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 |

Nick Lantz, “Battle of Alexander at Issus”

Off in the mountains a hermit checks
his rabbit traps before returning
to his hut for the night. The rabbits grow
bold near dawn and dusk, the hours
when clouds lower ladders of light
down the mountainsides. The hermit
hasn’t admired this light in decades.
At this time of day he is always bent
low, unfastening the thin leather snares
from around still-warm necks. If he hears
what sounds like thunder in the valley
one cloudless evening as he ties another
limp body to his belt, he thinks only
of returning home to bed, the rabbit fleas
that torment his sleep, the door that never
quite closes against the cold night air.

Back in February, I featured another Nick Lantz poem, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle,” from the collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. The poem above is from the second of Lantz’s collections published this year, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, which also contains “Portmanterrorism” (from The Writer’s Almanac). Oh, and back when I wrote about We Don’t Know…, I didn’t know you could find “Your Family’s Farm, Empty” online, or maybe you couldn’t, then.

Lantz discussed this book in an interview with The Rumpus: “It’s the much-revised remnants of my MFA thesis, and it had been collecting rejection slips since 2005. A poem in that book alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a boat that was supposedly maintained over many years by replacing its parts piecemeal as they deteriorated, begging the question of whether it was still the same ship, and, if not, at what point it ceased being that original ship. That’s how I feel about The Lightning. If you were to dig up my actual MFA thesis (please don’t), you’d see only a handful of the original poems. With The Lightning, I worked from the poems up. I was figuring out what that book was about as I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled it.”

By the way, Rumpus readers were also treated to the premiere publication of another Lantz poem: “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance.”

7 July 2010 | poetry |