kinds. WeRead is a “recommendation engine,” Motukuri said, that also operates through Facebook (200 million members) and offers virtual book clubs, personalized book shelves and generates millions of ratings and reviews.  Scribd offers its iPaper application—a flash reader that allows creators to upload original writings in an app that permits both uniform publication display of documents and the content to be embedded off the Scribd.com site and easily shared. Both sites detailed how they work with publishers like HarperCollins, Random House and others as well as unpublished writers.