Social Media has a stronger impact to books than the movable type had, launched six centuries ago. Social Media makes information producible, accessible and spreads it easily, quickly and without barriers of entry. Is Social Media the paradigm shift which will the publishing industry alive? In any case changes will come. Big changes.

The Publishing industry provides the creative with resources not available to them, namely: production of books, the distribution, the pricing, marketing and sales.

Book Production

Looking at the emerging landscape of online publishing all of the mentioned contribution is available to authors online and seems much more economic by nature than the capital-intense publishing industry – it seems digital content makes production a commodity. Making use of online collaboration and web 2.0 technology lots of crowd-sourced book sites like FastPencil allow authors to skip the traditional publishing route entirely (and control their own promotion) to self-publish their eBooks. FastPencil claims this allows authors to have access to the broadest distribution possible as well as the promise that the digital files will be able to adapt to any eReader that is introduced in the future. Another company called Blio is intending to offer publishers/authors the opportunity to create digital files at no cost that can preserve the format of previously tough-to-digitize tomes such as cookbooks. On top of that as a author you can:

Social media has now given a voice to so many authors who'd never stand a chance with giant publishers. While writers need a pen in their right hand, they need social media in their other hand-it's the best free marketing tool out there and it has revolutionized the publishing industry. Criswell, J, Canty, N (2014) Deconstructing social media: an analysis of Twitter and Facebook use in the publishing industry. Publishing Research Quarterly 30: 352 – 376. Google Scholar Crossref. Social Media has a stronger impact to books than the movable type had, launched six centuries ago. Social Media makes information producible, accessible and spreads it easily, quickly and without barriers of entry. Is Social Media the paradigm shift which will the publishing industry alive? In any case changes will come. Napoli, Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (2019) hereinafter Social Media and the Public Interest. Other proposals may not use the precise phrase “public interest,” but their contents are similar in form to old public interest-based concepts, as with Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO.

Embedded multimedia – inserts web pages, videos, and other interactive content into selected areas of text toenhance meaning.
3D book view which includes realistic page turning
Reading out loud: TTS (text-to-speech) or a synchronized audio track
Translate to or from English in an imbedded translation window

This is all pretty impressive stuff and can create a user experience much more enhanced and engaging than paper books. Presumably this in the next years to come this will put some traditional offline publisher under pressure.

As part of the digital publishing revolution the way a story of a book is told even is about to change; transmedia is the buzzword here. Readers and writers engage and connect with each other to create the stories which are delivered then in systematically dispersed junks across multiple delivery channels. You can choose between chunks of text, watch a video story update or even, as in Girl Number 9, catch up on Twitter, where you can interact with characters and receive clues and updates. This means basically books are changing from being content sandwiched between two covers and organized by chapter to a many-to-many interactive storytelling. I like that.

Book Distribution

A trend noticeable is distributors or retailers are becoming book producers the same time. AmazonEncore for instance is not just a huge book store and recommendation engine to unearth exceptional books but they also partner with authors through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store,Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers. So if you can produce you eBook for free and get marketing and distribution support by your retailer, who needs publishers?

Having mentioned the Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, obviously the upcoming launch of the new iPad (any future mobile device really will turn into an eReader) and the trend to eBook distribution/consumption in general (in Dec 09 the number of digital books sold on Amazon surpassed the paper editions) shines a brand new light on the traditional publishing industry. New technological capabilities enable companies like Wired Magazine (see the video of the iPad version of the magazine below) to raise the bar of publishing (multimedia) content to a new unmatched form. This will certainly provide the users with a new level of experience of information consumption and will make the switch from print to digital media consumption easier, more tantalizing and much more readers will use it. Especially if you compare this approach to the content you get by using some clunky black and white eReader.

Book Sales and Marketing

No doubt publishers are facing are tough time with pressure coming from authors, distributer/retailers as well as readers. To me it seems the current value chain for publishers is breaking. The landscape of content/books will get a lot more crowded and there’ll be a lot more competition for eyeballs. Authors can self-publish books and utilise social media and word of mouth marketing to sell their books. Distributors are beginning to dictate pricing and thread the availability of books on their platforms as seen in the case of Amazon vs. Apple vs. Macmillan (seeApple vs. Amazon: The Great E-book War Has Already Begun). Also they have a huge information head start when it comes to customer needs or buying behaviour (they collect and utilise all the buying behaviour data online). Not to mention the ever demanding hunger of readers for new authors, different formats and sophisticated multimedia content. This is true especially for next generation of book buyers won’t understand why they can’t access any information they want in a digital format.

Book publishers are at an enormous advantage to corporate or consumer brands. They have a vast amount of content, they have an existing, passionate community who want and love their products. On top of that, book fans are author/brand loyal groups of people. Books raise discussions and bring people together…and online can help augment the book experience by bringing the readers into the inner workings of the publishers and authors on a daily basis.

So what to do here are some simple social media ideas to think about if you’re a book publisher:

Become a social brand

Set up social monitoring systems around the places your customers (readers, authors) hang out. Listen what they talk about, find topics which would make a good book and find emerging authors.

Using social media channels effectively

Engage with communities and leverage the influencers. Books are an emotional topic and readers trust the recommendation of peers much more than ay advertising. When it comes to book there are countless vibrant online communities, forums and bloggers consisting of deeply engaged readers and authors. So for new books for example find the bloggers opinion leaders and reach out to them. Do the same thing on Twitter and LinkedIn to create buzz and word of mouth campaigns. Make use of facebook fanpages for each author and create facebook groups around topics and feed them with your content arsenal. Leverage live streaming – now within facebook – and provide weekly live readings of new books/authors. Have your authors interviewed on a regular basis and publish the content on internet radios or video portals.

Create platforms and a social media hub

The re-thinking of becoming a social brand as well as providing the authors with resources requires undoubtedly social media platforms. The publishers website needs to become a social hub where the authors will be promoted and can execute their own social media marketing. Obviously the authors can use their expertise in their field to produce excellent content for their publisher site inherent blogs for any kind of inbound marketing and/or SEO strategy. Create forums covering topics or authors – readers are very much interested in authors, they want to interact with them and authors have much more to say then what is published in their books. Enable the offline interaction – let your fans know where your authors are, where to speak to meet them in flesh!

Involve the reader into book development process

Monitor the social web to find hot topics for books. Enable authors to produce transmedia content or ask your community what to publish next to help developing ideas.

Create new formats and test them

Utilise technology to empower production of books in different formats and for different channels. Paper books, eBooks, mobile apps, multimedia, etc. and test what works best for which topic or audience. Not all will work the same way but publishers must have the flexibility to quickly produce and disseminate content/books to emerging upcoming distribution channels.

Define the niche

You’ll need for the different content/book topics of your authors different social media strategies. Since you’ll have completely different audiences with corresponding different user/reader behaviour you’ll need to adjust the strategy accordingly.

And then?

When you got your head around that, you can begin engaging in the communities in earnest. Invite your authors into the discussions. Invite other passionate folks at the company. Stay friendly, and stay passionate and you can be sure your audience and community will grow over time.

For more information about social media and the book publishing industry please visit my site.

I am a social media strategy/technology consultant and trainer who helps companies to engage with their online customers through a compelling social media or personalisation strategy.

Ok, I have to admit: I added a 5 to this title. Why? Because people dig lists – titles with a number in it usually work quite well to catch people’s attention. That’s why, according to Buffer’s recent analysis, 19% of viral news headlines contained a number. It’s one of the effects of social media on digital publishing: writing compelling headlines to make sure people notice it in their timeline, click it and visit your website. But there are more ways social media has impacted digital publishing; we’ve pulled together 5 here for you:

1) The death of the homepage

Not long ago, the homepage was the digital front door of a newspaper. That’s where all visitors came in, very neatly and predictably. However, two years ago, The New York Times declared the “Death of the Homepage”. Social media was reported as the “killer” as it enabled people to discover news articles in their social feeds instead, sending them straight to the article, bypassing the home page. In 2016, this story continues. Pew research found that even though younger adults are more likely to name social media as a main source for news, 62% of US ‘older adults’ now get news on social media sites. Social media enables publishers to spread their content far wider than used to be possible. Subsequently, internal article pages that go viral on social receive many more pageviews than the homepage. So also in 2016, the homepage is still dying. People now visit a publishers’ website through all doors but entering via the back door is more popular, after a walk in a social network’s “walled garden”.

2) Compelling headlines

The fact that more and more people use social media to discover news online made the quality of the headline extremely important. Of course, writing persuasive headlines has always been important. Because based on the title, people decide to continue reading or skip the post. On social media, people base their decision on the headline whether or not they click over to your site – and you’re competing with lots of other fancy headings. Or, if they find the headline compelling enough, they might just share it without even reading it (yes people do that!). Which then of course reaches a broader audience of potential clicks over to your site. Clearly, an attracting headline is more important than ever to driving readers to your site.

3) Shorter visits

So let’s assume you just published the perfect headline that made people actually visit the article page. Hurray! Don’t cheer too early though: most social visitors are notorious for quickly scanning the article and returning back to where they came from – from social media. Pew Research found that visitors who arrive directly spend on average 4:36 minutes on a site and visit 24.8 pages per visit, while visitors from Facebook only spend 1:41 on a site and visit 4.2 pages per visit on average. Longer visits and more pageviews per session are important because they increase brand awareness and in the end conversions. And, as Digital Content Next recently revealed in their research: 43% of social media users don’t recall the source of the article they read. This struggle to keep visitors from social media on a publisher’s site is ongoing. The best landing pages in terms of reader engagement match the environment the reader came from and provide relevant information. Information that engages readers and makes them click-through, for example by providing links to other relevant articles and adding social media comments from readers or industry leaders. Despite the fact that many readers arrive from social media, most article pages are notoriously social-light however.

4) Algorithms

Being able to use social media as a distribution platform to reach more people than ever before is a great opportunity. An increasing number of visits from social media to your website is great as well, but it also means a greater dependency upon Facebook and other social media platforms as traffic drivers. Moreover, they get to decide what people see: with their recent change in the algorithm, Facebook de-emphasized posts from publishers in favor of posts from their users’ friends and family.Many publishers have feared the role of social media platforms in the editorial process, because they often feel they need to adjust their editorial content to what the algorithm of a social media platform likes best.

Social Media Lessons From The Publishing Industry History

5) The rise of the citizen journalist

Now that almost every human being on the planet owns a smartphone, everyone can shoot photos or videos or post commentary, anytime, anywhere. When people, who are not professional journalists, report information, they are called a “citizen journalist”. As we described in one of our previous blog posts, citizen journalists can augment traditional journalism in speed of reporting and increasing credibility by providing eyewitness reports. When news breaks, social media enables people to see directly what’s real, from myriad sources, who are at the scene of the event. However, these posts are made public with just one click on the button. Therefore, it’s crucial for publishers to filter out the noise and monitor and publish only what’s real.

Social Media Lessons From The Publishing Industry Group

Taking back control

Needless to say, social media has drastically changed the rules of the game for each digital publisher in terms of content distribution and creation. The ability to use social media platforms for content distribution provides them with a fantastic opportunity to reach a far broader audience. However, the increasing dependency upon social platforms reveals the need to regain power and capture readers on a publisher’s own domains. And that’s where using relevant social media to amplify editorial articles plays a huge role. From citizen journalists, to opinion leaders, to the average man on the street – they all post observations and opinions on social media.

Publishers can take control back into their own hands by bringing the power of social media to their site. By adding relevant social media posts to your editorial articles, you provide your audience with a more complete story. Also, adding social content to editorial content gives visitors from social media a warm landing –they don’t need to go back to the social platform they came from to stay in the ‘social media’ mode.

Social Media Lessons From The Publishing Industry Analysis

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