After Dustin at McNally Jackson pointed out the similarities between these books, I remembered that I’ve been seeing design twins and triplets too. (For some reason, every time I think of aesthetic pairings I go right to Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.)
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I’m a little late in posting this, but better late than never. If you haven’t seen Liza Daly’s slides from DBW, check them out. It’s a reality check to anyone who makes ebooks.
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As I plan out FSG’s 2010 social media strategy, a few recent articles piqued my interest. (In fact, I hate that phrase “social media strategy.” Instead I’m going to say “methods for reaching readers online.” Because that’s all I want to do.)
First up is a Book Business article praising Chronicle Books’ efforts in this arena. I dig Chronicle’s list and many of their points in the article. Taking a day off to practice what you preach for your book on saving the environment? Amazing. Getting authors to participate in topical discussions using your Twitter and Facebook channels? Great.
But what didn’t track is the contradiction in their approach. Chronicle’s twitter feed has a near 1:1 ratio of follows to followers. This is great when you have a few hundred or even a few thousand followers. But 14,000? How does one manage the community at that scale? The answer: you don’t. Unless you have a full-time staffer, you can’t possibly maintain any kind of personal relationship without expensive CRM tools. (Echoes of my frustrations over the pervasive fallacy of Twitter worth.) At best, Chronicle can dip into the conversation at random. But randomness isn’t a great way to talk to readers.
On the other side of this equation is Clive Thompson’s “In Praise of Online Obscurity,” from the most recent issue of Wired. He addresses this demarcation line between communication and broadcast pretty well. Now, if you’re a large company like Kodak, your online strategy should and will be sui generis. But for publishers, especially houses like Chronicle and FSG, we ride the fence between communication and broadcast. At first I assumed garnering 10,000 Twitter followers would be great for FSG’s Twitter feed. But what do I get with that? 9,000 people I can’t talk to, just talk at.
Which begs the question: what would you rather have? This isn’t difficult to answer, and there are plenty of offline precedents. If your house’s titles are review driven (i.e. buzz driven, word-of-mouth driven), then you know the importance of 1:1 relationships with reviewers, editors, and bloggers. This is what I want to cultivate through our online channels. Because as anyone familiar with network theory can attest, 1:1 doesn’t scale well.
What do you think? I’m curious to see what people think about this with respect to different houses of different sizes, keeping resource allocation in mind. Yes, we’d all love to Twitter all day, just as we’d love to talk to every bookseller in the U.S. about our books and their most recent reviews. But let’s be realistic.
Related: Thompson’s article echoes Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Barabási’s Linked, both recommended reading.
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My little FSG Twitter experiment for John Bowe’s Us: Americans Talk About Love has been pretty exciting this week. Thought I’d highlight a few favorites below.
Thanks Booksquare, Kat Meyer and the Book Maven for spreading the word!
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Or, An All Too Aptly Titled Exhibit.
Last Friday I headed uptown to catch the opening of “A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza,” a collection of works inspired by a character’s fictitious ouevre in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In the novel, Wallace fills an extensive footnote with a complete record of the “après-garde” director’s work, including short summaries of each film. Columbia’s LeRoy Nieman Center for Print Studies commissioned several artists to interpret these films however they wish. I was excited about the project, a kind of Borgesian reification or artistic Möbius strip: artwork inspired by a sly tangent in another artwork, unified across media.
Unfortunately, the exhibit was very poorly staged. You enter a bare room with one wall-size projection skipping through the video art at random, like afternoon television with an impatient teen at the remote control. As soon as I sussed out which piece corresponded to which film from Wallace’s footnote – there were no onscreen titles – we were on to the next one. It was maddening, as if the gallerist had learned all the wrong lessons from the novel.
Of course, there is a perfectly logical venue for the artwork, and it isn’t in a whitewashed room on 116th st. Why doesn’t the gallery post the videos online and invite discussion from readers and art lovers?
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Adaptive Blue’s Get Glue initiative is the kind of exciting tech development you hope people in publishing pay attention to. There are echoes of Shiv Singh’s keynote at Digital Book World: find the influencers, start a relationship, reward them for directing their followers to your content. I’m happy that FSG is participating in the opening salvo (Michelle Huneven’s NBCC Award Finalist Blame is among the giveaways). I can’t wait to see how it all shakes out in the coming months.
For more on Glue, check out TechCrunch’s article or Galleycat’s writeup.
Full disclosure: my friend Ami was a colleague of mine before working for Adaptive Blue. And she owes me $8.
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NB: So I’ve been at FSG for a month, doing a lot of long-term planning and some necessary but boring back-end work. Here’s a new project I came up with.
Many of you are familiar with Smith Magazine’s 6 Word Memoir project, where autobiographies are composed with the restrictions famously laid down by Hemingway. (Legend has it he said he could write a short story using only six words: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”)
I thought it would be fun to tweak this concept toward the subject of a recent FSG/Faber & Faber title, Us: Americans Talk About Love by John Bowe. In a Studs Turkel-esque fashion, Bowe canvassed the country getting people’s first-person accounts of love. All the various lengths of relationships, types, and dirty proclivities. They range from the sweet to the, um… intimate, from playground love to bitterness to polyamory. (More here, including recent articles.)
So what’s the experiment?
Thought you’d never ask. I’ve pulled lines from the book to distribute on Twitter (@usbook) over the next week or so, with the length of the source’s relationship in parentheses:
I’m hoping other people will add their own. Can you summarize your past or present relationships in 140 characters? Valentine’s Day is coming up, which should add to the general cheesiness/vitriol of people’s responses. You can use the #lovetalk hashtag to see everyone’s contributions. Of course, I’m not exempt:
As a primer, here’s Kayla, Age 5:
For those of you following the craziness around Amazon pulling Macmillan titles from its store Friday night, I direct you to the New York Times wrap up and Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s statement. There’s also a great post from John Scalzi (Tor author) from the author perspective.
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I have six pages of notes (10pt. font!) from Digital Book World. Plenty of takeaways and tips, a few of which are mentioned below. I want to thank Guy LeCharles Gonzalez for pulling it off, and say ‘ello to all the people I met and caught up with. It was nice to hear over and over again how important influencers are while sitting next to examples par excellence like Kassia and Richard. Conferences like these always walk a fine line. Either you have the presentation full of vague pronouncements (amounting to good vibes with the lifespan of a butterfly) or data analysis too narrowly defined to be of use outside the case study (a common complaint at Tools of Change). I’m happy to say most of DBW’s panels performed admirably.
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My teenage bedroom was ridden with indie movie posters. If I was a teenager right now, I’d probably go for these:
Cody Hoyt – Infinite Jest (via the excellent Kitsune Noir)
Michael Cho – White Noise (buy it at Penguin’s site)
Mark Weaver – Moby-Dick (another from Kitsune)
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