By Carolyn McCray, Author

In my previous article on ebook giveaways, we discussed how not all ebook giveaways are created equal.

We learned that researching and setting goals for your giveaway were as important as what you’re giving away itself. We covered the four main goals of any free ebook giveaway (beyond the vague sense of wanting to build name recognition and to grow a “reader base”):

1. Generating sales of your backlist.
2. Compiling an email list to be used in future campaigns.
3. Obtaining reviews to be used in your other marketing efforts.
4. Creating good will within the reviewer community.

Today we are going to look at how you can accomplish these goals at the start of your giveaway and beyond.

Promoting Your Giveaway on Day One

The day of the giveaway has arrived. So you can sit back and relax?

Absolutely not!

You need to be out stumping on all of your social media platforms, driving traffic to the giveaway site. If you have any cross-promotional partners, get them involved as well. Also you need to be all over that promotion. It is best to give away a free ebook per comment (this helps the blogger/reviewer/host to engage their readers) and to give the book away immediately if possible.

Giving away free reads in real time is preferable because many people hop right back onto the comment stream after downloading and talk up your book. It is an excellent technique to increase hype and buzz during the giveaway itself.

You also need to mix it up in the comments. Talk to the readers. Discuss your process. Thank them for their time. Joke, laugh, have some fun.

The “You’ve Won My Book” Email

Beyond being an engaged, responsive and prompt promoter of your giveaway, the other single most effective way to fulfill your goals is to create a dynamic “You’ve Won My Book” email. After a giveaway, most people simply thank the winner for participating and hand over the book.

Au contraire! Consider this “You’ve won” email a chance to shake the winner’s hand and create a lifelong reader.

The key goals of this letter are to:

• Thank the winner for participating and commenting. (This is just nice to do, and it helps with all four goals!)
• Thank the host of the giveaway because, especially for bloggers and reviewers, they need to know you are supporting them. (This clearly supports goal #4—creating good will with the reviewers)
• Let the winner know you would love to hear how they enjoy the book, and as an indie/new/struggling writer, you would really appreciate a review once they are done. (Supporting your goal #3—obtaining reviews for future marketing purposes.)

Remember though, this call to action is asking the reader to do you a favor. Now, as always, you should then give them a reward for that favor.

One of the most effective ways I have found to reward readers for giving me a review is to inform the winner that if their review is chosen, it may end up in future versions of the book! Many avid readers get very excited by this opportunity and jump at the chance to review.

Gift Card Offers and Special Discounts

If you don’t have control over your future editions, you can substitute that enticement with a gift card offer. Inform the winner that out of the reviews you receive for your book, you will randomly draw a winner for a $5 Amazon gift card. Or for the most thoughtful or funniest review. You get the picture.

As simple as it sounds, that enticement is a great incentive to many free ebook winners to actually not only read your book but formally review it.

The next section of your “winner” email includes:

• An opportunity for the winner to purchase another of your titles at a steeply discounted price.
• If you are an indie author on Smashwords, you can provide a 25%, 50%, or 75% off coupon. Even having a new reader spend 10 cents on your work, converts them from a free user to a paid reader, which is a huge accomplishment. Getting people to crack open their wallets, especially in these tough economic times, is paramount.
• If your books are only on the larger retail platforms such as Amazon or B&N, you should have at least one backlist title “value” priced at 99 cents. The rationale for strategic pricing of your backlist is probably enough for an entire other article, but for our purposes here, 99 cents is the lowest price these retailers will allow and gives a new reader a fairly low entry point into your backlist.

To finish out this “winner” email, you want to request permission to add the winner to your monthly newsletter. You should be able to guess what comes next. We just asked a favor of a reader (adding them to our newsletter), so now we must offer an enticement.

Again, offering up gift cards works like magic here. Offering a $5, $10, or $25 gift card randomly to your newsletter recipients a) increases your list retention significantly, b) increases your open rate, and c) increases your click rate.

In a single email you are well on your way to accomplishing all four of your goals!

• You have prompted the winner to search out your backlist and purchase from it.
• You have collected their email and created an opt-in for future newsletters.
• You have cultivated an environment for reviews.
• You have thanked the primary blog host/reviewer and reinforced their brand.

While you don’t have to include each and every portion of what I have described in your “You’ve Won My Book” email, you should at least experiment with each section and see what works for your book. Also keep in mind that you can’t simply say “buy my backlist.” Or “join my newsletter.” As always we want to keep our marketing copy fun, engaging, and entertaining.

Following Through on Your Ebook Giveaway

Then about a week after the giveaway you should tabulate your four goals and see how closely you came to meeting them:

• How many of your backlist did you sell?
• How many new emails were you able to collect for your newsletter list?
• How many people promised to review your book? (Check in a month to get a final tally of people that actually did it!)
• How many bloggers/reviews/hosts requested to do another giveaway or recommended you to colleague for an event?

Compare the goals you set in the first article to the results of your giveaway. Did you meet them? Exceed them? Or is there sobbing involved?

No matter what your results, now that you have a detailed strategy you can work to fine tune your results and reap real, tangible benefits to your giveaways! Running an ebook giveaway? Share a link to your giveaway in the comments below, and I’ll be glad to hop over for a mini-critique and give pointers on your giveaway strategy.

Carolyn McCray is a social media and sales consultant to writers and publishing houses alike.  Her own controversial thriller, “30 Pieces of Silver” hit the #1 spot on the Amazon “Men’s Adventure” list, (beating out the likes of Clive Cussler). Carolyn is also the founder of the Indie Book Collective, an organization dedicated to helping writers utilize social media to sell their books.

By Carolyn McCray, Author

In theory, ebook giveaways sound so beguilingly simple, don’t they? Give people free books, they will love your work and create gobs of word of mouth sales. This is one of those theories that turns out to be nothing more than an urban myth: Build it and readers will come.

With the exception of a handful of writers who have created a large sales platform off of free giveaways, the vast majority of ebook giveaways fail to create anywhere near the amount of buzz or secondary sales that the writer had hoped.

Why?  Because the giveaway did not have a solid set of goals and a strategic plan for after the book was given away. Sure, they had a sense of wanting to generate some name recognition, however their planning stopped there.  This has been the death keel to many a giveaway.

Instead of vague hopes, dreams, and wishes, we should concentrate on four measurable goals for any free ebook giveaway:

• Generating sales of your backlist.
• Compiling an email list to be used in future campaigns
• Obtaining reviews to be used in your other marketing efforts
• Creating good will within the reviewer community

For each and every ebook give away, you should set some very specific goals for what you wish to accomplish. Is the focus of this marketing campaign to increase sales?  Or is your main priority collecting email addresses, etc? Or a combination of the four? It is difficult to measure success and make vital changes to your marketing strategy if you do not know what you turn out you expected and how well you fared.

How exactly do you go about this?

Pre-planning Stage

1. Study the blog stops on your tour (or your own website statistics if hosting it yourself).  How many books do they normally give away per stop?  How many do they anticipate giving away for your promotion?

2. How are the winners notified?  You, as the author, always want to do the notification.  Work this out ahead of time.

3. How are you and the blog stop going to work together?  How much pre-event publicity do they do?  How much on the day of?

4. Do you have any promotional partners that can contribute extra support during your tour?  If not, you might want to get some!

Let’s say based on the research you did above you calculate that you will be giving away 100 ebooks on a blog tour which encompasses 6 blog stops.

Setting Goals

How many backlist copies do you hope to sell? A good rule of thumb is a 10:1 ratio.  For every ten books you give away you would like to get 1 sale of a backlist title. More than that? Great! Share your secret for the rest of us.  Less than that, you will want o take a look at your after-giveaway protocols.

How many emails do you hope to add to your newsletter list? Usually you want to convert 75% of all emails collected into long-term newsletter recipients.

How many reviews do you hope to get from the give away? A good ratio to shoot for is about 20:1.  So for every 20 books you give away, you get 1 review back.

How many blog tour hosts do you wish to convert to long-term reviewers? Ideally you would want this to be a 1:1 ratio, however personal taste, work load, etc can affect this so I tell everyone to shoot for a 50% retention rate.

You can now calculate your concrete set of goals for this imaginary give away:

1. 10 Backlist Sales

2. 75 new, unique email addresses added to your newsletter registry

3. 5 Reviews of your free ebook

4. 3 Long term reviewer contacts

Fantastic! Um, great… but how do we achieve them? Ah, that’s for the next article!

Comment below to let me know if this article was helpful to you in planning your next ebook giveaway and any questions you may have regarding the information.  Also feel free to share your successful and not-quite-so-successful ebook giveaways.

I subscribe to the comments, and will try to answer any questions within a few hours of posting.  Feel free to leave your Amazon.com page link, blog link, or links to any giveaways and I will hop over and give a mini-critique of what I see with a few pointers on how to improve your overall goals.

Carolyn McCray is a social media and sales consultant to writers and publishing houses alike.   Her own controversial thriller, “30 Pieces of Silver” hit the #1 spot on the Amazon “Men’s Adventure” list, (beating out the likes of Clive Cussler).  Carolyn is also the founder of the Indie Book Collective, an organization dedicated to helping writers utilize social media to sell their books.

Having a solid engagement strategy can help you discover your online community and serve its needs with high-quality, relevant content, products and services. This strategy, when properly executed, can create the foundation for tapping into new revenue streams for your online efforts, especially for paid content models.

But an effective engagement strategy involves more than ‘just add water’ shortcuts. Social media has many people thinking that they can create content and engage an audience easily – even “virally” – if they just know which button to press, which trick to use, which guru to listen to.

They believe they can sneak in, plant their message, have everyone see how brilliant they are, and then have a crowd come running to them. But a real engagement strategy involves a lot more than that.

If you have the patience to create quality content, iterate your strategy and truly connect with individuals, then executing on your content strategy is a fun process, including some of the following elements:

• You will learn more about your market than you ever thought possible
• You will connect with more experts in your market than ever before
• You will establish deep research channels that give you incredible insight into the needs and challenges of those you serve
• You will find potential business models that support all sides of this equation

Do you have the patience to properly engage your community?

We all seem to admire companies that have established credibility in their markets over the long haul, yet too many companies (and individuals) nowadays want instant access, instant credibility, and instant quarterly revenue from their online initiatives.

We are left with questions like, “What is the ROI of social media?”

If you want to build a respected, stable online business that offers a legitimate return on your investment of time and resources, having a solid engagement strategy can fuel your company’s bottom line for years. But, you’ll also need a little patience.

The Patience to Explore.

It can be tempting to focus only on other large established players, especially for established media companies, but oftentimes, the exciting stuff is hidden, spread across dozens of other blogs, Twitter streams, LinkedIn groups, forums and other places. Of course, these great resources are mixed in with the not-so-great, and finding value here is time-consuming because Google will give you thousands of results for any topic you plug in to their search engine.

But this is how you find hidden opportunities: by NOT relying on the obvious filters that your competitors are using.

The Patience to Learn.

Whenever I find a great blog or interesting person on Twitter, I always like to find out more about them – something that gives me a 360-degree view of who they are. Doing so helps you understand their motivations, their expertise, and possible points of connection.

The “about us” page of a website is often my favorite, and often the most disappointing. Digging further, LinkedIn is a great source, giving you information about a person’s professional work experience, their network, and other places they might be posting online. Beyond this, a simple Google search of their name in quotes can bring up loads of great information. We are not looking to pry, we are not looking for scandal; we are simply looking to discover great, untapped resources.

The Patience to Listen.

When you find someone doing great work online, you should follow them wherever is relevant: their blog’s RSS feed, their Twitter feed, their YouTube channel, their LinkedIn posts, etc. These streams are about more than gathering information; you also get to understand their tone, their habits, and the nuances of their expertise, their goals and their challenges.

Too many people view social media primarily as an opportunity to share a message, but it is an even better opportunity to listen. The more you listen, the more nuggets you will pick up, and that your competitors will possibly miss. Companies consider their products and services in terms of a ‘unique value proposition.’ They should also consider how unique their listening system is – what are they hearing from their market that others might be missing?

The Patience to Ask.

The web and social media are incredible research channels. Some of this is passive research, as mentioned above, but active research is a huge opportunity, too. This can involve formal means of surveys and the like, but it can also be more informal – asking for advice, asking about preferences, needs and goals.

It allows you to easily explore the margins of your market – in areas that you may not be able to put huge financial resources, but that might offer serious insights that will shape your business and online offerings in the future. So much of business success is finding unmet needs in areas of your market that no one else is focusing on. The ability to reach out to these dark corners and ask questions can be a competitive advantage.

The Patience to Engage.

Commenting on blogs, responding to Tweets, giving feedback via email – these are ways to engage with no promise of immediate rewards, but building credibility is about giving your attention, your expertise, and helping others do the same. It is not about a transaction – expecting something in return for your mildest efforts or attention.

This is about helping others long before you would hope they might help you. It could be simple actions, such as reading, retweeting, linking, or deeper actions such as direct conversations, helping others connect, and sharing advice and hard-won insights.

The Patience to Build.

Too often, brands only care about social media for its potential to broadcast their messages to as large an audience as possible, as cheaply as possible. The real value, however, is in connecting with individuals, and not always with the ‘top dog’ in your market.

Engaging with those who seemingly have no power – eg: nothing of business value that you can immediately turn into revenue – but who have relevant expertise, has immense long-term social value. Just as you can’t put a price on your friends, or on experiences you’ve had with colleagues over the years, you can’t put a dollar amount on the social value of building actual, real relationships with others via the social web.

One. Person. At. A. Time.

Social media is not about going viral, or about instant, inexpensive scale – it is an opportunity to connect meaningfully with individuals.

The Patience to Create.

In a world where dime-a-dozen blog posts, ephemeral Tweets, and amateur videos are often “good enough” to satisfy but rarely enough to truly make a difference, creating quality content is not always as easy as some people make it seem. Merely aggregating a bunch of content rarely solves anyone’s specific problems.

Creating and curating great content often happens over time, through trial and error.

The Patience to Analyze and Iterate.

You must treat your engagement strategy as a business, something that is analyzed often, and iterated on without being distracted by fleeting trends or cutting into your ego. Most online successes started out as something different than they ended up; the more you are iterating, analyzing and iterating again, the more likely you are to find success.

Key Steps to an Engagement Strategy

Everything listed above is a resource-intensive process, which is exactly why you may need a formal strategy and clearly defined tactics to successfully engage your audience.

Gone are the days where each niche has one or two must-read blogs – now there are dozens of ways your market is interacting with each other via social media, and each one is another opportunity, as well as another way to feel that you can never catch up to it all.

These fundamental actions will put you on the right path:

Identify key sources that you will focus your attention on.

• This could be an industry blog or an individual on Twitter. For instance: I follow several hundred people on Twitter, but have a smaller list of a couple dozen people who I focus intensely on. For these people, I never miss a Tweet they share, and ensure I can contribute to their interests and goals whenever possible. It’s not enough to create a comprehensive list of blogs in your niche – you must create a filter of who you will focus your scarce attention on.

Measure your engagement in actions.

• It’s not enough to read a blog or a Twitter stream – you must ACT upon them. You need to comment, retweet, respond via email, or create your own blog posts in response to the work of others. In doing so, you need to add to the conversation, and when possible, promote the efforts of those you respect. If you aren’t acting upon something every day, then you are not fully engaging.

Create personal goals and milestones.

• It is too easy to feel that any effort you make in online engagement must somehow be helping you reach goals, but this can lead to inefficient strategies and wasted resources. Create clear goals for your efforts online, with appropriate milestones and benchmarks, and carefully measure your progress on a regular basis.

And, of course, have a little patience.

Dan Blank was Director of Content Strategy & Development for Reed Business Information for the past decade, where he worked with editors and bloggers across 50+ brands — including Publishers Weekly and Library Journal — with the goal of creating engaging content and community. Blank is the Founder of We Grow Media, an online media consulting & training company, where he works with writers, authors, editors, & journalists to build their online media & marketing skills and engage their communities in fun and meaningful ways.

Topic: Community vs. Commerce

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EDT on Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Pablo Defendini, Interactive Producer, Open Road Integrated Media
Bridget Warren, Former Co-Owner, Vertigo Books

Special Guests:

Elana Roth, Literary Agent, Caren Johnson Literary Agency
Kevin Smokler, CEO, BookTour.com

Moderated by:

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

The Curator and the Docent

Recently, as I wandered around a museum with overwhelming breadth and depth of content, I was lucky to be guided in my travels by a professional. When she introduced herself to me, she used the term ‘docent’ to describe her function. A docent is a ‘knowledgeable guide’ and the function seems to me to perfectly complement the process of curation. In an online world, where more and more content appears to “carry the same weight,” we will look to and pay for the combination of curator and docent – sometimes the same person or entity – who can organize and manage a range of content and also engage with the user so they gain insight and meaning from the material

Book Publishing Websites: The Best And Worst (PHOTOS, POLL)

Everyone in book publishing has a website. We know Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound and Borders among others sell books on the web. Authors have web sites that tell you about their writing. But what do book publisher websites do? We wanted to know, so we looked at what’s out there to see if we could figure it out.

There’s a mix of blog content, video, book purchasing options and news. Some sites seemed neglected and with no personality, others were brimming with enthusiasm. Some had us clicking through for more, while others had us navigating away quickly. While many publishers have found ways to integrate blog content and social media, others remain essentially book-buying portals.

So You Have a Platform; Now What?

It’s been a while since I ranted about social media gurus and the “Blogs! Facebook! Twitter! GET ON IT!” mentality that most of publishing is still annoyingly mired in. It’s partly because I’m bored by the topic, and partly because I think the backlash finally started to set in late last year and not as many people are blindly drinking the Kool-Aid any more.

Or maybe they are and I’ve moved on? (Sadly, I know many still are.)

One thing’s clear, though: writers are being encouraged expected to be their own marketing and PR departments nowadays, building an audience BEFORE even thinking about a traditional publishing deal, and arguably needing one in order to have any real hope of DIY success. Sure, anyone can sell eBooks via Kindle just by uploading them with a decent cover and compelling description, but like blogs, the competition for attention is only going to increase, and the early adopter edge is fading fast.

MANIFESTO

I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify  everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.

Markets Are Conversations

The first markets were filled with talk. Some of it was about goods and products. Some of it was news, opinion, and gossip. Little of it mattered to everyone; all of it engaged someone. There were often conversations about the work of hands: “Feel this knife. See how it fits your palm.” “The cotton in this shirt, where did it come from?” “Taste this apple. We won’t have them next week. If you like it you should take some today.” Some of these conversations ended in a sale, but don’t let that fool you. The sale was merely the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence.

Twitter (as RTd by @DigiBookWorld)

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Book bloggers are the docents of the literary world. #dbw

RT @tstcpublishing: #dbw Groundswell by Charlene Li is  good primer for efforts along these lines.

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Niche publishers are best positioned to move quickly to B2C model. Yay for romance! #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Thank God for librarians because they really do get the books into the hands of the kids. #dbw

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Interesting Q: Are writers’ websites, outreach geared toward readers or peers? #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Booksmith (SF) monthly book swap as community builder + interaction, gathering around books is brilliant. I want to go. #dbw

RT @kellymcclymer: #dbw Awkward authors and disinterested staff can kill a book signing/reading. Amen to that!

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Is it authors or publishers (or librarians or booksellers or agents) who should turn readers into fans? #dbw

RT @jfallone: Tor is curator + genre advocate building community, brand, fans. Genre first and the fan trust migrates to book sales #dbw

RT @jennybullough: Big pubs + self-pub arm: “lame”, “weird”, “shady” (@elenaroth) or “smart”, “forward-looking” (@glecharles)? Discuss! #dbw

RT @pa4culture: Pubs have been accused of not listening, no community building – self pub a response of a sort – @glecharles #dbw

RT @Stacy_Boyd: Thanks to @glecharles @ElanaRoth @weegee @vertigobooks for a great #DBW session. now, lunch time is officially over. (TY!)

The first time I met Ron Hogan was during the Digital Book World Conference back in January, when he was still Senior Editor of GalleyCat and right before he started at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as their Director of E-marketing Strategy. There was a seat between us during a panel, and there wasn’t a moment when some person wasn’t clamoring to ask him for a favor, run an idea by him, say hi, or offer to massage his feet.

If there was a contest, I’d vote Hogan Nicest Dude in Publishing, which is why my jaw literally dropped when I heard about his abrupt departure from HMH two weeks ago.

In the mid-90s, Hogan worked at a Los Angeles bookstore while finishing his Master’s in Film Studies, and originally wanted to be a professor but had doubts about academia. Those doubts coincided with the rise of the Internet, and he launched Beatrice.com in 1995, publishing interviews with authors as they came through LA.

“Like a lot of people, I kind of thought it would be cool to do a website.”

Since then, Beatrice has become one of the top book blogs, a destination site for anyone who loves books and is looking for something new to read.

“It’s not pinned down to any one type of book or story. I talk about things I happen to think are cool and some of that catches people’s eyes on a relatively regular basis.”

The HMH Drama

While running Beatrice, Hogan has freelanced for a number of dotcoms, took a staff position as Category Editor at Amazon.com, was the Senior Editor of GalleyCat, and most recently, became the Director of E-marketing Strategy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a job he “really enjoyed doing.”

So what happened?

“Basically, as I’ve come to understand in retrospect,” Hogan explained, “the VP who conceived of this position and hired me was herself let go during an earlier corporate restructuring in March. I can only assume that the people who weren’t invested in this position from the beginning have reevaluated their needs. I think they believe their e-marketing strategy can be met by existing marketing staff.”

“I didn’t accomplish half of what I had hoped to accomplish in that position. I hope the publisher will continue to move forward in some capacity. They are serious about online marketing, as any major publishing has to be at this point and the books are fantastic. One of the reasons I was so glad to take this job was that it was an opportunity to work with an incredible front list of consistently excellent titles.”

A free agent again, he’s keeping an eye out for a similar position, with a publisher that is open to using online tools to engage readers more directly; and to be more responsive to those readers.

“That’s the kind of staff job that I would be looking for at a house,” Hogan continued. “In the meantime I will be consulting for authors, small presses and independent booksellers on using social media tools. Coach them on identifying what they want to accomplish, picking out the tools, giving them an action plan and then touching base with them and tweaking their strategy a bit. Giving them tools and the know-how.”

“It’s a great opportunity to do a lot more than say, ‘Oh, our book comes out today.’”

Hogan wants publishers to use those tools to bring communities of readers together and actually take seriously what they have to say. “That will result in a much more significant long-term advantage,” he said. “These aren’t just more platforms to put out news of new releases.”

Future of publishing – half-full or half-empty?

“The best answer I’ve heard is: ‘Twice as big as it needs to be.’ I’m very optimistic about publishing’s future. I don’t know if that future is going to be print-oriented, or how much of a chunk will be eBooks, but I am confident that there are publishing companies forward-thinking enough to be responsive to communities of readers and that they will be able to deliver stories and information in any number of formats. The rest is containers.”

Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. In 2010, after writing about the business side of publishing as a senior editor for GalleyCat for several years, he briefly served as the director of e-marketing strategy for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His most recent book is Getting Right with Tao, a print edition of his popular online “translation” of the Tao Te Ching into modern vernacular.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

For transmedia novelists (and publishers) to retain creative control will require more than a repurposing of content. This might give a ‘taste’ of what transmedia can ‘do’, but for it to work on all levels it must be intrinsically built in and not bolted on.

–Alison Norrington, Transmedia Requires New Breed of Writers, Publishers

Back in January at the Digital Book World conference, Alison Norrington spoke about her book, Staying Single, for which she created social media profiles for her protagonist, Sophie Regan, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Then in March, I wrote about location-based social media and the potential, as bookseller Stephanie Anderson noted, to “check-in to the intangibles.”

Now, with the launch of Roorback.com, I’ve become even more curious about authors’ creating social networking profiles for their characters and websites for brands that engage with the real world, but only exist within their books.

Aidan Cole is a blogger for Roorback.com, a Gawker-esque gossip site that sports the provocative tagline: “A defamatory falsehood published for political effect.” And then regretted.

He is also one of the two main characters in David Goodwillie’s new – and first – novel, American Subversive (Scribner; April 2010). The novel, which has a traditional online presence, has received tons of good reviews, and the Associated Press called it “a triumphant work of fiction.” Roorback.com is still in its early stages, but it’s been gaining momentum fast, mostly as a snarky gossip blog, but also as a very cool transmedia experiment.

Explaining the birth of Roorback, Goodwillie noted that just four years ago an author could write a book, and then only be loosely involved with its online marketing plan (usually involving MySpace).

“The literary landscape has changed,” he said. “The web is one giant marketing opportunity, and while a good publicist can help navigate this vast and open ocean, most of it remains uncharted, and overwhelming.  No one really knows what sells books online (or off, for that matter), though fresh ideas certainly beat annoying the world with friend requests and promotional tweets.  And so my editor, a few friends and I sat down and came up with one.”

Goodwillie describes Roorback as “a real-world blog populated by fictional characters.” What the readers see as “Aidan’s” posts are anonymously written by a few Brooklyn bloggers.

The concept is great and the execution is even better, but because the fictional Cole is engaging with and commenting on the real world, I wondered how Goodwillie manages to balance the fact that Cole doesn’t really exist.

eg: A recent Cole post about the latest YouTube sensation, Greyson Michael Chance:

And for the first time in a very long while, something resembling joy stirred in my black heart. With the pipes of an angel and the hair of the Vampyre Justin Bieber, he’s bound to get to get to second base with all the swooning groupies his heart desires… Act now, eighth grade girls, before he turns thirteen and realizes your rapidly developing female bodies do nothing for him.

As of right now, there is no overt reference to American Subversive on Roorback.com, except for a vague banner ad in the upper right-hand corner. People who stumble upon the site via a link or search without having read the book will most likely think it’s just another gossip blog.

“I don’t want the book to be too front and center,” Goodwillie said, “but I also don’t want people to leave the site without knowing what the real deal is.”

Zack Sultan, a collaborator on the Roorback project, said, “I think we can be very honest with the audience, and ask them to come in as collaborators in the joke rather than trying to pull one over on them. I think if we do that, and are super straight-forward, we can achieve both more focus on the book, while supporting the ‘artistic’ endeavor of the blog.”

“You don’t have to have read American Subversive to enjoy–and contribute to–the blog that lies at the heart of it,” says Goodwillie, “but as Roorback ramps up in the coming weeks, you might decide you want to.”

Where do the boundaries, if any, lie when you’re blurring the lines between fiction and reality?

And what other ways can authors expand their stories beyond the printed (or electronic) page?

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

Interested in learning more about using transmedia storytelling and cross-media strategies? Join us at StoryWorld, the only major gathering of industry leaders, decision makers, and transmedia specialists, to explore new business models, innovative partnerships, and fresh revenue streams.

A free WEBcast, presented by Digital Book World.

From Amazon and eBooks to new media, social media and transmedia, the landscape for authors has changed dramatically in the 21st Century, and some are taking full advantage of the new opportunities available to them.

Join best-selling authors Alison Norrington, Jason Pinter and Gretchen Rubin as they discuss their hard-won experiences and lessons learned in a free live WEBcast on 5/18 @ 1pm EDT // 10am PDT.

The Digital Author: New Challenges, Opportunities, Partners
Tuesday, May 18th @ 1pm EDT // 10am PDT

Speakers: Alison Norrington, Jason Pinter, Gretchen Rubin
Moderator: Joe Dolce

This free WEBcast took place on Tuesday, May 18th @ 1pm EDT // 10am PDT; DBW Members can view the on-demand archive.

“No one can say for certain where Eleanor Wakefield’s opinion ends and Joseph Illidge’s opinion begins.”

–Joseph Phillip Illidge

Joseph Phillip Illidge is a co-partner at Verge Entertainment and was one of the panelists at Digital Book World’s Digitize Your Career: Marketing & Editorial Forum two weeks ago. He first caught my attention during a discussion about the challenges of establishing an online identity without getting fired from your day job, when he said: “I can have my cake and eat it, too.”

Illidge has the ability to blog about whatever he wants without getting in trouble for his public views because he is lucky enough to have an outlet that actually requires him to spew all sorts of opinions, albeit not necessarily under his own byline.

He writes for ExpoWeekly, an online gossip site that is a cross between The Huffington Post and TMZ. Not that we need another site like either of those, but ExpoWeekly is somewhat unique as its staff consists entirely of, well, fake people.

ExpoWeekly came about when Illidge’s partner at Verge, Shawn Martinbrough, came up with the idea for an entertainment website slash “digital intellectual property.” Because traditional journalism is shifting into the digital space and its seasoned writers are fast becoming the new generation of bloggers, Illidge, Martinbrough, and Expo co-owner Kevin McCarthy brainstormed their way into the fictional universe behind the site.

As the company’s head writer, Illidge developed most of the characters and their origins, and his three avatars are Editor-in-chief Keisha Parks; Creative Director Cassidy Chase; and Global Affairs Reporter Eleanor Wakefield.

Interestingly, during the Forum he spoke often about having an “authentic voice” when using social media, but he writes from the perspective of three different fictional female characters. That’s kind of awesome because he can let different aspects of his personality take over in order to really get into a character; so if you think about it, fictional universe aside, there’s nothing more authentic than that!

“Relating to the three ladies is easy because they’re all extensions of various facets of my personality,” he said.

As a former editor of the Batman comic books for DC Comics, Illidge connects with Parks’ “multitasking mind and advocacy for quality work”. Chase is relatable due to her smarts and chutzpah, and I think Illidge really enjoys the fact that she’s “opinionated as hell.” As for Wakefield, he “admires the hell out of New York Times columnist and author Maureen Dowd,” and figured he could show his political side “while portraying older women with the respect that’s due them.”

Illidge had complete say on the characters he wanted to portray, and after the team put together the basic archetypes, he was able to flesh all three out to full realization. “It’s crazy, because I can tell you the histories of all three women, from the death of Keisha’s mother to Cassidy’s college affair with her professor to Eleanor being a co-novelist with her ex-husband. And the fact that all three are women means I get to show my feminine side!”

Getting into each character isn’t hard because he knows all three so well, but the “Expo Bible” helps, with a breakdown of each character’s history, created by himself and his Verge partners.

• Keisha is a crusader for good writing, story and language, to the point where she’s anachronistic to a lot of people, and texts in perfect English. She’s my cultural pride and writer/editor persona, along with a sprinkle of self-assuredness.
• Cassidy always refers to herself in the third person as “The Chaser” and is in her early twenties, so when I wrote the tribute to Corey Haim, I knew Cass didn’t see The Lost Boys when it was in the theaters. She is my intolerance of stupidity, mixed with the fearlessness and self-righteousness I had when I was her age.
• Eleanor has high standards, marched in opposition to the Vietnam War, and wants to force people to think instead of just act and consume. We’re both good dressers, don’t care about reality TV, and would watch Mad Men before ever paying to see any Transformers movies.

“What is crazy, though,” Illidge explained, “is that I’ve been affected by the opinions of the characters. I gained a whole new level of respect for Mario Lopez after Cassidy Chase wrote ‘The Nine Lives of Mario Lopez’, because he adapts to any and all challenges with determination and a smile.”

So far, the response to the site has been good and Illidge says they see pretty hefty traffic spikes when AintItCoolNews mentions them, or he spreads a gossip rumor (eg: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are going to be in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Superman film). Their fictional characters have even interviewed industry professionals like film producer Reginald Hudlin and novelist L.A. Banks, with more to come.

At the Forum, Illidge said, “Being able to express myself under fictional guises allows me to comment on anything I want to, but the face isn’t me. I can have my cake and eat it, too.” When I asked him to elaborate a few days later, he told me, “Suffice it to say, the bigwigs at my Clark Kent job can’t give me guff because of what I write as Superman, because the lines between me and the fiction cannot be clearly identified.”

Illidge has it pretty good, both as a writer and publishing professional [the Clark Kent job], able to express himself creatively without any bureaucratic obstacles.

“The worst part is loving it so much that I want to write three Keisha columns in one day, but then my girlfriend reminds me that I could spend some time with her instead.”

Hard life, man. I want his job!

Joseph Phillip Illidge has been an editor and writer of comic books, graphic novels, and columns for over a decade. He’s worked on DC Comics’ Dark Knight, THE BATMAN, and the WB television series, Birds of Prey; Milestone’s STATIC; and most recently as the co-creator, co-writer and editor of the Ayre Force graphic novel and animated webisodes for digital entertainment giant, Bodog.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

DBW Homepage on 1/27/10

By Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Chief Executive Optimist, Digital Book World

Three months ago, during the mid-afternoon of January 25th, we flipped the switch on DigitalBookWorld.com and shifted from the event-focused site promoting our inaugural Conference (that would kick off the next morning), to the community-focused site you’re reading now.

To help accomplish our goal of becoming “The Publishing Community for the 21st Century”, we wanted to do three very specific things, with this web site representing the hub for each of them:

1. Offer a range of programming, year-round, focused on implementing the strategies that were put forward at the Conference.
2. Promote a sense of optimism about the future of publishing, and the opportunities hidden in the challenges the industry is facing.
3. Publish content that syncs with our mission of focusing “on publishing strategies, not tools; solutions, not theories; practicality, not punditry.”

Since January 25th, we’ve produced 6 WEBcasts and 11 episodes of The Roundtable, as well as a second 7x20x21 event that was the epitome of publishing optimism (the videos from which are available on-demand here on the site), and our first Digitize Your Career Forum. We’ve also published 105 articles on a number of topics, including eBooks, marketing, and the evolving business model; insightful takes on Amazon and the iPad; and inspiring profiles of a variety of optimistic publishing professionals.

Our editorial plan has been to focus on quality over quantity, optimism over gloom and doom and empty hype, publishing 4-6 substantial articles each week, and leaving the link-blogging on Twitter where it belongs. Poking around Google Analytics is always an interesting exercise (something all editors and marketers should do on a periodic basis), and it’s fascinating to see where our traffic is coming from, and what you’re all reading the most.

Traffic Mix

Referring Sites – 47 %
Direct Traffic – 37%
Search Engines – 16%

Google provided 93% of our search traffic, and that total number has grown each month as we publish more content and have more sites linking backing to it, resulting in our showing up more frequently, and higher, in relevant keyword searches. We keep our sitemap updated regularly and expect search to eventually represent ~25% of our traffic mix.

Top Referring Sites

twitter.com – 24.45%
booktrade.info – 6.97%
news.ycombinator.com – 4.89%
networkedblogs.com – 4.69%
facebook.com – 2.88%
linkedin.com – 2.52%
blog.writersdigest.com – 1.90%
mediabistro.com – 1.87%

Not surprisingly, Twitter is a major traffic generator, and actually represents closer to 30% as HootSuite, ow.ly, and iconfactory.com are all tracked separately, and combine for another 4.5% of total referred traffic. Facebook is actually 7.5% as Networked Blogs traffic is primarily coming via our feed into Writer’s Digest‘s Facebook page; it will be interesting to see if that picks up with this weekend’s addition of the “Like” button to the site. (Scroll down and test it out!)

The Hacker News (ycombinator.com) traffic is a bit of an aberration as it all went to one article, The $75 eBook: A True Story, about 6 weeks after it was originally published, and while it likely wasn’t our core audience, it’s always nice to see when an article of ours has relevance beyond the publishing industry. (Thanks to Mike Cane for submitting it.)

Top Articles

• My First 36 Hours with the iPad
• Getting Past “Good Enough” eBooks: Liza Daly
• The $75 eBook: A True Story
• eBook 101: Designing for Kindle and ePub
• O Brave New eBook
• How Many Kindles Have Really Been Sold?
• What Happens to Book Sales if Digital Versions are Given Away?
• Closing the Gap Between Publishers and Readers
• Discoverability: Still A Book’s Biggest Problem
• Glue Offers Authors an Alternative to Amazon

That eBooks and marketing are the subjects of our most popular articles isn’t surprising, but seeing Tim Brandhorst’s article, “Closing the Gap…”, already in the top 10 after being published just last Friday is. Chalk that one up to a combination of our Friday enewsletter getting out before the end of the day, and the fabled Tim O’Reilly Bump via Twitter over the weekend.

That’s what some of the numbers tell us, and there are other insightful numbers like registrants to our WEBcasts, our growing list of DBW Members, and the 850+ comments and trackbacks our articles have received, but there’s nothing like direct feedback to let us know how we’re doing.

With that in mind, the comments section on this post are an open forum to discuss anything and everything related to Digital Book World. Tell us what you like and don’t like. Who would you like to hear more from, and what stories are we missing out on?

Remember, this is YOUR community; we’re just facilitating the conversation.

How are we doing?

Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project, an account of the year she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from popular culture about what makes us happy. The book came out in December 2009 and immediately hit the NY Times Bestseller List and has been on the list for four months, including hitting #1.

She is also the author of the bestselling Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill; Forty Ways to Look at JFK; Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide; and Profane Waste. Her popular daily blog, The Happiness Project, appears on The Huffington Post, as well as many other sites, and ranks in the prestigious Technorati “Top 2K.”

Rubin has spent years playing with social media and here she shares insights on creating a digital presence and the best practices for authors to build an audience.

JOE DOLCE: What’s the single most important thing that authors should do when using the Internet to discuss and promote their work?

GRETCHEN RUBIN: Start early. About four years ago my agent said, “I think you should start a blog.” I said, “I don’t want to. I’m not techie; I don’t write short, I write long; I’m not a journalist.” But she planted a seed with me. As part of the premise of my book, I needed a way to test the precept that “Novelty and challenge bring happiness.” So I thought I’d take up the challenge of starting a blog, in order to test the theory.

I started in March 2006, and I’ve been blogging six days a week ever since.

I think starting early is super-important; you’ve got to do it in advance, little by little, to get the network effect going. It takes time. I got one little link from Lifehacker and saw my traffic shoot up. Then I got some big things — I became a featured contributor on The Huffington Post and Slate, and that helped a lot.  Here’s my big theory (I didn’t make it up but I think it’s absolutely true):

On the Internet, ubiquity is the new exclusivity. It’s important that your stuff be as ubiquitous as possible.

And I think Twitter is amazingly powerful. It’s one of the main drivers to my blog, and I don’t even tweet that much. Even now, most people don’t use Twitter, but it’s a highly engaged group.

JD: I hear a lot of the resistance from authors to Twitter, “But I don’t want to talk about what I had for breakfast.”

GR: If you don’t want to talk about yourself, don’t. Talk about ideas. Talk about other people’s books. People who are interested in books are always interested to hear what other people are reading. I send tweets like: “Here are the books I saw being read on my subway train.” All book writers need to help each other.

What happened to your blogroll? It’s not on your site anymore?

I took it down. It was too much real estate. I do link every day to someone else’s blog. It’s good karma, plus I’ve made a lot of friends that way. I used to think I had to incorporate references to other blogs into my text, but now I just put a note at the bottom: “Was looking at so-and-so’s blog.” You get a lot of good will, and it’s a great resource for my readers.

Tell me one clever way you’ve used Facebook.

Geographic targeting. When I did my book tour, the ability to do geo-targeting was so helpful. Because I could send messages by city, I didn’t have to spam people with messages that weren’t relevant to them.

Lately I’ve started posting “Happiness Questions.” I’m getting a great response from these. People are really eager to weigh in with their answers. People want to engage but with the least work possible. Surveys are easy.

What other Best Practices can you recommend to authors?

When I started my blog, I made a list of what I want my blog to be. What’s my voice? What’s my angle? I developed a set of questions: Am I giving good information? Am I being funny? Am I telling stories? Am I showing what it’s like to live in New York City? Am I highlighting great work by other people? Am I being honest about myself?

Also, I never criticize anyone but myself. I never have a funny rant about anybody but myself. No snark, no irony. And I never work blue. I never write anything that my grandmother wouldn’t be comfortable reading.

Why?

For my own happiness. I never wanted to feel bad or uncomfortable about something I wrote.  A lot of people said, “Earnestness is not going to work. Irony is what people are interested in.” But I think it’s a voice question. I wanted to be consistent. Mommywantsvodka is heartwarming yet profane. That’s her voice.

More tips please.

Links are gold; personal and URLs. You always want to be linking.

Seth Godin said, “Power is going to continue to accrue to authors with direction connections to readers.” It’s a lot of work to do, but true. Have a newsletter list. I’m sure you tell clients to keep an email list. Authors always say, “What would I say to people? I’m like, “Ummm. tell them you have a new book coming out.”

I was meeting with an agent today, looking at a cover, and she said, “The author has no idea what to do with it now that he has it,” and I suggested that the author ask his readers what they thought of it. Ask them to tell him what they like/don’t like about it, and what it makes them think the book is about.

That’s a great idea. Here’s something I did that turned out to be very useful. When I was thinking of doing the book tour, I asked readers, ‘I’m trying to gauge interest in a book tour. If I came to your city, would you come?’  I got a list of all the people who said they’d come to see me speak, and I was able to let those people know if I did come to their city.  They said, ‘Thanks for emailing me about the event!’ They seemed truly happy to know.

And you were truly happy to see them show up!

Yes indeed! Another thing. I started noticing from my emails that people were reading my book in book groups. That was surprising to me, because most book groups only choose fiction,  and most book groups only read paperbacks, and my book is hardback nonfiction. I wrote a one-page discussion guide for book groups, and HarperCollins made it a pretty, one-page PDF. I announced it on my website: “If you’re reading this in a book group and would like a one-page discussion group, email me.”

I got 300 emails in one month.

So the lesson is….you have to know what to ask of your publisher?

Yes. Another example: I asked my publisher to make a starter-kit for me, for people who want to start happiness-project groups. I wrote it, and they made it into an attractive PDF. On my blog, I told people, “If you’d like to receive this, email me,” so I could email it to them.

I think publishers would happily do this for a lot of authors, but I think they need to be shown.

HarperCollins also created e-cards for me, because my book was coming out after Christmas, so people could use the e-card to tell gift recipients that a copy had been ordered for them, their gift was on the way. When people come to you, you don’t have to be broad, you can target.

Did the publisher offer good ideas on how to help you?

I have a weekly video; Harper marketing really pushed me to do that.

I think it’s more valuable than a written press release these days; TV producers really like to see how you express yourself and your ideas.

Harper marketing really pushed me, because lots of people want video. So now, each week, I post a 2-minute video. It’s the “2010 Happiness Challenge,” with a theme and a resolution each week.

They did right by you.

They did, but a lot of publishers still don’t. Maybe you could offer your clients help on what to ask of publishers. Many authors don’t even know what to ask them for. I’d ask them, “Can you turn this into a PDF and host it for me?” They can do that!  You could help writers and publishers how to get more value out of their mutual relationship. Publishers don’t have the time to think about it; and a lot of authors don’t know what to ask for.

What mistakes have you made?

The first would be not using lots of ways to engage with people.  I didn’t start my newsletter for two years — it took me that long to get it in gear. But fortunately, I still had two more years to go before the book came out! You know, if you’re going to start using social media, you can spend a lot of time scratching your head over what services to use. When I was starting I found that just the question of what blog format can paralyze you– WordPress vs. Blogspot vs. Drupal.

You can feel very stupid baby-stepping your way in.

Like with Twitter. It’s very easy, but it’s hard at the same time to get started. First of all, turn off the chirping sound on your Tweetdeck. Then turn off the notifications.

I just met with a writer with a book coming out, and I asked, “Are you using Twitter?’”She said, “I have a Twitter account, and I don’t really post anything, and I already have 200 people following me! I’m going to start tweeting when my book comes out.” And I thought, “Those 200 people are just spam followers. They have no idea who you are. They’re not loyal fans.”

That’s a classic mistake.

Another classic mistake is not having a very clear place on your blog’s homepage where you explain, “What Is This Blog.” You need to make it very clear to people, right away, why they should be interested in reading your posts.

Another: If you’re sending an email to someone because you want them to see something you’ve written, and perhaps link to you, don’t just put the link, include the link and the text.

And the headline.

Right! People won’t link through unless they know what it’s about.

What other forms of author resistance do you see?

In the last few years I’ve seen a huge shift.  I used to be seen as a sort of a scab — undercutting the market, it’s not right to write for free. Now other writers are getting very interested in online. Writers still come too late, like 6 months before their pub dates. 

I have to be the bearer of bad news. I have to tell them this is the long road. They think it’s going happen fast. Or they say after 3 months, it hasn’t worked. But I ask them, Is this your only book? If so, yes, it hasn’t worked. But if this is for life, think about it:  Are you building a following that you can call upon time and time again?

A non-fiction writer was making the case to me about why she shouldn’t have a blog. She said, “Nobody wants to read about my topic online.” I had to ask her, “If you don’t think anybody’s going to read you free for 3 minutes online, what makes you think they’re going to pay $25 for a book?”

If there’s no audience online, it’s hard to imagine an audience in the bookstore.

Joe Dolce is a partner in the Public Relations/Media Strategy firm, DolceGoldin, and the creator of a new online publicity system for authors. He was the former editor in chief of Details and Star magazines. He can be reached via email.