Iris Blasi, Digital Media Coordinator, Hilsinger Mendelson East

Ed note: Iris Blasi is a speaker at the upcoming Publishers Launch San Fransisco on November, 2. The conference, which follows StoryWorld Conference + Expo, will explore Ebooks For Everyone Else. Blasi will discuss how small publishers, agents, and authors can make their books more discoverable through social media and make use of a wide variety of online tools. With less than a month to go, you’ll want to register now.

We’re well past the social media tipping point. No longer must people explain its value or justify it as more than strangers announcing what they’d had for lunch. And yet still I find so many showing up at the social media pool, all suited up in their 140 characters, and they’re just doggy-paddling—tweeting about the errands they ran that day, posting an interesting link or two, broadcasting their observations about life, ‘liking’ up a storm, chatting with friends.  As long as you’re not posting anything inappropriate for a public forum, this is all no harm, no foul. But if you have anything other than a purely personal motive for engaging, you’re wasting time with this splashing around. If you’re on Twitter for more than just socializing—if you actually have something to sell—it’s time to learn how to do some fancy dives.

The good news is that as an author, an agent, or a publisher, you already have something to talk about: books. Social media ignites when passion meets profession and, presumably, if you’ve written, agented, or published a book, you love reading. (If not, you may want to stop now and consider a non-publishing career path.) “What are you reading?” is one of the most intimate questions one can ask in polite society, and you can use the magical things that are books to connect with other like-minded people.

The big question is HOW?

There are numerous ways to do this – tapping into category-specific trending topics like #fridayreads; dipping into the search function to find people talking about your subject of interest; actively following thought leaders in your field – but the one I find to be the most under-utilized is the Art of the Nudge.

Social media is often likened to an online cocktail party. In such a situation, you wouldn’t necessarily barge up to a person you wanted to meet, extend your hand, introduce yourself, and launch into your pitch. Instead, you’d engage in the dance of proximity: being interesting within earshot. You tell a joke so on point that the group surrounding you laughs simultaneously; you share an anecdote that sparks an animated conversation. This piques your target’s interest and draws them to you. This subtler art is all too often neglected in social media, in favor of direct contact.

There are handles everywhere in the social media world. Grab onto them. Use them to get someone’s attention and – voila! – they’re pulled right into the conversation.

Back to our hypothetical cocktail party. How often have you heard, “Did you read that thing in the Times?” A good conversationalist can steer the discussion deftly no matter the answer. But imagine if when you posed the question, the person standing behind you within earshot just happened to be the journalist who wrote the article. And that next to her was her editor. And next to him was one of the experts she’d consulted for the piece. And then a college kid writing his thesis on the topic overheard and chimed in with a few tidbits of information from his latest research. And then a preeminent scholar on the subject wandered over to add in his two cents.

What is a relatively unlikely occurrence in that setting (if it happens, it’s a heck of a party) is well within the realm of possibility in social media circles.

Before long, we’ll reach a point where handles are prevalent on business cards, resumes, and hyperlinked every place a name appears. Until then, it is almost always worth the extra 60 seconds to find the right attribution, which will allow that person to overhear what you’re saying. Read an interesting piece that morning? Look to see if the journalist is on Twitter before posting. Giving a shout-out to a book on #fridayreads? Check to see if the author or the book itself has a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. Did you get a nice bit of publicity from an online venue? Post on your Facebook page using their Facebook handle, so it appears in their stream. Have something smart to add to a conversation begun in an article? Include the media outlet’s handle and that outlet may well re-tweet you, bringing your words (and your handle) to the attention of a much wider audience. These are the ways to initiate an interaction. You’re not @replying them; you’re not playing “please re-tweet me” games; you’re not hollering for them to buy your book or read your blog post. Instead, you’re virtually name-dropping in conversation and making sure they hear you. <Nudge nudge.> I’m over here and I have interesting things to say.

When plotting just how you want to brush up against someone using The Art of the Nudge, think about your desired reaction. Do you want them to click through to a link? Follow you back? Re-tweet you? Answer a question? Sign up for your mailing list? Write a review? Having the endgame in mind will change how you plan your nudge. (And, no, “more followers or fans” should not be your objective. Empty popularity contests won’t get you much of anything. Social media should be the means to some kind of end.) Pause for a moment and think about what works on you: with information streaming by at a mile a minute, what catches your attention? Probably not someone screaming out for followers and begging for re-blogs. So what is it, exactly, that earns your click-through? What makes you want to re-tweet? Pinpoint how others successfully seduce you, and use the lessons learned from these online Don Juans with your own followers.

At its core, social media is really the art of the tease.  It’s all about clever headlines and good timing. Sure, you could walk out on stage shouting into a megaphone about how great you are. But if you take off a single glove in just the right way, you might find a lot more people sticking around for the rest of the show.

This post originally appeared in the conference program for eBooks for Everyone Else and has been reproduced with Ms. Blasi’s permission.

Iris Blasi is the Digital Media Coordinator at literary PR firm Hilsinger Mendelson East. Formerly, she was an associate editor at Union Square Press, and she’s also worked for Random House, NBC, and The Idea Logical Company. Her writing has appeared in outlets including The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, Dow Jones Newswires, Publishers Weekly, BUST Magazine, The Jewish Daily Forward, Bitch Magazine, and BookPage.

From the interview:

One of the questions that all authors right now are facing is: to what degree should they feel responsible for getting their books out there and promoting their books. For some authors, that seems like a lot of fun and it comes naturally to them, but for many writers, that’s not something that they naturally want to do, and they sort of feel like, “I’m a writer and that’s my job: to write my book or to write my article. I don’t feel like I have to be responsible for all these other things.”

And there’s a lot of talk about branding, and I think the word “brand” has a lot of negative connotations for people, so I always think about my voice, because to a writer thinking about your voice feels much more natural.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

From the interview:

I don’t think anyone should be betting the ranch on a particular device, platform, or whatever. And, my encouragement to them is to really do the inside things, invest in workflow, in metadata, in all the of the sort of unsexy but fundamental things that will lay the groundwork so that when winners do emerge on platforms, devices, and so forth, you’re in a position to scoot in there very quickly.

And small guys… are really not in a position to spend a lot of money on apps or special enhancements to their books and stuff.

So, it’s really a matter of: Let’s stay alive. Let’s position ourselves so that when the lights come on in the 12-, 24-, 36-month period, you’ve got a chance to scoot in and do well.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/

The panel took characters from the Three Little Pigs and gave them social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook for character development, back story, and interactivity. Mobile app developer Scrollmotion created an iPad app that also included entry points for audience interaction with the story. The experience was set up so that participants could determine the outcome of the story through interaction with the characters. At key points in the story, audience members could tweet what would happen next: will the Pigs be able to “run” away before the Wolf could “blow” down the house?

I caught up with Esther Lim, Founder and Chief Experience Architect at The Estuary to talk about the panel and the future of storytelling; Lim has over 15 years of experience in interactive agency consulting experience as a digital marketing leader, social media strategist, and game analyst. Lim created social media profiles for each of the characters in the Three Little Pigs story, who then interacted with the audience and with each other. Characters from other folktales, such as Little Red Riding Hood, herself a victim of the Big Bad Wolf, were also brought to life through social media and engaged with the main characters of the core story.

Why would you flesh out a story through social media? For Lim, part of the value of expanding the core story into social media lies in the ability to develop character and story beyond the original franchise. Plus, audience members can see the inner workings of the story more clearly and become more attached to the characters because they identify and associate with character behaviors more readily. Not only did this add to the back story and character development, but, by showing the dynamic between characters, social media added to the story world and expanded on the personality of the characters.

But, for Lim, it’s vitally important to make “organic choices” about what social media to use as a narrative platform. Some of the key questions creators need to ask include:

Questions about the story

• Is this a translation or an original intellectual property conceived in a multiplatform way?
• How well-defined is the story world?
• Are there subplots or other themes that could be expanded outside of the core narrative?
• How well-defined are the characters?
• Which characters are most appropriate to expand into social media?
• What is that character’s archetype?
• How would that character express himself or herself through social media?

Questions about the audience

• Who is the core audience of that intellectual property?
• What technologies are members of that core audience using?
• Is the use of social media to engage with your core audience or to expand to new audiences? If the latter, what technologies are commonly used in that target audience?

Care needs to be taken, though, when using social media as a narrative platform, and Lim offered some useful advice about executing this kind of transmedia experience. She advised that narrative “bridges” have to be written to link the core stories and the sub-arcs unfolding over social media. Creators need to look for opportunities in the core story where sub-arcs could be created, and even if there is an expansive story world to draw from, editing and focus are still important to the creation process or else the story becomes convoluted.

In terms of production planning, Lim noted that, interestingly, web series have begun to bring interactive elements in to augment their content. By filling up downtime (for example, while filming) with character development and world building through social media, the intellectual property continues to be consumed even while audiences wait for the next episode.

Finally, Lim emphasized how audiences are already engaging with characters, stories, and IPs through social media. In the end, it’s really the early adopters, creators that are already producing content across multiple platforms (sometimes with interactive and even collaborative dimensions), that are really driving the conversation about the future of storytelling.

Esther Lim is the Founder and CEO of The Estuary LLC, which specializes in immersive digital marketing. She is a seasoned Digital Marketer, Social Media Strategist and Game Analyst with has over fifteen years of combined interactive agency and consulting experience creating and leading digital, social media and transmedia storytelling programs for Fortune 500 brands, designed to attract, engage, and retain consumer audiences while building brand advocacy.

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.

From the interview:

I think agents need to figure out the authors that they feel can continue to publish traditionally and really focus on making those people as successful as they possibly can, long-term earners.

And, then for the other clients that they have, that maybe are going to be struggling to get traditional deals, you need to find alternatives, and that means looking to new companies. It means understanding the different business models of e-publishing and apps and figuring out ways they can add value to that.

The role of the agent has always been to find great projects. Now, you have to figure out ways to get them out there.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/

From the interview:

When a reader comes to your book, it’s not just about the book; it’s about what happens before they get the book, their need, their desire, the things missing from their life and what happens after they put the book down, because ideally your purpose is not just the book, because they’ll read it, and eventually it will be put down, and it will eventually be dust.

It’s the idea that you’re giving them an idea or an experience or entertainment that lives on in their head that they now want to pursue more knowledge in that industry or that genre or more things that you’re doing. They want to connect more with you, or they’re really thinking about this in some way. It’s about this lifespan beyond the book itself.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/

From the interview:

I think one of the things that we’re going to see over the next year is social media really come to the book publishing industry. I don’t think we’ve seen the ultimate social media model for books or anything even close to it.

And one of the things people keep talking about is the issue of how do you discover a book that you weren’t planning to purchase in the digital world. Where you used to walk down the aisle in a bookstore and stumble on a book that you didn’t anticipate. And, while physical bookstores are still very significant and will always be significant that is, I think, a real question, and I think social media is part of the answer.

But, to me, even if there is no complete breakthrough on the marketing side, you’re still going to see big sales increases just by moving the distribution barriers.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com

OverDrive and the Library eBook Convenience Paradox
Eric Hellman

The library ebook distribution channel presents another opportunity for market segmentation. Libraries “buy” the ebooks, resulting in revenue for rights holders. Consumers can read the books without paying for them, but they have to be willing to put up with 21 step configurations and account IDs, and face the possibility that a book might not be available right away and may have a long lending queue. At least with ebooks, there’s not the inconvenience of going to the library again to return the book at the end of the lending period!

But imagine if the Overdrive website made it as easy to find and borrow a book  as Amazon’s makes it to get a Kindle Edition. Imagine that you didn’t need an Adobe ID separate from your library card number. What would happen to the inconvenience barrier that allows publishers to still capture the high end of the price curve at full price? It seems clear to me that without the inconvenience barrier, publishers would quickly remove their desirable content from library lending programs to protect their retail sales.

So here’s the paradox: libraries can only be successful at ebook lending if they do a bad job of it.

The Present and Future of Digital Publishing
Joshua Gans, Harvard Business Review

Thus, just as publishers saw costs being shattered and power moving back their way, a new roadblock complementor stood in their path: the owner and controller of the software powering eReaders and tablets. Of course, here Apple’s iOS is currently the market leader, but Google’s Android and HP’s WebOS are waiting in the wings. As is well known, Apple maintains tight control of its iOS and imposes various rules on content and also how content is paid for. Google takes an opposite approach, seemingly on a strategy not to earn money in that market at all — at least not directly. In either case, publishers will be at the mercy of whoever controls the operating system of tablets users have purchased.

The iPad is a game console
SemiAccurate

Do the comparison: Console vendors are quite willing to take it on the chin in hardware price, because a low hardware price sets up volumes that let them make far more money on the games, by taking a big cut of game revenue. Apple takes it on the chin in hardware, and sucks in 30% on the back end every time an app is sold. It’s just like Nintendo patenting and keeping secret a magic chip they put in their cartridges, without which games can’t run on their systems. Instead of a chip, Apple has the App store. Same principle, just a different implementation.

Facebook Shares Are Worth Almost Three Times More Than Tweets For E-Commerce
Leena Rao, TechCrunch

According to the startup, the value of a Facebook share is $14 and the value of a Tweet is $5. For shares and tweets, ChompOn was able to directly attribute sales to the original action and took the total revenue attributed to each action and divided it by the total number of shares/Tweets. ChompOn is working with 50 partners including Blackbook Magazine, JDeal and the wine vertical of flash sales site Beyondtherack, to power Groupon-like crowdsourced coupons.

The Three Facets of Transmedia
Simon Staffans, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Your audience is your audience, but at the same time they are your co-creators, investing themselves in your story and inevitably bringing change with them. It is then up to you, the creator, to choose just how much change you want. But generally, the more people invest, the closer they will feel to your content. Best case scenario, you not only have an audience and a horde of co-creators, you also have advocates that bring your stories to people in a fashion you yourself never could.

Digital Natives Explore Digital Preservation
Library of Congress

Today’s teenagers are part of the first generation to grow up immersed and fluent in the world of digital technologies. These “digital natives” depend on digital information for communication, education and entertainment. But today’s Digital Natives may not know that digital information can easily be lost.

Tweet of the Week

That’s just a taste of what you may have missed this week. To stay on top of the most interesting news, commentary and tweets related to publishing, keep in touch via our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join your publishing colleagues in our LinkedIn group, and connect with the broader DBW Network.

Digital Book World 2011

Following are the assigned hashtags for Workshops and breakout sessions.

MONDAY, JANUARY 24

WORKSHOPS

10:00am-1:00pm:

Content Strategy (Dan Blank) #dbwcontent

Mobile Strategy (Sobhany) #dbwmobile

Ebook Design/Production (Tallent) #dbwebook

2:00pm-5:00pm

Email Marketing (Blackwelder/House) #dbwemail

Transmedia Development (Norrington) #dbwtrans

InDesign to Ebook (LeBlanc/Cunningham) #dbwindesign

TUESDAY, JANUARY 25

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

1:30pm-2:20pm

Content First, Format Second #dbwcontent

New Models for Agents #dbwagents

Indie Bookstores Still Count #dbwindie

ePUB3 3.0: Updates and Enhancements #dbwepub3

2:30 pm-3:20pm

Ebook Distribution for Small & Midsized Publishers #dbwdistro

Will Territorial Sales Become Obsolete? #dbwrights

Sales Department in Transition #dbwsales

Beyond the Ebook #dbwbeyond

4:00pm-4:50pm

Delivering Enhanced Ebooks #dbwenhanced

Building Author Brands #dbwbrands

Skill Sets Publishers Don’t Have #dbwskills

New Digital Revenue Streams #dbwrevenue

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 26

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

10:30am-11:20am

Consumer Sales Data #dbwconsumer

Metadata: Getting the Core Stuff Right #dbwmetadata

Understanding the Children’s Book Marketplace #dbwkids

Engaging Readers Directly: Tools of the Trade #dbwreader

11:30am–12:20pm

Thinking Direct-to-Consumer #dbwconsumer

Metadata: Getting Enriched Beyond the Mere Specs #dbwmetadata

Connecting With Kids #dbwkids

Rethinking Rights in a Transmedia World #dbwtrans

1:30pm-2:20pm

Publishers Developing Vertical Communities #dbwvertical

Marketing a Stand-Alone Title in Digital Times #dbwmktg

A New Kind of Publisher for a New Kind of Product #dbwkids

The Ebook Ecosystem: Where Do Libraries Fit? #dbwlibrary

Branding has become something of a bad word, or, if not bad, one loaded with unsavory implications. It can imply a smeary corporate veneer of insincerity, for example. Branding an author (not with a hot piece of metal, I promise) is really about consistency and making sure readers can recall the authors they like when shopping for books, and can easily identify what they’re going to get from those authors’ books.

The tricky part is that both the publisher and the author contribute to the author’s brand, but the author has more riding on the brand’s efficacy. A publisher’s usually focused on selling the one book by an author that they have in their current release schedule.

The author’s job, however, is to market not only that book but all the other books she has to offer, including older books that may or may not be with the publisher of her current work. So the author, let’s call her Jane Smythe, has to come up with some sort of consistent method through which she can make her name memorable, market herself and, by extension, all her books, even those that may be in other genres or with other publishers.

The most obvious place to begin the branding of an author is her name, or names, if she writes under different pseudonyms. The author’s brand name is what readers will remember – more than any single title, in most cases.

Publishers focus most of their attention on What’s Coming Out Now, though they may also promote backlist titles by the same author when a new release is hitting bookstores. Following in Harlequin’s footsteps, I expect there will be a lot more backlist promotion on the part of publishers, especially in digital releases, but for now, the focus is mostly on the book about to hit the stores – and remember, that’s umpteen-eleventy books every single Tuesday.

The publisher will put together some form of promotion for the current book, but Smythe has to combine her publisher’s efforts with some work of her own. This is not to say that publishers and the publicity and marketing folks who work within them won’t help an author who is trying to build her career, particularly between books. But as one publicity maven said to me, “There’s only so many of us to go around.”

This is where online promotion can be a very effective tool for building an author’s brand name.

Here’s the thing about online promotion and brand building, though: the hard sell does not work. If you show up online and hop up and down like a Jack Russell Terrier on perky pills saying, “Buy my book! Buy my book!” it won’t work. If anything, it’ll associate your brand name with the feeling of annoyance.

Building a brand name is not about selling books – it’s about making your name memorable. Connecting with readers about topics other than sales and promotion is itself a form of promotion. There’s a lot of paranormal romance out there, for example. If you’re the paranormal romance author who also posts a tried-and-true dinner recipe every afternoon on Facebook, maybe tying each recipe to a restaurant in your books, readers will remember your name.

That’s what you want: name recognition and recall, because it will go a lot farther than a simple sales transaction. Demonstrating an interest in the reader as more than just “that person who buys my books” is essential to building an effective brand, because it creates a connection that lasts beyond any one book.

Tricky, and simple, and highly effective.

Sarah will be participating in the 7x20x21 event during DBW 2011′s Opening Ceremonies on Monday, Janaury 24th, guaranteed to be a memorable experience!

Sarah Wendell is co-author of the book, Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, and co-founder of Smart Bitches Trashy Books.com, one of the most popular blogs examining romance fiction.