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To promote the launch of its 2013 Summer Reading Program, Seattle Public Library (@SPLBuzz) set a world record for the longest book domino chain consisting of 2,131 books. Read how it was done.
(Source: Mashable)
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Jonah Berger (@j1berger), Wharton professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, says, “Virality isn't luck. It's not magic. And it's not random. There's a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even.”
Six key drivers shape what people talk about and share. And the first principle is Social Currency....
People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times....
Social Currency...is why people brag about their thousands of Twitter followers or their kids' SAT scores. Why golfers boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers tell others when they get upgraded....
Want to generate word of mouth? Get people talking about you? One way is to give them a way to look good. Make people feel special, or like insiders, and they'll tell others – and spread word of mouth about you along the way.
See our other blogposts tagged Viral.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
The above Infographic (click to enlarge) is by VerticalResponse (@VR4SmallBiz).
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
Both marketing and publishing seek to reach consumers’ emotions. So we found the following research to be interesting.
NPR reporter on psychology, emotion, and the business of emotion, Alix Spiegel (@aspiegelnpr), investigated how British anthropologists used a computer program to analyze the emotional content of books from every year of the 20th century — close to a billion words in millions of books. And not just novels or current event books. Many were books without clear emotional content — technical manuals about plants and animals, for example, or automotive repair guides.
This effort began simply with lists of "emotion" words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.
The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.
With the graphs spread out in front of him, Bentley says the patterns are easy to see. "The twenties were the highest peak of joy-related words that we see," he says. "They really were roaring."
But then there came 1941, which, of course, marked the beginning of America's entry into World War II. It doesn't take a historian to see that peaks and valleys like these roughly mirror the major economic and social events of the century.
"In 1941, sadness is at its peak," Bently says.
But words that express emotion are being used less today (except fear-related words).
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
Amazon (@amazon) has acquired Goodreads (@goodreads), a website featuring user-generated reviews of books. Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine – members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended – does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.
The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.
Read Goodreads announcement.
Salon (@Salon) says the “brilliant business move” shows Amazon is “determined to monopolize book publishing.”
In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce. And the noise has certainly been ugly the past few years, with the closing of Borders and many independent bookstores, the consolidation of the corporate publishers, the e-book pricing wars. In the background of all this ugliness has been the rise of Amazon and their unabashedly thuggish way of doing business
Forbes (@Forbes) sees the purchase as an assault against Bookish (@BookishHQ).
TOC (@toc) declares, "Amazon marches on toward global retail domination."
And Huff Post Books (@HuffPostBooks) asks, “What Does It Mean for Authors and Readers?”
Also read our previous blogposts, “What's Going On With Readers Today?” and “All About Goodreads.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
An article by Stuart Elliott (@stuartenyt) in The New York Times (@NYTimesAd) explains another facet of the revolutionary change occurring in society because of the Internet:
The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network,” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Such ads are also increasingly being aimed at mainstream consumers, not just the younger consumers who were the early adopters of social media.
The appropriation of the trappings of social media for marketing purposes is an example of a tactic known as borrowed interest, by which brands seek to associate themselves with elements of popular culture that are pervasive enough to be familiar to the proverbial everybody. Social media’s new starring role in product pitches signals that agencies and advertisers believe they are sufficiently prevalent to refer to without producing puzzled reactions.
Another article says “every business should embrace change.” Kevin Chou, CEO and co-founder of Kabam, writes on his LinkedIn blog about counsel he received from a colleague, who said, “Business change is never popular, and it's a messy affair, but survival depends upon it."
"It's tough to put difficult advice into action, and harder still to have the conviction to see necessary changes through. For one thing, you need a thread-the-needle combination of self-confidence that you've made the right decision, and humility, so that you and your team learn quickly to fix the inevitable mistakes in the messy road ahead. For anyone facing a dreaded but necessary change process, I give the same advice – you likely won’t be popular, and will make inevitable mistakes – but standing still is certainly not an option."
We at Somersault believe the unprecedented changes occurring in the publishing world aren’t a crisis to avoid; they’re a playground of possibilities. We’re here to help you embrace change and leverage it to fulfill your mission. We like to say we’re flipping the publishing world right-side up!
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
A report in the The Bookseller (@thebookseller) says “the crucial role of physical bookshops to a healthy publishing industry” is evident “by findings from both Bowker Market Research UK (@Bowker) and research company Enders Analysis.”
“We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop,” says Enders analyst Douglas McCabe. This means as much as two-thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online, but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.”
Both McCabe and BMR director Jo Henry agree on the crucial role of bookshop browsing. Discovery still does not work online, McCabe asserted. “Consumers do not browse the Internet as is often suggested,” he said. Enders Analysis estimates that serendipity and discovery generate as much as two-thirds of UK general book sales, much of this down to bookshops. “There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant,” McCabe said. “Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level.”
The UK bookstore chain Waterstones (@Waterstones) is now “stocking special limited edition books with exclusive extra material to try to give it the edge in the competitive book-selling market. The book retailer has signed contracts with publishers to sell unique versions of their books, only available in Waterstones stores” to lure buyers away from Amazon and other online outlets.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
This article in The New York Times on “how JPMorgan Chase got into the mess of the London whale trades that dominated the financial news last year” illustrates the real costs of inexact communication.
A key figure in the controversy wrote at the time the following in a memo to “the International Senior Management Group of the Chief Investment Office:
...sell the forward spread and buy protection on the tightening move,... use indices and add to existing position,... go long risk on some belly tranches especially where defaults may realize,... buy protection on HY and Xover in rallies and turn the position over to monetize volatility.”
Gibberish. Yet it was approved, even though “relevant actors and regulators could not understand” it.
This is a reminder to all of us in the publishing trade that good writing is rooted in clear writing! As Strunk and White said in The Elements of Style,
Since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. When you become hopelessly mired in a sentence, it is best to start fresh; do not try to fight your way through against the terrible odds of syntax. Usually what is wrong is that the construction has become too involved at some point; the sentence needs to be broken apart and replaced by two or more shorter sentences.
Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically (and clearly) publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
The above presentation was presented by Goodreads (@goodreads) CEO Otis Chandler (@otown) at the 2013 Tools of Change (@toc) conference in New York. It details how readers discovered, acquired, and read two specific titles – Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, a hardcover book, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which is available in paperback.
Also see our previous blogpost, “All About Goodreads.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.
Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN).
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.