Book Culture, Social Media, & Monetization

Over the last few weeks, there have been some provocative discussions about people using social media (and other online tools) to monetize literary culture. The debate basically kicked off because of FridayReads, which started out about a year and a half ago as a fun hashtag meme that my friend Bethanne Patrick came up with. Simple premise: If you’re on Twitter on Friday, take a moment to tell people about the book you’re reading, and include a “#fridayreads” in the tweet so it’s easy for people to find in a search. It took time to build traction, but gradually it got to the point where thousands of people are participating each week.

At some point, Bethanne saw the base audience that had grown around the hashtag, and hit upon the idea of getting publishers to pay her to promote books to that audience. With our mutual friend Erin Cox as sales director, FridayReads began running publisher-supported giveaways and author chats. Not everybody knew this was the case, however, and even people who did know about it didn’t necessarily know the extent of the business. This went on until, as I say, a few weeks ago, when Jennifer Weiner called attention to FridayRead’s paid promotions, and one position that emerged from the hue and cry that followed was, in essence, that any reader participating in FridayReads was feeding Bethanne’s marketing machine, rather than supporting an organic book culture.

(It’s worth nothing here that I’m also friends with Jennifer; my respect for people on both sides of this issue enables me to see not just that each has merit, but that each is operating in good faith.)

The short-term solution was easy: Bethanne implemented more overt disclosure practices, making the business nature of FridayReads more apparent. Obviously, that doesn’t comfort people who are outright opposed to people making money off other people’s participation in what they expect to be friendly and non-commercial social media, but short of dismantling the financial operations, little would. To me, the question isn’t so much should Bethanne (or anybody, really) be making money off other people’s willingness to talk about their love of books online, but rather will they do so in as non-exploitative a manner as possible?

On that front, I didn’t have a problem with FridayReads. Once you know about the marketing component, it’s a straightforward proposition: You tell the world what book you’re reading, and there’s a chance—no guarantee—that you might be one of the handful of people who gets a free book. It’s not like Klout, where (as John Scalzi observed, among others) people were told, “Hey, how’d you like a prize for participating in Klout?” and then, when they went to claim that prize, basically told they hadn’t earned it yet. Sheesh.

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14 December 2011 | theory |

Whatcha Reading, John Green?

I met John Green at the mediabistro Publishing App Expo, where I was speaking on a panel about real-life business models for publishing-related apps. He was the keynote speaker, and he basically walked us through the history of how he, inspired by the pioneering work of Ze Frank, started a YouTube channel with his brother, Hank, called Vlogbrothers that’s become hugely popular. And on the one hand, that means that just by announcing the title of one of his novels, eleven months before it’s scheduled to be released, he can spur a pre-order frenzy that takes The Fault In Our Stars to the top of the Amazon and charts—but, on the other hand, it means he can mobilize folks to raise money for an orphanage in Bangladesh. I find that really inspiring; along with the success of the End Malaria Day project, it resonates with some ideas I’ve been kicking around about using community-oriented books to drive fundraising campaigns that I hope to implement in the next year or so.

But back to John Green: He’s reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and he’s really enthusiastic about it. It’s probably my favorite Gaiman novel, too, on a par with the best Sandman arcs. For my money, it excels in one of the things Gaiman does best, which is to take all these bits of pop culture and folklore and mythology that are kicking around in the back of our collective imaginations and invest them with emotional heft and significance—meanwhile, he’s introducing “fantasy” elements into convincing “real-world” environments in ways that feel very…naturalistic may not be exactly the word I’m looking for here, but you get the idea: It doesn’t require huge leaps of faith to buy into the premises of a Neil Gaiman story. If you haven’t read one before, American Gods is a great place to start. Just ask John Green!

(Back to his keynote: Another point he made, which I really took to heart, was the idea that the publishing industry’s goal of a magic app which will bring readers and authors (or publishers) closer together into an ongoing relationship already exists—it’s just that it’s disorganized and spread out over, say, Green’s books and his YouTube channel and his Tumblr and his Twitter account and so on. So, who’s going to tie it all together into a single application where you can buy and read books and reach out to the author and connect with other people who dig the books as much as you do? Which is actually a fair summation of one of the goals Electric Publisher app…)

7 December 2011 | whatcha reading |