In the wide and endlessly evolving social media and digital landscape, where does your author brand fall on the spectrum? Exactly how much of a social media butterfly are you?  Are you a heavy user, attached to your smartphone and tweeting? Or, are you like a vast majority of those who aren’t part of this generation of “digital natives” and have suddenly found themselves thrust into the digital world for a variety of reasons? Even a great brand today is in trouble if they are not employing a strategic and active social media engagement effort. This is because those in the marketplace who would be brand followers and advocates will have limited visibility to the brand without the enhanced presence that the digital world offers. Social media at its core builds relationships and encourages two-way dialogue and the open exchange of ideas. It fosters authentic and personal connections thus the brand becomes humanized and relatable when this type of relationship to the customer exists. In this way digital engagement (far more than traditional mass media with its one-size-fits-all approach) drives greater emotional resonance and ultimately, influence, with your audience. Social media networking has become such powerful force in our society that it has the ability to impact everything from where we eat lunch to who becomes our next president.

With the discovery that used to take place in brick and mortar bookstores now shifting to online word of mouth, social media is, more than ever, a lifeline for authors to establish platform and audience relationships. We recommend that the following points be taken into consideration for authors first entering the digital space.

1. Determine the most appropriate social media sites for your brand. Define your ideal target audience along with a thoughtful engagement strategy for connecting with them. For example, the pre-teen and young adult crowd has recently begun to favor Instagram over Facebook. However, for business leaders and corporate change agents active on the speaking circuit, LinkedIn would be a strong choice. LinkedIn is all business, all the time. It is ideal for networking (and increasingly for job hunting).  Pinterest, a relative newcomer, is shaping up to be an interesting design-oriented site and could be a good consideration if an author is publishing a coffee table book or has a more artistic or female bent to their readership.

2. Twitter. Twitter is currently one of the strongest and most influential sites for online relationship building and is a solid choice for nearly all authors across the board. Twitter enables an author to establish presence and visibility rather quickly by following organizations and individuals that align with their message and story and are representative of their readership target. Twitter is updated in real time quick feeds, is informative and relevant, and is presented in easily digestible bites of content. The site is well geared for idea and information exchange and has a mutually reciprocal brand building culture where members, upon receiving a new follower, often respond in kind and return the “follow.”

3. Outline a concrete plan around timing and content. Once an author has settled on an engagement strategy and identified an ideal mix of social media outlets, it is best to craft a tactical plan and manage social media activity in a highly intentional way. Think of what you want to say (and why) on the various sites that will spark interest within those communities. Being too active with random posts on Twitter can turn your brand into spam, while too little activity decreases visibility and atrophies your brand over time.

Social media engagement, for the newcomer and those less fluent in the medium, can be a daunting pool to dive into. It can often feel like moving: overwhelming, immobilizing and every time you turn around it seems you find a new box. The best way to start is to take small steps at first. Once you’ve identified the best sites for your audience, plan to dedicate at least 10-15 minutes or so a day to being active on those sites: respond to a question, post an interesting link, or reach out to a new connection. Make it a part of your daily routine like you would anything else requiring regular maintenance and upkeep. Think of it as brand flossing.

Learn more about making targeted choices regarding social media here:

                Which social media tools do you use and why?

It’s no secret that the publishing industry has gone through a lot of changes in the past few years. Any shift can create a decentralization of the norm, and in the publishing world, we have seen technological development contribute to the slow demise of our beloved brick-and-mortar bookshops, as digital files, apps, and ereaders gain a foothold in the market. As an author, finding your way through this saturated marketplace is confusing, and knowing where to invest your money can be downright overwhelming. It is essential to be educated about the digital options for your book.

The difference between an ebook and an app may not be immediately clear, especially to those of us who didn’t grow up with an iPhone at our fingertips 24/7. Ebooks are electronic publications that can include both text and images, and are designed to be read on computers or on ebook reader devices like the Kindle or Nook. Ebooks are usually created through a conversion process that can be handled by the author, publisher, or an external conversion house. (For more information about ebook formats and conversion, check out our Big Bad Book Blog post on the topic.)

Alternatively, apps are made primarily for phones and tablets like the iPad. They not only provide the text of the book, like an ereader, they also add a level of interactivity. They help elevate the book reading process to an “experience” by including additional features like games, audio, or animation. Apps are usually created by a professional developer or by an app company.

As books go digital, readers experience storylines in new and engaging ways. Books as apps enable the reader to immerse themselves within the world of the narrative through interactivity and customization. Apps can arguably be termed a reinterpretation of the original text due to the additional features and functions. Here are a few popular software features as seen in recent book apps:

• shopping interface
• navigation tools
• annotation tools
• style changes
• puzzles or trivia

For instance, Jack and the Beanstalk Children’s Interactive Storybook, a wildly popular kid’s app, includes a memory matching game and interactive pictures that respond to changes in orientation. Similarly, The Cat in the Hat app allows children to touch images that prompt animations (ie: touching an image of a cloud produces raindrops along with the word ‘Wet!’).

Some genres are better suited for apps than others. Any genres that have an inherent level of interactivity—such as children’s books, cookbooks, or how-tos—will translate well to an app.

Apps can work well for less obvious genres, too. According to Media Bistro, religion, science, and law are hot genres in app sales right now. The top-ten bestselling book apps on the Android last week included four religious texts, two apps about the moon, and a training guide for police officers. Successful apps have included everything from True Ghost Stories, to The Bible, to Paco Bongo—a gecko that only eats pickles.

If you think your book might make a good app, keep the following benefits and disadvantages in mind:

Advantages:

• Flexibility and customization
• Multimedia additions (see software features list above)
• Interactivity: A great example of interactivity is the app for SAS Survivor Guide; features include using a phone’s flashlight function to mimic a Morse Code signal.
• New markets for content: Since book apps sit alongside non-book apps on iTunes and other app retail sites, there is an opportunity to grow your target audience through exposure as consumers browse titles.
• Convenience: If you have a question about an unknown word, or want to highlight a special passage to tweet to all of your friends, voila! The app can do everything for you without having to set down your read.

Disadvantages

• Availability on multiple platforms: if you want your book app available on many platforms, you must produce different versions of the app for software compatibility. A few different platforms include iOS app (iPhone and iPad), android, and apps for desktops (ex: custom API’s).
• Cost: potentially thousands upon thousands per platform.
• Visibility in the market: customers may be looking in bookstores instead of app stores.
• Early retirement: technology moves fast. Apps become obsolete quickly as platforms upgrade versions and device models. Each upgrade may mean more costs if you want to create compatible versions of your book app to match the new versions.
• Compliance problems: some of these issues include questions of integrating book apps into metadata systems, such as if book apps will have ISBN’s; whether or not apps should be registered with the Library of Congress; and who owns intellectual property of the book app.

As exciting as all this sounds, book apps are essentially still in an emerging stage. Publishing houses experimenting with book app development have tweaked and formed content, but still need to see whether or not there will be a return on investment after production costs.

Take into consideration the cost-to-benefit ratio before making a decision on whether or not to make your book into an app. Again, your goal is to make your book as successful as possible, to deliver it to as many people as possible, and to generate as much profit as possible. What kind of book are you producing? Will interactivity, hyper linking, and multimedia increase your sales? Consider your budget. Will you be able to invest in marketing for both your physical book and your book app? Is an app going to increase your sales enough to cover development costs?

Make it worth the cash. Don’t spend money and time developing an app with one or two functions. Build it up with software features and an interesting design. Otherwise, you might be better off sticking to an ebook.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to make your book into an app, Media Bistro is hosting a Publishing App Expo December 7-8 in New York City.

Have you seen a great book app recently? Tell us what you like about it in the comments below.

Are you using Amazon Author Central? If not, why? It’s an excellent author-friendly tool that can be used to promote your book and your platform that only takes minutes to setup. If you have more than one book, it’s a central location where an Amazon shopper can find your entire bibliography in one place. How’s that for an easy way to cross-promote your work?

Amazon Author Central allows authors to create a custom profile that customers then use to learn about the author and make purchases. The content you can place on your Author Central page includes:

• A bio—Tell readers a little bit about yourself so they'll connect with you as a person.
• Photos—Include your author photo and any other images your readers may like to see, perhaps your workspace or things that inspired your writing.
• Video—Want to get that trailer up on Amazon? Uploading it here only takes a few minutes!
• Events—Want to drive traffic to your speaking engagements and readings?  Advert them here.
• Blog feed—Linking your blog to your Author Central page is just another way to grow your list of blog followers and give readers more of what they want: a connection to you as an author!
• Twitter feed—Extend your social media outreach even further by displaying your tweets on your author page.

Recently, Author Central began providing weekly sales data from Nielsen BookScan (a service that tracks sales of print books in stores across the country) for free to authors who sell their books on Amazon. You can view your sales data in a variety of ways.  Amazon gives you a basic total from BookScan and shows how many units more or less you sold compared with the previous week. They also visually display your most recent four to eight weeks of sales data on a map of the United States. Alongside that display you will find a list of geographic areas from New York to Los Angeles and the number of books you sold in each. 

Access to BookScan data can help you determine whether your publicity efforts are paying off, and tells you what markets you have the most demand in so you can amp up your promotion accordingly.

Finally, for those who like to keep tabs on their Amazon sales rank, the sales data tab displays a line graph of your book’s sales rank history on Amazon and tells you what your current rank is. As with all sales rankings on Amazon, the data is updated hourly. 

You can also use Author Central to modify the description of your book listing on Amazon or write a message directly to your readers. 

We encourage all of our authors to create an Amazon Author Central page. Even William Shakespeare has an Author Central page. It has to be cool.

We’ve written a great deal about building your platform and especially about the benefits of blogging and writing articles to demonstrate your expertise to your audience. Still, you’re always looking for more ways to drive traffic back to your online presence, and ultimately to the bookstore to buy your book.  Another excellent way to achieve this is by serving as a guest blogger.

A guest blogger is someone who does a single post for another individual or group’s blog. This can be a one-time deal or a recurring column, but either case allows you to tap into someone else’s audience. There are many great blogs out there for you to choose from. You can locate blogs related to your platform in a number of ways:

1. Go to the top magazines or associations in your topic. Chances are the editors of the magazine or leaders of the association have at least one blog (sometimes they have several—each one for a different beat).
2. Ask for referrals. Find out from your network what other blogs your audience is following.
3. Check out the competition. Other authors and experts in your field already have a line in with your audience. Grease the wheels by offering to swap guest posts.
4. Look at the blogroll of your favorite sites. Most times bloggers feature the blogs they follow on their tool bar. This is a great (and fast) way to locate additional blogs. You can use sites like Technorati (link) and Alexa (link) to evaluate which blogs have the most traffic so you can develop your strategy and start by focusing your time on the blogs with the largest audiences.

Once you’ve identified blogs related to your topic, you will want to craft a pitch. Before you contact the blogger, check to see if they have posted writer’s guidelines. If so, follow them to the letter. If not, send them a short pitch that includes a specific idea for a post topic and identifies exactly why that post would be of interest to their audience. Close with a short paragraph about your qualifications. Here’s an example of a typical pitch letter:

Dear blogger,

The world of publishing is changing fast. Many of your readers are trying to navigate this evolving landscape, but it can be overwhelming. I propose a post that looks at the pros and cons of each book publishing option available to authors, complete with a short checklist readers can use to identify which route is best for them.

I work at an independent publisher and write articles and white papers related to publishing. You can view samples of my work at www.bigbadbookblog.com.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Author

There are a few other things to consider when pitching a guest blog post:

1. Research the outlet beforehand to make sure it’s appropriate. Bloggers don’t want to get pitched by writers who are outside of their subject area and who don’t have anything to offer their readers.
2. Read some of the posts and make sure that you are providing something unique. If they’ve already done a post on the subject, craft a new angle or choose a different topic.
3. Be considerate of the blogger’s brand. They are building their platform and readership too. Don’t try to hone in on their turf.
4. Keep the self-promotion out of your post. Often you are allowed a short bio and a link back to your website or blog, so focus on creating value and leave the promotion out.

Above all, don’t be afraid to ask. Most bloggers work hard to fill their editorial calendar and are happy to have someone fill in (as long as the topic is relevant). Also, don’t be afraid to consider having someone guest post on your blog as well. They will bring their readers with them and will often add you to their own blogroll. In the realm of social media and blogging, paying it forward really does pay off.