Spotlight on: Social Media:
Twitterpated: Religion Authors Dive into Social Media
-- Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2009 3:47:00 PM
By Jana Riess
In the excellent 2007 how-to guide Plug Your Book, online marketing expert Steve Weber provided authors tools and techniques for creating book buzz on the Internet by leveraging Amazon, employing search engine optimization strategies and blogging. There was even a short chapter on a newfangled thing called social networking, focused almost exclusively on MySpace.
It’s only been two years, 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. And MySpace? So 2006. Nowadays, authors are not on MySpace unless they are (a) writing for a YA audience; (b) in a rock band; or (c) having a midlife crisis. (See also b.)
Why are publishers so twitterpated (a prescient term used in the movie Bambi for true love) with social media? “There’s a level of spontaneity and excitement involved in reaching not only those who may be familiar with a company’s product, but also connecting with those who may not be,” says Woodley Auguste, senior publicist for the Strang Book Group, which uses social media not just for publicity but also for author acquisitions and product development. What’s more, social media offer a rare opportunity to do inexpensive niche marketing—a precision tool that publicist Kelli Daniel-Richards of Tarcher appreciates. “Through Twitter and Facebook, one can actually search for one’s niche,” she says. “When looking to boost our TarcherBooks Twitter followers, I often search for New Age practitioners and Julia Cameron fans.” Daniel-Richards does “hot galley” giveaways to excite anticipation for a book, as with the forthcoming Cameron title The Artist’s Way Everyday: A Year of Creative Living (Tarcher, Oct.).
Facebook: It’s All About Connection
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. This is certainly true on Facebook, where people accumulate friends (both actual and virtual). Although it’s early yet, it seems clear that Facebook is a particularly strong way to drive word-of-mouth buzz—if authors don’t overplay their hand.
Social media is “about building community,” says Jeff Loper, director of marketing for nonfiction trade books at Thomas Nelson. “If you engage in social media with a marketing mindset, you are going to be sniffed out by the online community and do more damage than good.” The key is cultivating groups of like-minded people who care about similar issues and creating a space where authors can interact with readers, and potential readers, in meaningful ways. Some people can be so single-minded about promoting themselves and their work that they alienate the people they are trying to reach. “I accepted a Facebook friend request from someone with whom I had eight friends in common,” says Susan Isaacs, author of Angry Conversations with God (FaithWords, Mar.) “My wall got slammed with posts about real estate. He wasn’t interested in knowing me; he was just a real estate broker. I defriended him immediately.” Lesson? Too much obvious self-promotion is a bad thing.
Having said that, Facebook is a great place to post information about book signings, offer links to favorable reviews and discuss various aspects of the writing life—as long as it’s not too frequent or impersonal. It’s also an amazing tool for targeting very specific audiences. When InterVarsity Press was gearing up to promote N.T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (May), one of several advertising strategies the publisher employed was to target the people who were Facebook fans of a theologian with the opposite view. “We got a good number of hits after we did that,” says Heather Mascarello, IVP’s print publicity manager.
New Kid on the Block: Twitter
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: as a way to keep in touch with what friends are doing and thinking. But others have broken out in new directions. Boston University professor Stephen Prothero (@sprothero), for example, recently started tweeting an online course on the world’s religions in 140 characters or less. (Consider this crystallization of Taoism: “Confucius sucks. Ritual=empty. True Way=wu-wei, natural as flowing water. Be free, be qi, live 4 now 4 ever. Ahh!”) Prothero’s tweets relate directly to his 2007 book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (HarperOne). Although the book got the kind of media attention publicists dream about, with features on Oprah and Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, the advantages of the Twitter course are that it keeps the book on people’s long-term radar and offers them something the book does not. In Amazon reviews, for example, the top complaint of readers was that the book diagnosed the problem of religious illiteracy without actually teaching readers what they needed to know about world religions. The Twitter course provides that, in tiny digestible chunks for Prothero’s followers, who numbered over 500 after just two weeks on Twitter.
Another strategy is the “twinterview,” a Twitter interview conducted wholly through 140-character bursts. Authors like doing it because interview responses are so easy to prepare and go out to hundreds, and potentially thousands, of people on Twitter. However, people using the twinterview for publicity purposes should be careful about wearying their followers: since each portion comes to followers separately, even a short twinterview risks overwhelming the in-boxes of fans and friends. Scot McKnight, an author with Paraclete, Zondervan and Thomas Nelson who has built a fan base in the emerging church conversation, has learned to be judicious about twinterviews. “I gained friends and I lost friends because it’s annoying for your Twitter feeds to have a hundred tweets by me in an hour,” says the author of Fasting (Thomas Nelson, Feb.).
Twitter’s most foundation-shattering contribution to date may turn out to be in the area of events and conferences. Devoted on-the-ground texters can send an author, book signing or hot-button issue into the public consciousness in real time. At the Great Emergence, a December 2008 conference to celebrate Phyllis Tickle’s book by the same name (Baker, Nov.), there were only about 300 people attending. However, according to organizer and author Tony Jones (The New Christians; Jossey-Bass, 2008), “the social media footprint of the two-day event was about 100 times larger. We ran a Twitter feed on a large video screen throughout the event, had participants call in live updates to a regular podcast, and encouraged people to live-blog the event.”
Advance Buzz
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. “Online social media is one of the main reasons Mad Church Disease was written, published, and is currently selling,” says Chris Fann, marketing manager for Zondervan, which published the January book on ministry burnout. In 2007, author Anne Jackson launched www.madchurchdisease.com to conduct marketing research via surveys of Christians experiencing church fatigue. “Within 48 hours of launching the site, over 300 blogs had linked to the survey and promoted the Web site,” says Fann. Now Jackson has more than 2,400 Facebook friends and more than 4,000 followers on Twitter.
Even successful authors can benefit from advance online buzz. At Thomas Nelson, social media is a large part of the promotional strategy for Don Miller’s fall book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (Sept. 29). The publisher will use short quotes from the book for Miller’s tweets, and longer content via Facebook—strongly encouraging people to leave their own comments and responses to the book, says marketing director Kristi Henson. There will also be an unusual galley giveaway in which online clues will be provided about the whereabouts of bookstores that have a bound ARC, before the book’s release. Lucky fans will not only get the galley but also Miller’s phone number for feedback. “Yes, it will be Don’s real phone,” says Henson. “And, yes, he’s taking their feedback seriously.”
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. Publishers can also track “retweets,” which are forwarded Twitter messages that can exponentially increase the size of an audience for a book link or recommendation.
Social media is still evolving, so it’s difficult to hazard grandiose predictions. 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. “That’s the beauty of social media and the online world,” says Thomas Nelson’s Loper. “It advances, it morphs, it grows. And who knows what will be next?”
And see the 10 Commandments of Social Media.
