You may have seen our recent post concerning FiledBy’s new Twitter Integration functionality.  If you’re already actively using Twitter – and by “using” we mean “Tweeting” – then you probably already recognize the significant utility of this new feature. However, there are a great many authors who are not yet familiar with all the advantages of actively using Twitter. Furthermore, if you’re already using Twitter, you may not be using it to its fullest potential. This update is intended to provide a few ideas for how to effectively use Twitter to promote your work and, as always, sell more books.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that you are relatively familiar with Twitter – that is to say, even if you don’t actively use it, you know that Twitter is a unique form of social network comprised of millions of people posting “microblogs,” or very brief updates about their activities, interests, and whatever comes to mind. If you are not familiar with Twitter, I recommend reading the excellent Wikipedia article on Twitter, which covers much of its utility, its history, and its significance as a communication medium.

Twitter’s greatest power comes from its openness. Anybody can read anything written by anyone. Anybody can take something someone else has written and forward it on. This means that any given message, thought, Tweet – whatever you want to call it – has the potential to reach an audience exponentially larger than the one it was initially sent to, if people find the tweet interesting, relevant, and worthwhile of passing on to their online community.

So. What can you use it for? Well, the possibilities are fairly limitless, but here are a few ideas:

• Events: Make sure to Tweet about upcoming events (book signings, speaker engagements, etc.). Better still, Tweet from the events. Anything interesting? Tweet it.
• Promotions: Give away free copies of a book, or free tickets to an event, to the first person who Tweets back the correct answer to a given trivia question, or similar. You’d be surprised at how quickly giveaways like this can get Re-tweeted by your followers. (Just make sure, if you’re doing trivia, that a quick Google search doesn’t immediately reveal the answer!)
• Opinions: Your readers follow you on Twitter because they think you are interesting. Harness that interest. Is there something in the news of the day that is similar to the focus of your work? Tweet a quick opinion. Make it interesting.

Those are just three ideas, all playing to one theme: be interesting, relevant, and worthwhile of engagement. Your goal is not only to keep your existing readers interested but to make your Tweets sufficiently interesting so your readers will engage and Retweet them out to their online community. The viral nature of Twitter is only one of the best ways to begin building the foundation of an exponentially growing audience.

The IBPA Publishing University will be held on May 24-25 in New York—the only educational conference created BY publishers FOR publishers

Here’s a sneak peak at why you won’t want to miss the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University 2010: Transitions-How to Start, Grow and Succeed in Publishing’s New World:

• Seth Godin, author of 12 bestselling books and called by American Way magazine “America’s Greatest Marketer,” will bring his unique style and no-holds barred vision to independent book publishers as the luncheon keynote speaker. Dominique Raccah, Publisher and founder of Sourcebooks, Inc., a company whose name is synonymous with “innovation” and that has grown from one room in 1987 to a multi-million dollar independent publishing company, will kick off the opening day.

• Emagination: What’s Now and What’s Next in Ebooks. The e-revolution is upon us—what do you need to know to come out on top? Join a panel of digital pioneers and industry prophets who will weigh in on a host of e-issues that will help you formulate your publishing company’s e-strategy right now.
  …Continue Reading

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to start looking at several important web analytics. Analytics are an important element in determining if your web efforts are a success.

Let’s stop right there with the word “success.” Everybody who has a presence on the web wants that presence to be successful. However, what does “success” really mean? Is it having more people visit your website every week? Is it driving more people to buy your books from your website? Is it making sure visitors to your website are interested in the media materials you post?

The answer is simple: any and all of the above, and then some. It really all depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

Web analytics can answer these questions. Is your aim to make sure that people who visit your website are continuing on to purchase your books? Analytics can tell you that. Analytics can even tell you how often those people visiting your site are viewing and/or downloading media materials you post to the site or from what state or country your visitors reside. Let’s say that success, for you, is appealing to people from New Orleans. Analytics can tell you how much of your visitor traffic is from the Big Easy.

This is just scratching the surface. Over the next few weeks, we will devote one blog post per week to exploring one of the key standard web analytics, because it’s important for anyone attempting to conduct business of any kind on the web to know what tools are out there to evaluate the relative success of their efforts. We’ll tell you what each analytic means, and give examples of how each analytic can be used to gauge success. We’ll even explore how analytics can be instrumental in helping improve your website.

Seth Godin posted two typically brief and brilliant updates to his blog this week, one of which explicitly mentions books, while the other seems to continue in a similar vein to the first post. Both posts are recommended reading for anybody involved in attempting to market a product in any space, doubly so for anyone in the digital space, and trebly so for anyone marketing a work of media such as a book.

The gist of the two posts is fairly simple. First, recognize that your book doesn’t appeal to everyone, and leverage that recognition. Unless you are sitting on the next Harry Potter series, you need to know who your reader is, and you need to communicate to that reader in the method and manner that reader is most likely to respond to. Don’t make the mistake of attempting to communicate with an inappropriately broad audience. In the digital realm, and particularly in social media, the quality of your audience is vastly more important than sheer quantity. And second, recognize that quality is important because your core audience is the audience that will coalesce around your message and your work. As Godin puts it “tribes” don’t form around the “status quo.”

Godin’s posts gel well with the Long Tail theory, a statistical theorem given modern business context in Chris Anderson’s excellent The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The Long Tail theorem posits that the majority of the population isn’t defined by the most popular characteristic of that population. In business terms, this essentially means that while any given Harry Potter book rules the charts on release, the majority of the population is actually not purchasing that Harry Potter book and is, in fact, purchasing an almost infinitely wide variety of other books.

How does this gel with Godin’s posts and with your efforts to engage with readers and sell more of your books? Simple. Regardless of the size of your core audience, those are the people you should be focusing on. Focus on your slice of the long tail. Godin’s second post argues that “people don’t coalesce into active and vibrant tribes based on the status quo,” that the “only vibrant tribes are the ones closer to the edges.” Translation for an author? By focusing on your slice of the long tail, you’ll be reaching the readers who are most likely to respond sharply to your message and your work. These are the readers who can do your marketing for you, by evangelizing your work. These are the readers who can find new readers. They can do more to broaden your slice than almost anything else.

This is, in essence, the power of social media for digital marketers. You should look at your social media communication less as promotion and more as a way to energize your base audience into doing your promotion for you.

Nashville, Tenn., March 30, 2010 – FiledBy (www.filedby.com), the leading online directory of authors and contributors, today announced the launch of various new features and functionality available on author websites as well as across the FiledBy site.

Twitter posts can now easily be streamed directly to FiledBy author sites, providing a seamless integration of the two platforms. Available with a Premium membership, FiledBy authors can configure this new functionality through their account administration page in just a few simple steps.