Can You Make a Bestseller with Social Media?

A reader sent me a link to a post at James Frey’s blog earlier today, where Frey talked about how he’d gotten interested in a Facebook group called “I bet we can make these books best sellers,” the goal being pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The project starts off with two novels by Shawn Klomparens, Two Years, No Rain and Jessica Z. (which I haven’t read yet, but I’m willing to check them out at the next opportunity).

Frey raises the example of Facebook fans getting Betty White a guest hosting gig at Saturday Night Live, and raises the question of whether the same principle could be applied to getting a book on the bestseller lists. It’s not quite the same thing, though: With the Betty White project, all anybody had to do was express an interest, until it got to the point where Lorne Michaels or somebody noticed and figured, well, heck, we could that. Here, you’ve actually got to convince people to buy a book (or two), and that takes a greater leap of faith. And then there’s the whole issue of buying those books from the outlets that report to the bestseller lists, unless you’re just trying to get on some online bookstore’s charts… (Full disclosure: Several years ago, I was involved in a loose band of bookblogs that tried to leverage whatever “literary influence” we had at the time to sell deserving books; it never quite worked out as well as I’d hoped, in part because it was organized in such a way as to deliberately eschew marketing sensibilities.)

Still, something being hard doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, and the project that I was involved in didn’t have the advantage of Facebook or Twitter to help mobilize social impulses. So if fans can get behind a book and push it onto the bestseller lists, great! There’s a dark side to that—what fans can do out of enthusiasm, insiders can do out of cynical manipulation…a problem Seth Godin addressed earlier this week. “As these [social media] signposts become more, not less, important,” he observes, “there’s a significant market opportunity for someone who can, as Billboard did, clean up the charts and make the payola worthless or at least more transparent. In the meantime, be skeptical.”

8 July 2010 | uncategorized |