Thanks! I haven’t been online in a professional capacity for very long — my position was made permanent in August. I have to admit, I didn’t make the connection between you, BookSquare and Romacewiki until you sent me that tote bag!

“I wish HarperCollins did Twitter too.”

@ Mike Cane, HarperCollinsCa has a Twitter account. It’s interesting — I’ve found more Canadian branch offices on Twitter than the main American offices (such as Random House and S&S). But with the people search down, I might just be missing them.

Twitter is a channel that reaches a certain type of online user. Ditto for Facebook. And MySpace. And Bebo. And so on. While I enjoy indiscriminate Twittering as much as the next person, I also understand that there’s a lot of noise. How does a publisher with all these brands figure out the best approach?

Since there isn’t One Way, the company that is known as “HarperCollins” (thanks HC for playing along today!) needs to both assess how it wants to move forward from a mega-perspective, but also from the smaller perspective — or, the best ways to reach the right audiences for the books.

Authors like Malcolm Gladwell and James Patterson do a lot of the heavy lifting themselves, and just about every author I know understands that they must participate in the success of their book. That gets individual authors in the mix.

But publishing houses have long dumped a lot of books on the market and hoped for the best. I won’t get into my thoughts on too many books, etc here, but will say that success comes from connecting the right books with the right audiences. This is why bookstores know the importance of hand-selling — the problem for the customer is that they’re not always in the right place (the right store) at the right time (the right person/bookseller). Customers have expanded their social networks beyond the physical world in different ways, so publishers need to think beyond the traditional silo as well.

You see it happening in small spurts and baby steps — which I think is fine because we don’t know how this landscape will look tomorrow, and we don’t really know how these various types of customers connect to books/information. It’s a time for wild experimentation.

More importantly, it’s time to get out there and start talking.

“plagiarize” might be a word that
is overly loaded in your mind, but
if you check the dictionary, you’ll
see that it fits rather well here…

“take without referencing from
someone else’s writing or speech”,
in particular, seems to apply…

one link would have covered you.

instead, you have people saying
> Well said. This applies to
> any industry or company
as if they have no realization that
it was indeed originally conceived
as applicable in exactly that way,
and all you’ve done here is to
turn the general to a specific.

plus if you bothered to ask me,
i’d be very happy to tell you that
i go with that old saw about how
good artists “borrow”, while the
great ones _steal._ but it appears
that you _prefer_ to feel insulted.

my point was extremely simple.

if anybody reading this entry
believes this “advice” is _new_,
they must have been in a cave
for the last 9 years, because
“the web is a conversation” is
a long-standing vibrant meme.

to the point that it’s now trite,
unless you’re bringing something
new to the table along with it…

which probably makes you feel
insulted.

-bowerbird

p.s. bowerbird is my “real” name,
for many values of “reality”.
if you need my phone number
to verify that, just let me know.
i live in west l.a./santa monica,
if you wanna do lunch sometime.
i’d be happy to treat you, just so
you know i’m “a real person”…

Cluetrain was done in 1999, but sullen and argumentative is even older than that. You’re playing a really warped record.

It’s clear that you are looking for a different kind of conversation and subject matter than what’s being discussed here. If you want to participate in a constructive manner — which means respecting the fact that others have different world views and opinions than you — great, but if you want to keep hijacking conversations, as you did with the Google Book Search discussion, then please take your comments elsewhere.

In the meantime, the rest of us will be figuring out how to navigate this ever-changing world in a way that meets the needs of everyone involved in the literary chain.

probably so few that you can
now safely plagiarize it here.

so much for authenticity…

> Alain, good point. But I do
> think there’s a lot of room for
> movement toward sincerity
> that can be done before we
> totally cross the line of
> overt vested interest.

it’s in your overt vested interest
to think that way, of course, but
it’s probably not in the interest
of your customers to agree, is it?

will you respect their wishes if
they politely ask you to go away
because they want a dialog that
is free of commercial concerns?

-bowerbird

Why settle for those two niches when there’s an *entire Internet* out there?

I get Little, Brown’s tweets. I also see Del Rey Books just started. I wish HarperCollins did Twitter too.

In fact, while I’m here, Attn Book Publishers: Follow me on Twitter so I know you exist and I can Follow you. Once that’s done, you can stop Following me. (Twitter Search = FAIL.)