Crowdsourcing
Social Media Becomes Ticket to Publishing Contract

by Laurie Sullivan

Social media in 2010 will give authors a chance to demonstrate to publishers that their book ideas have selling power long before their labors of love hit bookstore shelves. Quintessential marketer Aaron Goldman did just that by testing a variety of topics in tweets on Twitter before nabbing a book contract with McGraw-Hill.

Goldman, a managing partner at Chicago-based digital marketing firm Connectual, got inspired to pen a "tweet-o-biography" chronicling his life, one tweet at a time. McGraw-Hill initially rejected his proposal, but that rejection prompted Goldman to turn to social networks to finetune the fit.

After receiving feedback from the publisher, Twitter followers and Facebook friends, Goldman met a representative from McGraw-Hill at ad:tech, an advertising and technology conference. He asked her to put him in touch with an editor to pitch his book. That rep connected him with an editor, who turned down the initial idea, but invited him to come back with something more "business-friendly." He not only came back with an idea, but about 20 blog posts published in online journals, along with comments from readers urging him to write more on the subject.

Gathering up the blog posts and comments, Goldman once again approached the McGraw-Hill editor, who asked him to submit a proposal. The 60,000-word tell-all with the working title Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From Google is scheduled to hit bookstore shelves and online stores this fall.

Crowdsourcing book topics, or getting opinions from the masses, through social media sites continues to gain ground as a legitimate route to a publishing contract. Generating Twitter followers, Facebook friends or fans, and connections through blog posts or LinkedIn not only demonstrates to publishers a built-in audience and platform for promoting the books, but also serves as a gauge of the potential book-buying audience.

Social media opens doors, provides a megaphone for feedback and allows people to test ideas, not only for book topics but characters, too. The practice originated in consumer products with brands like Mountain Dew, which collaborated with passionate soft drink fans to create three products that hit store shelves in April. Through social media, grassroots campaigns, and in-home trials, PepsiCo, which owns the Mountain Dew brand, determined products, flavor, color, tastes, advertising, and message.

Similar to Mountain Dew, which determined consumer demand before releasing the product, Goldman determined the demand for the topic of his book before taking it to the publisher. His tweets—text-based posts of up to 140 characters on Twitter—sold the publisher and potential readers on the book's concept even before he sat down to write a word.

By focusing on generating buzz for the topic created through social media, Goldman managed to demonstrate the topic's worthiness and his ability to self-promote the book. "Share information and make it a goal for the topic to go viral," he said. "This gets people passing along information about the book to friends through social media. Don't quit marketing the book through social media after signing the deal and receiving the advance."

The details of Goldman's deal, which he declined to specify, included an advance from McGraw-Hill and a percentage of royalties from the sale of each book.

Crowdsourcing has become easier as social media sites have proliferated, giving more people access to information. And the numbers keep growing.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told attendees at the company's recent Chirp Conference that the microblogging site supports about 105 million registered users. Marketing on social sites also became easier after search engines Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo inked separate deals with Twitter and Facebook to pull in and index select information on their respective search engines.

Facebook counts more than 400 million active users. Each user, on average, has 130 friends. People spend more than 500 billion minutes per month on the site. Advances in technology now allow people to make purchases, such as books, from the site.

Another writer, Michael Gyulai, used Facebook to secure a two-year reprint publishing contract with iUniverse Star, the traditional publishing arm of iUniverse, after he self-published his memoir Midnight in Rome. The reprint contract came together for Gyulai after he marketed and sold the first run nearly entirely online. Regardless of whether the book sold thousands of copies during the first (self-published) print run, without online marketing social media skills, Gyulai might not have secured the reprint contract. But the publisher saw potential in his ability to market the book.

During the book's first print run in 2008, it sold more than 500 copies through online forums, Twitter, and social networking sites. This was after he tried the traditional approach and sank hundreds of dollars into a variety of print newspaper and magazine ads that ran for one week.

In the second quarter of 2008, Gyulai ran a print ad to market the first run of his book for $575 in San Francisco Weekly, circulation 116,000, and a $669 print ad in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, circulation 149,153. He also spent a little more than two hours a day on Google researching relevant travel and Italy-focused websites, blogs, newsletters, and Facebook groups on which to post links. He built up a website following of about 300 unique visits per month. The number of books sold online jumped to 225, up from 72, and the number of books sold in retails stores grew to 101, up from 76 in the prior quarter.

The print ads actually had very little impact, if any, he said. It didn't take long for the money to run out, so Gyulai turned to the Web.

"The online promotions geared at driving Internet users back to the Midnight in Rome website costs me about $115 annually to host," Gyulai said. "Aside from the cost to host the website and my time to market the book, which was quite intensive, it was basically free to promote online."

Gyulai's best sales quarter followed the period with both print and social media marketing campaigns, suggesting that authors use an integrated strategy of online and offline marketing.

It also highlights the financial struggle that independent authors face. Nearly half the total book sales from the first book, which he self-published, came during a time when he marketed the book online and offline at a cost of about $1,244 during that quarter. Estimating a per-book-royalty of around $2.50, he only recouped $815, not factoring in the initial self-publishing costs incurred before books hit the shelves. The self-published titles that sold in stores on consignment returned $1 or less.

"That is a very poor and unsustainable return on investment," he says. "In contrast, during the seven quarters aside from the second quarter in 2008, I sold an equal number of books in total, but invested zero on advertising, and instead chose to invest my time online. Sales were slower, but the financial return on investment (ROI) goes from negative territory to infinitely positive."

Gyulai noted that the prime difference between companies and independent authors in approaching marketing and ROI is that companies will most often offer goods or services that can be repurchased once a customer gets to know their product. This way, the author garners a higher ROI over time for each new customer than a traditional or social marketing campaign might deliver.

There is power in online crowdsourcing and people who can influence others. Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Augie Ray developed a framework called "Peer Analysis" that allows marketers to identify and measure how people who share information on social media sites not only influence one another, but their sales as well. The two estimate that within social networks, consumers shared their opinion about product and services in 2009 about 256 billion times. In social posts other than networks, such as blogs and product rating sites, consumers shared 1.64 billion influential posts.

No matter how interesting the topic, sometimes it takes buy-in from readers who can influence a book's success. iUniverse Star released the reprint at the end of August 2009 and promotional efforts began the second week in September. Gyulai launched a new website featuring a WordPress blog and social bookmarking aggregators. He started a Facebook Fan page, and began to post frequent blogs syndicated on Twitter. He still has a modest number of Twitter followers, about 1,623. Although visitors to his website rose from 259 per month during Q3 2009 to 383 per month in Q4 2009, book sales have not picked up. Crowdsourcing might get you the contract. Good content will keep it alive.

Sales haven't taken off as Gyulai expected, but he feels fortunate they have held steady. Gyulai continues to promote his book online, working with sellers like BN.com to add the title to the list of great summer travel reads. "Hopefully that will give sales a shot in the arm," he said, suggesting it's another way to keep books on consumers' minds.

Laurie Sullivan writes about online digital advertising and marketing. She pens a daily column for MediaPost about search engine marketing. Sullivan's work has appeared in Advertising Age, Los Angeles Business Journal, Investor's Business Daily, Red Herring, RFID Journal, and InformationWeek, among others.