BEA begins
I didn’t get a chance to stop by BEA yesterday — there was too much to do around the office. (Plus, I couldn’t for the life of me find a list of the panels on the website beyond the sparse “Events at a Glance” PDF.) Which was a pity. But fortunately, Publishers Weekly was there, so I’m linking to their coverage.
Here are some panels that caught my eye:
Combating Print and Digital Piracy of Publishers’ Works (AAP)
Giving it Away: When Free ebooks Make Sense — And When They Don’t
I’ve been very interested in finding out more about ebook giveaways — on the one hand, you’d think that a free ebook would lead to fewer sales, but that hasn’t seemed to be the case. Or has it? Peter Balis, director of online sales at Wiley, and Brent Lewis, v-p for digital and Internet at Harlequin, discussed “rules” for giveaways and talked about cases in which free ebooks have both helped and hurt sales.
Richard Nash, formerly publisher at Soft Skull Press, and Dedi Felmen, formerly a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, discussed their new venture, Round Table, a mash up of sorts of a subscription service and a social network that gets writing to readers.
I’ll be heading up to the Javits Center later on today — it’s shaping up to be a busy afternoon (and evening).
What to download for your BEA trip
As the countdown to BEA / Book Expo America begins, I thought it would be useful to think about what wired folk should download (besides books, of course), so you might consider:
Signing up for:
Your Twitter arsenal: Twitter will be *the* way to keep up with people and panels. If you haven’t already signed up, chances are you won’t be familiar enough with the program to utilize it at BEA, but for current users, make sure you’ve got your mobile app like Tweetie or Twitterberry and, if you’d like, a desktop manager like Digsby or Tweetdeck .
Flickr: if you want to post / share pictures
Downloading on your iPhone (although you can access these applications on the web, too):
Hopstop: particularly handy for getting around the city because it provides both subway / bus and walking directions. We use it for getting to neighborhoods with which we’re not familiar (or any areas served by the G or M trains).
NYC Subway Map: There are several free iPhone applications that provide maps of the NYC subway system. @DBerthiaume uses CityTransit (available for $2.99) that uses GPS to find you the nearest subway station (and which also includes maps of Metro North — with trains serving Westchester and Connecticut — and the Long Island Railroad). Maps for New Jersey Transit buses and trains (including PATH trains that serve Hoboken and Jersey City) can be found on the NJ Transit web site.
*** Note: A lot of subway lines are “affected” — by which I mean “royally screwed up” — by track work on weekends. Check the MTA Service Advisories site for details (and the iPhone application CityTransit provides these updates from the MTA site). ***
Yelp: information about nearby bars, restaurants, shopping, hotels, banks, drugstores and more
Loopt: find people (but only if they’re on Loopt as well — Twitter sort of does the same thing)
Any New Yorkers have other suggestions for handy getting-around-NYC applications? Please comment.
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Once you’re in New York, these web sites may be of use.
Menu Pages: @kalenski reminded me of this useful site that lists menus for hundreds (thousands?) of New York City restaurants broken down by cuisine, neighborhood, zip code — pretty much any designation you’d want.
GoMobo: Allows you to place on order online with a local eatery and then have it delivered (or you can pick it up).
Open Table: If you know where you want to eat, you can make reservations here.
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And here are some tips for catching a bus the New York way (or at least my way).
As you may know, the Javits Center, located at 34th Street and 11th Avenue, is a bit out of the way. The closest subways are at 34th and Seventh Avenue or at 34th and Eighth Avenue; depending on how fast you walk, you’re looking at a 10-20 minute hike.
The Javits Center Directions page notes that there is an M34 crosstown bus available. I will take this on faith. I have never taken it. I am not sure I have ever seen it. Nevertheless, if you would like to try, this is how to do it: walk west on the north side of 34th Street, which is the side of the road on which the bus allegedly arrives.
At each bus stop — one is located on each avenue, check to see if a bus is in view. If it is, wait for it; if not, continue walking to the next avenue. Periodically, turn your head to see if the bus is coming — it’s perfectly normal; New Yorkers are paranoid — and if it is, book like all heck to the next stop. Keep doing this until you catch the bus or get to the Javits Center. I always find it tremendously fulfilling when I beat the bus to my destination. The small pleasures.
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And lastly, for tweeple coming to New York, feel free to use #nychelp if you have questions about the city (and if you’re from New York and are willing to help out, check the hash tag and answer what questions you can). Check my Want to help out bookish folks coming to NYC for BEA? post for details.
For authors on book tour, don’t forget your …
Some people prepare long checklists when traveling. I don’t, in part because the checklist is inevitably missing some item anyway, in part because you can usually obtain with relative ease whatever it is that you forgot. But here’s my abbreviated checklist of must-have items for traveling authors:
1. Medication(s) — if applicable
2. Glasses / contacts (including an extra pair) — if applicable
3. Travel documents including a government-issued ID if you are flying
4. Rechargers for gadgets — if you can, recharge your gadgets fully before you leave so you don’t have to worry about a phone going dead, at least at the beginning of your tour. If you have a lot of gadgets (laptop, phone, iPod, Blackberry, ereader, etc.), consider bringing a surge suppressor. It sounds funny — after all, your Blackberry can recharge on the hotel bathroom floor — but a surge suppressor is convenient if you have the space for it in your luggage.
5. At least one extra copy of your book
6. A nice pen — please don’t sign books with Bic pens!
7. A change of clothes and basic toiletries that you carry in your carry-on bag if you are flying — pack as though your luggage will be lost. It’s a pain having to wait for lost luggage to arrive when you’re on vacation and spending a week in one location. It’s about 10 times worse not having lost luggage arrive before you have to decamp the next morning for the next book tour stop.
What other items are “must haves” for authors on book tour? Comment at will.
How authors can reach out with a blog
Editors and literary agents often talk about an author’s “platform” and the “target audience” for a book — they want to know who and how far the book will reach, (with “reach” meaning “sell,” of course). Blogs are sort of similar. And since a lot of authors blog these days — and a lot more are thinking of blogging — I thought I’d look at how to reach out with a blog.
You could say there are two aspects of reaching out with a blog: finding an audience and having the audience find you.
Finding an audience
Last week, PR Squared posted a piece about audience targeting in social media. They broke down web users into three groups: Passionates, Influencers and Ad-Hocs (the idea being that you probably can’t reach everyone early and immediately, so you might as well know who to go after first). PR guru Ronn Torossian also weighed in last week on influencers.
Having the audience find you
The other part of blogging is making sure people can find you. The technical term for that is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), but that makes my head swim, so I’m going to highlight just one aspect of SEO: anchor text (the text of which a hyperlink is composed). Maw Books explains further in Linking Best Practices and Anchor Text and The Blog Herald also shows why anchor text is important.
It isn’t enough to simply write a blog post — that’s the equivalent of the tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. So how do you get folks to the forest?
Want to help out bookish folks coming to NYC for BEA?
I’ve only been to BEA once. And that was pre-Twitter. So if I get to go this year (I’m working on it), it’s gonna be exciting.
BEA, for those of you who don’t work in publishing, is Book Expo America, the largest book convention in the country. It brings together booksellers and publishing houses and rights people and book-y media and media escorts and pretty much everyone who has anything to do with book publishing (except, apparently, me).
Anyway, while I’m waiting to see whether or not my BEA visa comes through, I thought I’d jump in on the action. Since a lot of people will be traveling to New York for the conference and since about 99.9 percent of publishing people are based in New York, I thought we could perhaps offer our guests some help getting around the city.
It’s pretty simple — you just need Twitter. Here’s how it’ll work:
If you’re a BEA attendee coming to New York and need information about the city — directions, hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. — type in your question on Twitter using the hash tag #nychelp.
If you work in publishing and are willing to help provide information about NYC (in 140-character chunks), please check #nychelp between now and Sunday, May 31 and answer whatever questions you can. The more people we get checking in and answering questions, the more people we’ll be able to help.
A few things to note:
1. #nychelp is not intended for questions about BEA itself. (The BEA website provides a substantial amount of information, as does the printed guide.) It is intended for questions about New York in general — for example, if you’re standing at the corner of the Javits Center and are trying to figure out how to get to the New York Public Library. Or if you want to know how to get to Prospect Park from the Brooklyn Marriott. Or if you want to know where to get good sushi. Or if you’re looking for someone to run the Central Park loop with you. That kind of stuff.
2. I won’t be able to guarantee the accuracy of the information on #nychelp (although I do hope people will be as honest and as accurate as possible) so my recommendation would be to use #nychelp in conjunction with another source like a map (or a website or a guy on the street).
3. It’s entirely possible that someone else has already started something like this. If you know of something similar, let me know and I’m happy to close up shop and join forces with them.
4. And lastly, feel free to forward this post / link to it and encourage your publishing colleagues / BEA attendees you know to use the hashtag.
Sending review copies of books to bloggers, Part III
The proliferation of book blogs has been incredibly beneficial for the publishing industry, providing those of us in book publicity with a new tool to promote books at a time when print publications have been forced to slash their books and arts coverage and providing readers with a wealth of information about books. But the evolution of the literary blogging community has raised a few issues that bear consideration.
In this recent Follow the Reader interview with reviewer Bethanne Patrick, who blogs at Still Life with The Book Maven and hosts The Book Studio, she explored the differences between what she defines as “professional” and “amateur” book bloggers. Many others have noted that not all book blogs are created equal, that some bloggers spend a considerable amount of time and care on their sites and others … not so much. I’ve never distinguished between “amateur” and “professional” in the past (although I do recognize “well written” and “not well written”!) but I imagine this will become a recurring issue as more people jump into the game.
Also, with a limited number of promotional copies of books at our disposal, the widening array of literary blogs means book publicists, now more than ever, must pick and choose who receives complimentary copies of books. Recently, one publicist — the recipient of repeated requests from a blogger who asked for dozens of books (yet failed to share a website) — sent in the following suggestions.
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First, reviewers — both for print and online outlets — are not guaranteed review copies. Publicists receive a limited amount of promotional copies to mail out at their discretion.
Secondly, depending on the book and the department, publicists may select reviewers based on the circulation and the overall reach and prestige of the publication (online or off) or of broadcast outlet. For online review sites we look for statistics including the following:
- Number of unique hits/page views per month for the blog, NOT the host site (like Blogger or WordPress or Blog Talk Radio)
- How often content is updated—daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
- How many registered users are on the site’s mailing list
- Alexa or Technorati ranking for the blog, NOT the host site
- User comments, i.e., evidence of a vibrant, interactive online community
***
There’s very rarely any one magic number or cutoff for determining who receives books. Most book publicists recognize there are any number of factors that must be examined to determine a blog’s popularity, several of which are listed above. (It’s also important to note that book publicists hold print journalists to similar standards. There are, for example, a number of print reporters — from large, prominent organizations — to whom I never send review copies because they have a habit of requesting virtually all titles in a catalog, yet repeated Google searches reveal no reviews or author features.)
Publicists — what else do you look at when determining whether to send a review copy to a blogger? And bloggers — how do you toot your horn?
For more information about receiving review copies of books, you may want to check:
Sending review copies of books to bloggers
Sending review copies of books to bloggers, Part II
Media requesting review copies of books / trying to contact authors
Why a *pre-publication* web presence is important
At this point, pretty much everyone is convinced of the value of an author’s web presence. Yay. But I’ve seen too many authors shoot for the book’s publication date (or a couple weeks before) as the launch date for their website.
This is about four months too late.
Typically, four to six months before the hardcover publication of a book, the publicity department sends out galleys to magazine and newspaper book editors as well as to some broadcast producers and online journalists. When I follow up with galley recipients, I’ll include some information about the book in the text of my email message, but it’s helpful for me to be able to link to more information online — links are an extremely effective and unobtrusive way for book publicists to provide the media with the additional details that could sell a writer or editor on a book. They are also vital tools for bloggers whose posts are lent credibility by links that direct readers to further information.
I’m not saying the complete author website needs to be up and ready six months before the book’s publication date. I’m not even saying the author has to have a web site at all. But I am saying it’s a really, really good idea for *something* — a website, a social networking profile, a blog — to be accessible when galleys are mailed out. An author without a web presence is a bit like the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one around.
The more information a website has the better, of course, but it’s also okay also to add to the site in stages. Realistically, busy authors may simply not have the time or the money to create beautiful websites at this stage in the game (or ever). Here are a few quick and cheap suggestions for getting online fast:
— Create a website with basic information first: If you don’t have or don’t know a lot of information (blurbs, book tour dates, etc.), first create the website with the basic information that you do have: a JPEG of the book cover, an author bio and a summary of the book. Make sure to mention both the publication date of the book as well as the publishing house and include contact information for the author and / or book publicist. Your publishing house can suggest web designers that work within a variety of budgets, but you can also put together a website yourself for free. (Of course, these sites look like they’ve been put together for free, but because all the hard, program-my stuff has been built in to the templates, all you need to do is follow a few basic instructions.)
— Add the cover and a tag line to an existing author website: Many authors who already have websites will initially post just the cover of their upcoming book and its publication date. This is a simple and effective way to get the word out about a new book. (Just don’t forget to go back later and add more information about it!)
— Create a Facebook fan page for the book or a profile for yourself: If you don’t have the time and / or money to create or update a website, create a Facebook book fan page / author profile for free. You should post the JPEG of the cover as well as your bio, a summary of the book, and contact information. Make sure to mention both the publication date of the book as well as the publishing house.
For authors who can invest the time in a robust web presence (which is almost always a good idea these days), you can find more information about social networking on this site or you can check my blogroll (on the right side of the page) for other helpful blogs, but the suggestions above cover some of the basics. Anyone have other ideas for how authors can establish a web presence quickly and cheaply?
NPR Books Watch — 5/1-5/7
Here are the NPR interviews for this week. Anyone who emails me the imprints of all the books listed (or houses if no imprint is available) will win the NPR Books Grid for the prior week that includes, in addition to the information below, interviewer, pub date, imprint, genre, post-interview Amazon ranking, pre-interview ranking (if the book was mentioned on Shelf Awareness and I was able to look up the number before the interview), and interview hyperlink. ***
TOTAL book stories for the week: 24
All Things Considered: 8
Diane Rehm: 4
Fresh Air: 2
NPR.org: 4
Talk of the Nation: 3
Tell Me More: 1
Weekend Edition Sunday: 2
* rebroadcast
| All Things Considered | Dissection | John Harley | Warner |
| All Things Considered | Brooklyn | Colm | Toibin |
| All Things Considered | You Must Read This / Independent People | Halldor | Laxness |
| All Things Considered | Annie’s Ghosts | Steve | Luxenberg |
| All Things Considered | End of Overeating | David | Kessler |
| All Things Considered | Three Books … / Mining The Classics For Laughs (Even ‘Moby Dick’) | ||
| All Things Considered | Resilience | Elizabeth | Edwards |
| All Things Considered | Final Four of Everything | Mark | Reiter |
| Diane Rehm | Match King, The | Frank | Partnoy |
| Diane Rehm | Brother Gardeners, The* | Andrea | Wulf |
| Diane Rehm | Sonata Mulattica | Rita | Dove |
| Diane Rehm | Age of the Unthinkable | Joshua Cooper | Ramo |
| Fresh Air | Bad Mother | Ayelet | Waldman |
| Fresh Air | Brooklyn | Colm | Toibin |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / Who is Mark Twain? | Mark | Twain |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / Likewise | Ariel | Schrag |
| NPR.org | Books We Like / Stealing MySpace | Julia | Angwin |
| NPR.org | Against the Grain / Why We Hate Us | Dick | Meyer |
| Talk of the Nation | Secret Lives of Boys, The | Malina | Saval |
| Talk of the Nation | Mighty Queens of Freeville | Amy | Dickinson |
| Talk of the Nation | 40 More Years | James | Carville |
| Tell Me More | Sag Harbor | Colson | Whitehead |
| Weekend Edition | Requiem for a Paper Bag | Davy | Rothbart |
| Weekend Edition Sunday | Who is Mark Twain? | Mark | Twain |
Is email outdated? Enter the discussion group
Many of you are familiar with my antipathy to voicemail (not so much the quick messages from people I know, but the lengthy ones from people I don’t about something that requires a lot of explaining and a lot of writing and, typically, a lot of follow-up phone calls and messages). Email provides a handy solution in situations like these since a written message can be a one-stop shop of information about both topic and sender.
But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. (Like the time I polished off a theater-sized box of M&Ms as a nine -year old and subsequently couldn’t stomach anything sweet for days.)
When it comes to discussions — versus simply providing information — email, too, can get pretty cumbersome. I know that when I see people start to weigh in on a message, I … wait until the end of the day to weigh. I sort the messages by subject, respond to the latest message in the thread and delete all the earlier ones (sometimes unopened, depending on the topic).
And this is where discussion groups come in handy. Two popular discussion groups are Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. Both are relatively easy to use (although everything takes a little getting used to). Ning has a few more bells and whistles — it’s sort of like a social network plus a discussion group. (And social networks themselves like Facebook and LinkedIn do have discussion functions.) Of course, Twitter is the venue du jour for many discussions as well: yesterday I attended the first meeting of the Digital Publishing Group organized by Daily Lit. You can see some of the commentary at #digpub.
As a book publicist dealing with authors and journalists, I can see the value of email — and I certainly don’t envision myself *not* using it — but for my sake (and for the sake of anyone with whom I might interact), I’m going to try to make more use of discussion groups. What is your favored platform for a discussion group? And what do you use it for?
Getting people to show at author events, the music way
On Saturday, I attended a Harvardwood panel entitled “Making music in tough economic times.” Music is often compared to books, in part because book publishing is facing the same digital growing pains the music industry did several years back, in part because concerts and literary readings often draw similar audiences.
I asked the panelists about concert promotion, since a little-known band or singer and a mid-list author face much the same challenge in getting people to show up for events. They suggested double billing — something bookstores do sometimes when they can find two “matching” authors available on the same day — and also finding an audience locally using the online tools at our disposal (which for the music industry continues to be MySpace — probably because it remains one of the few social networks on which you can post music tracks).
What are your favorite ways to promote author events? What have you found to be the most effective? Traditionally, book publicists have relied on scheduling author interviews to promote events, but with interview opportunities drying up, do you find yourself spending more time on online event promotion?
The Book Publicity Blog 