Talking and tweeting

Yesterday evening I attended the Women’s National Book Association’s Book Marketing on the Web panel.  (Recap here.)  It was an informative discussion, with the panelists highlighting the importance of authenticity and knowledge.  Panelist Fauzia Burke of FSB Associates pointed out that online  publicity / marketing is incredibly time consuming because pitches must be personalized for blogs and websites, which is one of the reasons why author Abby Stokes advised authors to take on (at least some) of the responsibility of promoting their books.

Content aside, the panel was interesting for couple reasons.  At the start of the discussion, the moderator had announced a Twitter hash tag for those people who might be live tweeting the event.  I whipped out my phone, but felt a little awkward since most of the audience seemed to be, well, just listening.  I sure was tickled, though, when it became apparent that not one, but two of the panelists were themselves tweeting!  Now that’s what I call multi-tasking.  Both Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com and Kelly Leonard who heads up the Online Marketing department at the Hachette Book Group, monitored — and contributed to — the Twitter stream, but never missed a beat in the offline conversation.  (I’d definitely need practice to do this.)  They were able to get real-time feedback from both audience members who were tweeting, as well as from people not in the audience who were “listening in.”  Who needs a live feed when you can just follow the Twitter stream?

A second issue of note came mid-way through the panel, when the talk turned to ereaders and Peter Costanzo from the Perseus Books Group took out his second-generation Kindle and passed it around.  So despite the hype, despite Oprah, despite this being a room full of hardcore readers and writers, the Kindle is still an uncommon enough device  (due in no small part to its outrageous price, I’m sure) that it merited a show-and-tell.  Still, the march of the ereaders continues: today Sony is expected to announce a deal with Google that gives Reader users access to a half million books in the public domain.