RicDay on Publishing

As publishers we have traditionally contracted and worked with an author to develop a book. Some steps later, we have sent that book off to retailers to sell to readers. The process has been one-way: we produce the books which retailers sell and generally anonymous readers buy and read. This no longer works in a connected world.

The one-way traffic approach started to change almost two decades ago. CompuServe and AOL built communities around readers and authors. CompuServe was especially active, with places people could ask questions of agents, publishers, editors, and authors (I was involved with the Writers forum there for a number of years in the early to mid 90s). An early participant was a young Diana Gabaldon, who asked a reading group to read and critique early draft chapters of her first Outlander novel.

Multiple New York Times best-sellers later, Dr. Gabaldon remains actively involved in CompuServe forums, and a number of other locations. She was a pioneer in the “social web” where reading — being a reader — has become a social experience.

The web increasingly makes interaction simple. Readers want to talk with writers. writers can and do get feedback and ideas from readers. I am not talking about email, or old style chat rooms on the net. I am talking about writers – blogs and pages on Facebook and MySpace. Syndicated newsfeeds. Twitter readers and followers.

Digital natives

Members of my generation tend to be private readers, immersed happily in whatever we are reading at the moment. The digital natives, the young people who have grown up with computers and never known a time when there was not a network to connect with, are different — they socialize on the Internet. To them, email is old school. Internet messaging (IM) and Twitter and SMS text messages on their cellphones are all natural ways of staying in touch. They discuss what they like and what they dislike. They influence each other.

The digital natives are our market now and in the future. If we can reach them.

Conventional advertising does not reach them. If they read a newspaper or magazine, they read it on the Internet — print newspapers and magazines are for their parents. If they listen to music, it is on an iPod, not the radio — radio is something their parents listen to.

Reaching these new readers means using the communication channels they use. Finding ways to get authors and editors involved in blogging. Building Facebook groups. Building discussions around the content of a book, even before it launches. Tracking and testing new venues and technologies.

The old channels for promotion and publicity are disappearing; the new generation mostly does not use them anyway. If your marketing and publicity people do not understand the new channels, or do not use them, you should be worried. If you are hiring people to promote your books, make sure they are already active in the new media; if they have to learn it, they will struggle. In-your-face advertising does not work on social networks. Building communities of people with similar interests does work, if you know how.

Numbers

If you are not familiar with the social networks, here are a few numbers that should get your attention.

• ComScore reports that an incredible 86.5 percent of Canadians age 15 and older who accessed the Internet from home or work computers in September 2008 visited a social networking site, up from 83.9 percent in September 2007. That makes Canada the leading country in the world for social networking activity. The numbers can be found here.
• Facebook has more than 130 million active users and is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world. The fastest-growing demographic is those 25 years old and older. Facebook had 15.5 million unique visitors from Canada in the month of March this year.
• MySpace (owned by News Corp.) has about 110 million accounts and is estimated to attract 230,000 new users per day.
• Instant messaging (IM) is very heavily used. The largest IM network in the world is Tencent’s QQ which is estimated to have nearly 800 million active accounts, mainly in China. Microsoft claims almost 300 million active users of Windows Live Messenger worldwide. Yahoo has about 250 million active users of Yahoo! Messenger. AOL’s AIM has over 50 million active users while Jabber has about 90 million.

Are you using social networking to promote your books?