The Post Pub

GoodReads Best of 2007 List

In today's GoodReads newsletter, I received a list of Goodreads' Most Popular Books of 2007. Says the newsletter, "So why is our list better than any other? Goodreads can tell you what people are reading now, which is very different from what people are buying. "

They don't specify what that means, exactly, but I guess they mean that members of GoodReads are reading or re-reading things that they bought in past years; that they're borrowing from the library; and that (in the case of The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird) they've been assigned to read in school.  ** Attention, marketers:  that trio, plus the Harry Potter volumes below, indicates a large demographic of readers under the age of 22 **

Here's their list:

Cool Stuff, Courtesy of Publishing Insider

1. 2008 Winter Books Preview from USA Today (updated regularly; worth bookmarking)
2. America's Most Literate Cities 2007

Thanks to Publishing Insider for the links.

Best Books of 2007, Continued.

A quick post to mention that the Top 100 Customers' Picks are now available on Amazon.

Publishing Hits & Misses of 2007

Thanks to a friend, this AP article was brought to my attention today. It begs the question, "What defines a literary success?"

I was surprised to find that Junot Diaz's book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is considered a flop for selling 27,000 copies. Everywhere I look, I see Oscar Wao reviewed, endorsed, praised and advertised. A friend and I tried to find a copy to buy at the Barnes & Noble in Forest Hills, Queens (NYC) two days ago, and were surprised to hear that the copies had sold out.  Plenty of copies of the hit Eat, Pray, Love were everywhere I looked in the store. What made Wao fly off the shelves four days before Christmas?

What is a literary "hit" in this day and age?  Is it the buzz factor -- hearing the author and the book title everywhere you go, within your own little world -- or is it pure sales, plain and simple?  And how much does a movie option, or the hope thereof, influence whether a book sells?

All questions worth exploring here in 2008.

2007 Best Books of the Year: Lists

Due to the general craziness of December, posting will be light at The Post Pub during the holiday season.  However, book-related end-of-year lists have started coming out in a variety of places. I'll do my best to gather & post links to them here on the blog.

Official Lists

• Book Sense Picks Highlights: 2007
• Boston Globe: Best Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2007
• The Economist: Books of the Year 2007
• Kansas City Star's Top 100 Books of 2007
• New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2007
• New York Times 10 Best Books of 2007
• Publishers Weekly: Best Books of 2007  (Note: Because the source material timed out on me, this is a link to the list as posted on Zaadz.)
• School Library Journal's Best Books of 2007

Social & Community Picks

• Amazon: books tagged "Best Books of 2007"

Fun Stuff

• Boing Boing: Best Book Covers of 2007

Have anything to add?  Leave it in the comments below.

How to Spot a Shill

There's an interesting discussion about this going on at Amazon. Food for thought for authors who are planting fake book reviews.

Books Meme: Total, Last, Meaningful

This book-related meme has been going around for years. (See also: here, here & here.) What are your answers?  The Post Pub tags all readers that stop by. Leave a link to your response in the comments.

Here's the latest iteration of the meme, with the Pub Editor's responses:

Total number of books I own

At least 400, probably more in storage, if you count college textbooks sitting in milk crates in an attic.

Last book I read

Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich

Last book I bought

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Five books that have meaning to me:

1. The World According to Garp, by John Irving - because it's set in New England, where I'm from, and I've loved it since I was 17
2. Working Men, by Michael Dorris - because I adore his writing; and because I met him and his wife Louise Erdrich at a special invite-only tea for young writers when I was a freshman at Dartmouth
3. Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison - because it's the first book whose ending left me gasping with sympathy for the characters and for the author
4. Jude the Obscure, by Thomas Hardy - because it's the second book whose ending left me gasping
5. The Father, by Sharon Olds - just because

Literary Village

From today's Interesting Thing of the Day, an article about a Welsh village where there is 1 bookstore for every 37 residents. Sounds like heaven.

The highest concentration of visitors descends on the town during the last few weeks of May for an event that has become world renowned: The Guardian Hay Festival. Launched in 1988 by Peter Florence and now attracting some 80,000 attendees annually, this literary festival has drawn famous writers such as Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, John Updike, and Don DeLillo, among many others, to give readings and conduct book signings for the assembled crowd. One unique aspect of the festival is the fact that attendees are likely to run into their literary heroes in the street (or at the pub) because of the small size of the town.

HarperCollins and MySpace Co-Brand an Environmental Book

HarperCollins and MySpace are co-branding a young adult book on how to save the environment.

This effort is engineered to succeed, for the following reasons:

1. By co-branding the book with MySpace, HC takes advantage of a built-in, impassioned audience looking for tools to help them make a difference;
2. The message of the book is at the forefront of peoples' minds (and the media's);
3. The book will capitalize on vanity by publishing the name of every single MySpace user who contributes a tip via the book's MySpace page.

I really like #3 -- it brings the phenomenon of user-generated media to the old-fashioned, prestigious world of publishing. Who doesn't want to see their name in a book?  But one has to wonder if the resulting list will drive the page count to 1,000 (that's a lot of dead trees and plastic fiber, recycled or not).

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so this was inevitable, and, partnerships-wise, probably pretty painless.  Nevertheless, it's exciting to see someone in publishing doing it right.

On a smaller scale, authors who've acquired a lot of Friends should be using MySpace, Facebook, Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing and other social networking sites in a similar manner:  as distribution channels for getting a message out to an audience that's already proven itself receptive. (And, in the case of bookshelf-cataloging sites, motivated to buy vs. borrow.) 

As for co-branding books with social sites... in the era of product placement, it's an intriguing direction to take.  If users weren't so fickle, it would seem smart for publishing companies to acquire some of these sites.  But users are fickle, and publishing companies may not be comfortable owning social sites that allow readers to promote other publishers' titles.  So... ay, there's the rub.  Still, a trend to watch.

Blogs, Social Media, and Authors: Where to Begin?

When launching a blog focused on discussing how the internet affects the experience of selling, buying and reading books, one can feel a bit overwhelmed by the question, "Where do I start?" 

Let's start with a biographical disclaimer:  I, the Editor, am a blogging and social media consultant. I work with authors to help them establish a foothold in the ever-changing digital media landscape.  In short, I help them construct and brand their blogs, websites, social media profiles, and newsletters.

That's the fun part. 

Then I help them find readers, with the hope that readers of free online content will eventually convert to readers of purchased, hard-copy books.

That's a little less fun... only because it's more difficult. 

Online marketing with a goal of selling books can be challenging, because the readers are everywhere, and they're on the move.  The competition for internet users' attention is more hectic than ever, with over 100 million blogs and many hundreds, if not thousands, of social networking websites in existence.  The internet is fracturing off into "nanoaudiences" centered on very specific interests.  People go where they find a message that resonates with them, and they're fickle; they may not stay for long before moving onto the next thing.

It's for this reason that I advise authors to devote time to building great blogs instead of chasing after the latest hip social networks -- because a dedicated blog readership may stick around for years, whereas a social networking site may lose its core audience within months. (As an example, as of this writing, all of my friends, ages 24-40, have abandoned ship on MySpace and are becoming active on Facebook.  Many of us were active on Friendster before that, and a few of us on Tribe.net.)

Still, blogs take time and savvy to develop.  It's rare for a non-corporate blog or website to command a market share the size of a Dooce.com, HuffingtonPost, or TMZ.  These days, it's not uncommon for an average website or blog to receive a maximum of 80 to 100 visitors a day. 

Using the standard sales conversion rate of 2% -- meaning 2% of your visitors will buy something after visiting your site and reading your message -- that can amount to as few as 2 books sold per day.

Many authors -- some of them frustrated and with very limited time to devote to publicity and marketing -- wonder if it's worth the effort to maintain an active blog or a consistent online presence for a sales rate of 2 books a day. (Indeed, an entrepreneurial sort might be able to sell 2 books a day at a lemonade stand.)

So is it worth it?

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