somersault

See the SlideShare deck page.

See the report in pdf.

According to a new survey, 56% of Americans have a personal profile on a social network, up 4% from 2011. And the number of people who say they follow brands or companies online has almost doubled in the last 2 years, to 33% of those polled.

These stats are from The Social Habit 2012 study by Edison Research (@edisonresearch) (SlideShare; Blog) and Arbitron (@ArbitronInc).

See The Social Habit website (@thesocialhabit).

WCG (@WCGWorld) highlights the following from the report:

·         Social networkers check their profiles often

·         Understanding the mobile experience is critical

·         Visual content is king

·         Users of social networking sites are following brands now more than ever

·         Facebook does impact buying decisions

·         It is not all about the coupon

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically leverage and effectively communicate your brand message using social media.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

New York-based start-up Zola Books (@zolabooks) is planning to replace the Google eBooks re-seller progam (to end in January; originally embraced by the American Booksellers Association), as the ecommerce platform of choice for independent bookstores selling ebooks.

According to Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld), “Zola will offer readers a social e-reader and bookstore, independent bookstores a new place to sell ebooks, and publishers another storefront to display their wares. When it launches to the public on September 19, the company plans to make a splash, offering readers a sizable selection of ebooks, including titles that will only be available on Zola.”

The plan is to offer a selling experience for independent bookstores that is easier, more attractive and more profitable than Google eBooks was.

Zola allows each independent bookstore to create its own storefront that it curates with titles it thinks its readers will like. Each bookseller is responsible for marketing their storefront but the proceeds could be worth it. Zola will pay independent bookstores 60% of net proceeds from every sale.

With Zola, publishers get a straight 70% of every sale and then Zola and its partners split the rest after paying a 4% credit card transaction fee....

In addition to providing a storefront for bookstores, Zola is providing pages for publishers, book reviewers and influential bloggers. Books sold through those pages will net whoever maintains the page an affiliate commission, which will vary in size depending on who or what the affiliate is. Each storefront comes with tools that allow for simple integration with all major social platforms so pages can be kept up-to-date by tweeting.

Read this in full.

Tech Crunch (@TechCrunch) reports, “The company’s Zola Social Reader will work on the Kindle Fire, Nook, and iPad. Zola Books will make both native apps as well as HTML5 apps available for its readers.”

Given the controversy surrounding ebook pricing right now, the company has decided to hold off from selling books until the publishers and the US Department of Justice have settled their current issues. Zola Books plans to use an agency model for selling books, meaning it will give authors and/or publishers full control over the pricing of content their are publishing exclusively on the site. By the time it launches publicly, the company expects to have every publisher on board. Exclusive content on the site will be offered DRM free.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market ebooks and pbooks, as well as stay current with the quickly changing digital publishing world.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (@Bookgal), offers 50 ideas for inexpensive book promotion, such as

·         Buy your domain name as soon as you have a title for your book.

·         Head on over to Blogger.com or Wordpress.com and start your very own blog.

·         Set up an event at your neighborhood bookstore. Do an event and not a signing, book signings are boring!

·         Create an email signature for every email you send; email signatures are a great way to promote your book and message.

·         Start a Twitter account and begin tweeting.

Read this in full.

Also see “Promote Your Book on a Budget: 20 Thrifty Ways to Get Your Writing Out There” and “Promoting your book on a budget: A response to BookBaby” by Suw Charman-Anderson (@Suw).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute your marketing strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

GigaOM (@gigaom) senior writer Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) reports on 72-year-old Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s (@MargaretAtwood) involvement with Wattpad (@wattpad) (blog) and Fanado (@Fanadoevents).

Wattpad is a Toronto, Ontario-based...online writing community with more than 3 million users and over 5 million pieces of content uploaded to the network....

Instead of just uploading books, many members of Wattpad’s community upload unfinished chapters that are still in development, or pieces of poetry they need feedback on, and then get comments and advice from other users of the service — both other writers and readers....

In addition to her work with Wattpad, Atwood is one of the founding artists involved with a startup called Fanado, which is trying to raise funds through the crowdfunding service Indiegogo (@Indiegogo) in order to launch a kind of digital-community platform for artists....

The idea behind Fanado is to give authors tools that they can use to interact with fans remotely, including the ability to share live video and audio of readings or get-togethers with a community, and to autograph and distribute both electronic books and printed books, as well as CDs and other offerings related to a work. In some ways, Fanado is the logical extension of an earlier project that Atwood was involved in, which led to the development of an electronic book-signing device called the “LongPen (@Syngrafii) — which authors could use to sign physical books in remote locations while on a virtual book tour.

Read this in full.

Read the Fanado news release (pdf).

See book patrol’s (@bookpatrol) post, “Fanado: The LongPen Still Lives."

Also see our blogpost, "Authors Can Now Personalize Messages in Ebooks."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute strategy to bring authors and readers together.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Forbes (@Forbes) senior editor Deborah L. Jacobs (@djworking) offers insights she learned in successfully self-publishing her non-fiction book.

Digital technology has made it possible for anyone to publish a book….But turning that book into a successful commercial venture is far more challenging. For more than one year after self-publishing my book, Estate Planning Smarts, promoting it was practically my full-time job.

I didn’t take the decision to self-publish lightly. In fact, I turned down offers from two big publishers because I wasn’t happy with the money they offered. McGraw-Hill’s offer was missing a zero—and I told them so.

...The reason for publishers’ low offers was that statistics show estate planning books don’t sell well. I had a vision for a book that would prove them wrong, but the big companies would never have allocated the resources to produce it.

My business model involved going against the grain by spending money where big publishers are cutting corners: high-quality paper, two-color graphics, printing on a Web press, rather than print-on-demand. And while big publishers were cutting experienced staff, I retained top talent for editing and graphics, on a freelance basis. The goal was to produce a high-quality product that advisers would give to their clients and friends and family would share with each other.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content in this fast-changing digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard;especially the Publishers tab that includes links to self-publishing services.

The above Infographic (enlarge it) is by Marketo (@marketo).

According to this article on All Twitter (@alltwtr), inbound marketing is the concept of “capturing the attention of prospects and helping them find your brand (or products) before they're ready to buy. This can be done in a variety of ways, but search, content marketing, and, increasingly, social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, are found to be the most effective.”

The approach differs from traditional marketing in that the campaign makes it easier for leads to find the brand, as opposed to the other way around.

A successful inbound marketing strategy will usually implement the following:

1. The creation of a central theme to anchor efforts each month

2. The creation of 2-3 small pieces of content around said theme

3. Regular updates on social media channels to get the word out about this content

4. The production of one major piece of content to support the theme

5. Blogging

6. Analysis and optimization

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan and execute effective inbound marketing strategy for your brand.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Sally Falkow (@sallyfalkow), president of PRESSfeed (@PRESSfeed) says journalists look for multimedia content to help them report a story. She offers 15 steps to crafting a successful social media news release:

·         Write a short, concise headline....

·         Add a main image that tells the story....

·         Craft the lead paragraph with the news angle and the 5Ws....

·         List the core news facts in the release in bullet points....

·         Write the rest of the release in narrative form....

·         Link to relevant analyst coverage....

·         Add approved quotes from the main players in the release....

·         Make the release available in an RSS news feed....

·         Add more images, so that there is a choice for bloggers and journalists....

·         If possible, add a short video....

·         Add any other supporting material: charts, slide decks, pdfs, Infographics or whitepapers....

·         Tag all the content with the keywords that will make it easy to find in search or social sites....

·         Add the About Us boilerplate....

·         Include a contact person – a real person....

·         Add icons that connect to all social content for the company....

Read this in full.

Get the above Infographic.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help plan your brand’s public relations and social media news strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers (@ThomasNelson), Michael Hyatt’s (@MichaelHyatt) new book is Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (#PlatformBook). It offers practical advice for anyone who wants to effectively communicate any kind of a message in today’s media-saturated world.

He says properly building a platform for your brand (either you or an entity you represent) provides visibility (elevation above the crowd), amplification (extend your reach to people who want to hear you), and connection (engage people with relevant and valuable information).

Hyatt maintains an active blog and Twitter stream. He says it took him 4 years to attract more than 1,000 readers a month, but today he has more than 300,000 visitors (and 130,000 Twitter followers). Read his post, “4 Insights I Gleaned from Building My Own Platform.”

Hyatt also conducted a teleseminar for Platform. You can hear it here.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically and effectively build your platform.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Between traditional publishing, the legitimization of self-publishing, print-on-demand, and Internet technology lowering the barrier to authoring books, roughly 1,000 books are now being published every single day in the USA.

We’ve never had so many books available, yet bookstores are going out of business like never before. With the astronomical number of books in the marketplace and stores closing their doors where books have historically been displayed for serendipitous encountering, the question these days is, “How will people conveniently browse and discover new titles.” The following social websites are one answer:

·         AudioBookFans (@AudioBookFans)

·         AudioFile (@AudioFileMag)

·         Audiobook Jukebox (@audiobkjkbx)

·         Authonomy (@authonomy)

·         BookCrossing.com (@BookCrossing)

·         BookFinder.com (@BookFinder)

·         BookFinder4U.com (@bookfinder4u)

·         Book Genome Project

·         Bookhitch.com (@bookhitch)

·         Bookins (@Bookins)

·         Bookish (@BookishHQ)

·         Booklist Online (@BooklistOnline)

·         Bookmarks Magazine

·         BookMooch (@bookmooch)

·         Booknibblr (@booknibblr)

·         BookPage (@bookpage)

·         BookRabbit (@thebookrabbit)

·         Bookreporter (@Bookreporter)

·         Book Review Index Online

·         BookRiff (@BookRiff)

·         Books & Culture (@booksandculture)

·         Books For Ears

·         BookShout (@BookShout)

·         BookSpot

·         Book TV (@BookTV)

·         Book Verdict

·         Byliner (@TheByliner)

·         DearReader.com (@DearReaderCom)

·         Edelweiss (publishers catalogs) (@weiss_squad)

·         Everyday eBook (@EverydayeBook)

·         Fanado (@Fanadoevents)

·         FiledBy (@filedby)

·         Findings (@findings)

·         FirstChapters (@first_chapters)

·         ForeWord (@ForeWordmag)

·         fReado (@freado)

·         goodreads (@goodreads)

·         Google Books

·         Hyperink (@hyperink)

·         Kirkus Reviews (@KirkusReviews)

·         Lendle (@lendleapp)

·         LibraryThing (@LibraryThing)

·         Listal (@listal)

·         Little Free Library (@LtlFreeLibrary)

·         Los Angeles Times Books (@latimesbooks)

·         Lovereading (@lovereadinguk)

·         The Midwest Book Review

·         NetGalley (@NetGalley)

·         The New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) (@Book Reviews)

·         Oprah's Book Club (@OprahsBookClub)

·         Published.com

·         Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly)

·         Reader2

·         Readmill (@Readmill)

·         Revish

·         Riffle (@Rifflebooks)

·         Shelfari (@shelfari)

·         Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness)

·         ShelfCentered

·         Shelf Unbound (@shelfmagazine)

·         Small Demons (@smalldemons)

·         Togather.com (@TogatherInc)

·         USA TODAY Books (@USATODAYBooks)

·         The Wall Street Journal Books (@WSJBookReviews)

·         Wattpad (@wattpad)

·         Zola Books (@zolabooks)

·         Zooba (@MyZooba)

Also see our blogposts:

·         “Findability, Discoverability, & Marketing" 

·         “Discoverability in the Digital Age: Personal Recommendations and Bookstores" 

·         “How Ebook Buyers Discover Books" 

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to market your books so consumers readily discover them.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, where you’ll find the above list of links in the Book Discovery Sites tab.

The above video has now achieved 5.2 million views on YouTube. It’s a promotion for BBC One using clips from David Attenborough’s (@davidattenboro) Life series.

What makes it so viral?

·         It’s simple

·         It’s majestic

·         It’s entertaining

·         Its music is familiar, catchy, and appropriate

·         It’s light-hearted

·         It invites repeat viewing

·         It’s emotionally uplifting

Also see our previous blogpost, “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategize and produce videos that effectively communicate your brand’s message to your target audience.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.