The premise was very straight forward – tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?

In a recent post, Moonrat (ok, so I feel silly typing that) discusses what went wrong with the publishing industry in October, 2008 -  lamenting the returns issues we publisher face, and offers a suggestion on how book lovers can make a difference.

I don’t think anyone’s being really straightforward about what exactly happened, and a lot of it is not very complicated.* The crux of the problem is that book publishing is a returnable industry. That means that say Big Chain Store (BCS) agrees to stock a book that my company publishes. They buy 100 copies at, say, $1 a piece (to be easy). They give me $100; I send them the books. Two months later, they didn’t sell any, so they send them back. I have to give them $100.

Keep in mind a couple of things about this system that don’t work in the publisher’s favor:
1) Shipping costs. Books are heavy.
2) Production fees incurred by the publisher (because, unfortunately, we can’t return the books to the printer).
3) Inflation. Haha.

Like many other industries, book sellers are getting hit hard by our current economy – but the Holiday season is upon us, so things should improve, right?

However, BCS and all its chain compatriots are counting on Christmas sales to save them. They need to stock up! They need to plump their stores with new enticing merchandise so they can convince customers to save them from foreclosure!

Where to get the cash for all the holiday books they needed to stock in October and November? Three. Guesses.

In October, bookstores returned so many books that most publishing companies had more coming into them than going out of them. For some companies, the incoming number was more than several months’ outgoing.

So, what to do? Moonrat has some great advice.

For anyone who cares about the book publishing industry and wants to do their part, there’s one simple action step:

Buy a book this weekend.

Just buy one.

Perfect idea.

Read more of Moonrat’s publishing blog at http://editorialass.blogspot.com/

(Photo credit: _mpd_)

Mr. Kiley wraps his post by asking the question “could it be that with such change afoot amidst a national financial crisis, readership of the dead-trees product will swing up again?”  Perhaps, but I don’t think that is the reason there were no newspapers left at 8:30 am this morning in Ann Arbor, MI. Instead I’ll suggest that when people want to hold a piece of something, especially when that something is connected to an event like the historical moment we all witnessed last night, they want something tangible.  Something real.

Why not just archive a digital copy of the New York Times, or take a screen capture of your web browser open to you local paper’s website?  Because those are not the same are they?  Do people keep the paper because 50 years from now, they want to pull it out of a box in the attic and share it with their grandchildren or even great grandchildren?  Seems a more authentic experience than booting a PC, or an e book reader doesn’t it? Gone is the feeling of the paper in your hand.  The smell.  The texture. The sound it makes as it moves in your hands.  Electronic formats are a long way from being able to replicate that.

Paper is still future-proof in many respects. Today we still have physical access to books that date back centuries. Imagine the scenario above and in 50 years hoping that digital copy of the New York Times on your Kindle is still accessible.  Assuming of course, your Kindle still works.

At this point you might be thinking that my examples serve to further the point that paper is not dead – and you would be right.  In fact, I believe there is a very good chance that we will always want some permanently imprinted or inscribed format for our words wither it be paper or not.  And that is really my point – publishers need to start thinking not only about the convenience of formats like e books and start considering how we can make those formats as future-proof as paper.

E books and related media suffer from too many formats, too many devices, and too much DRM and very little is being done to make sure that readers will always be able to access that content in the future.

Centuries ago publishers defined a format for the book – ink on paper, bound together.  As we define the formats for the future book, we must not forget about the generations to follow and their access to the words within.

What do you think?

(Photo credit: Wilsonious)

Book trailers hit the scene earlier this year as a creative way for publishers to promote and market their new titles.  Many have been straight forward, and others have been rather dramatic – more like a movie trailer than a book and that’s the point after all. But I really like what Capstone have done with this tongue in cheek approach to the viral.  The style of the video is true to the Capstone brand, and creates the desired buzz while having a lot of fun with the subject.  It also engages the viewer, and converts them from a passive consumer of media into an active participant.

As we publishers figure out how media like video fit into more traditional approaches to marketing, it is good to see Wiley colleagues like the Capstone team breaking out of the old media mold.

If you want to play along, watch the video below, and visit http://dearcelebrity.co.uk for your chance to win an iPod Touch (subject, of course to contest rules and deadlines.)