Why social media does/doesn’t matter and why you should/shouldn’t just shut up about it already

• Journalist Dave Obee uses author Dave Bidini as an example of why artists shouldn’t quit Facebook
• Author Maureen Johnson’s hilarious rant on the tedium of social media marketing: I Am Not A Brand
• A marketing specialist discovers that all the time you spend hawking your work via social media is not paying off in sales at all
• and because it is Friday … a little something special

The luddites of dead tree media versus the thieving, arrogant tech whores

Over on TechCrunch, there’s a new-media old-media throw-down involving the website and both Fortune magazine and Simon & Schuster. In a nutshell, Fortune asked TechCrunch’s Michael Arlington to post an excerpt from Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick’s new book The Facebook Effect, published by Simon & Schuster. They sent Arlington the excerpt, and Arlington reprinted it in its entirety, including praise and pre-sale links, not understanding he was supposed to excerpt the excerpt. Fortune then got angry and is claiming copyright infringement.

From Arlington’s blog post on TechCrunch:

Just six minutes after e-mailing to tell me how great the post was, Fortune e-mailed again telling me that in fact they had only wanted me to post exerpts of the excerpts, not the whole excerpts…That was just before 6 am on May 6. I had been asleep for two hours. Fortune then called me three times between 6 am and 7:30 am.

After a tense conversation with Fortune‘s managing editor, Arlington received an email from Simon & Schuster threatening legal action unless the post was taken down. This is ironic, not just because it’s a book about Facebook, but the post in question reads like a glowing, slobbering press release and is published on a website with 9.2 million unique visitors per month. This appears, as Crissy Campbell pointed out on Twitter, to read like Simon & Shuster is threatening to sue TechCrunch for what is essentially free advertising.

Daily book biz round-up: one million iPads sold; Amazon Associates payola; and more

A quiet day in the land of book news:

• Amazon starts paying referral commissions on Kindle book sales
• One million iPads sold, says Apple
• Is Amazon’s “most-highlighted” tracking creepy and wrong?
• Comix artist Peter Kuper on the death of the book
• Pearson develops Facebook for lonely, unpopular children

Bookmarks: Going Rogue mistakes, aliens and werewolves, Xbox Bibles, and more

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox? 

Amazon: more than just a bookstore

Time magazine book critic and tech columnist Lev Grossman follows up his report earlier this year about the future of literature with a new article, written with reporter Andrea Sachs, examining the impact Amazon is having on the publishing industry. “If Amazon is a bookstore,” the authors write, “it’s supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?” The answer, of course, is that Amazon isn’t just a bookstore anymore:

… Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it’s hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com, a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there’s Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.

As Grossman and Sachs put it, Amazon is “the most forward-thinking company in the book business.” Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on if you’re a book buyer or a publisher, they argue.

U2 and Madonna don’t have deals with record labels anymore; they did their deals with a concert promoter, LiveNation. That stuff that the labels used to do – production, promotion, distribution – it’s just not that hard to DIY now or buy off the shelf. It’s the same with publishing. Amazon could become the LiveNation of the book world, a literary ecosystem unto itself: agent, editor, publisher, printer and bookstore.

Still, as the authors rightly point out, while Amazon has the power to hurt publishers, it’s likely not in a position to mortally wound them. On the contentious issue of e-book pricing, for example, the industry is beginning to fight back against Amazon’s lowball $9.99 price tag on many of its best-selling e-books, an unsustainble price point aimed at fueling Kindle sales. Yesterday, Simon & Schuster announced it was bypassing the Kindle store altogether, making 5,000 titles available through Scribd, a social media platform that allows users to share and sell their own work. The S&S-set price – 20% off the hardcover price – is one that many publishers, not to mention authors, will find more sustainable.

Coalition fights new litmag funding restrictions

Last week, Q&Q reported on new federal funding guidelines that could imperil Canada’s small literary and arts magazines, by limiting Canadian Heritage money to publications with annual paid circulations of at least 5,000. Now, a growing number of people are expressing their anger in an oh so timely fashion – by forming a Facebook group. The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazines has been online for less than 24 hours, but already more than 700 concerned citizens have joined the group. You can lend your support to the cause by signing up here.

From the group’s Facebook page:

By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support.

To do so [...] would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy.

Put it this way, when Canadians get into their Chrysler and GM cars, they have to drive somewhere. A lot of them drive to their newsstands and bookstores to buy a literary or arts magazine.

Dying is easy, launching a small press is hard

Editor and author John Warner has a lengthy post on Maud Newton’s blog about the “non-success” of his fledgling publishing enterprise, TOW Books, a humour imprint that was supposed to make him “the Judd Apatow of the written word.” For all his self-effacing irony, Warner, the editor of McSweeney’s online, notes the crushing bathos involved in launching a small press.

Back then I imagined that the challenge for most publishers was content, and since our titles would be good, and rigorously curated, so that if you liked one, you’d like them all, we would take bookstores by storm.

I know, stupid.

A short few years later, Warner acknowledges that selling books has as much to do with publicity and distribution as it does with content, so to jump-start his business he’s employing a tactic that increasingly is becoming part of a publicist’s arsenal – namely, offering readers free copies of his books. The idea being that “in this day and age of Amazon and blogs and Facebook and MySpace, and LibraryThing, and Shelfari, everyone has a public forum where they can express their opinions.”

Warner’s piece is also a sobering reminder for humourless publishing-industry reporters to keep on their toes. From one of his press releases:

“According to Mr. Warner, TOW Books will be dedicated to publishing titles with staying power instead of relying on slapdash parodies, designed only to capitalize on a current cultural trend and rushed to market to make a quick buck.

“The first announced title to be published in early 2007 will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.”

I assumed the joke would be obvious, but this little nugget was repeated in the Publishers Weekly coverage of our launch as fact. “The second Tow Books title, scheduled for release in early 2007,” PW reported, “will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.”

Choosing your own adventure, digitally

On the CBC Arts site, Sarah Liss writes about a new startup from a B.C. software developer. Protagonize, she explains, is “an online community devoted to the creation of ‘addventures,’ round-robin-style fiction in which users create and develop interactive stories.” It launched late in December, and so far, writes Liss, most users are creating stories in the Internet-friendly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres.

However, this probably doesn’t represent the future of writing or anything. Creator Nick Bouton says, “Fun is the entire aim of the site,” while Liss describes it as “more of a Facebook-style community-interaction hub than a locus for creative development.”

The great Small Press Book Fair fight

A few weeks after the most recent Toronto Small Press Book Fair, a public battle is raging between fair organizers and disgruntled constituents – mostly in the arena of Facebook.

It began last month when author Stuart Ross, a co-founder and perennial supporter of the fair, posted some complaints about this fall’s event on his blog. Ross charges that organizers Halli Villegas and Myna Wallin did little to promote the fair – no posters, no free listings in local weeklies, no mass e-mails. He also notes that the two organizers

didn’t show up at the venue until 10:51 and 10:53 respectively, when they hastened to set up the tables for their own presses. Volunteers were already at the venue an hour earlier, putting up tables and chairs, and most of the presses were already there and waiting for the public to arrive when the doors opened at 11 a.m.

Villegas, who took over management of the fair this year with Wallin, took exception. From her note on the fair’s Facebook page:

We had over 300 flyers passed out at readings and events around town, we were featured on the Quill and Quire Omni Blog [true], the fair was announced at more then a few reading series, the fair was announced several times on CKLN on various shows. As always when you exhibitors received your forms you were asked to please spread the news to all your friends and reading public. In addition for the first time this fair we had a Facebook site. Myna did send in free listings for Now and Eye, but they were obviously missed in the shuffle at those papers.

And:

Myna and I are always happy to talk, or receive personal e-mails with suggestions that are constructive. We really don’t like being backed into corners on blogs or public forums before we have been approached privately. I suspect no one would.

If you think this sounds like it’s getting personal, well, you’re probably right. Angry wall posts have been flying on the Facebook page, and Ross says Villegas and Wallin have been censoring his comments. Now another Facebook page, “Friends of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair,” has been created, and comments are flying there, too.

And Ross has even taken his grievances to his personal Facebook page’s “status update,” which as of this writing reads, “Stuart Ross thinks the Toronto Small Press Book Fair coordinators are using the tactics of dictators and repressive regimes. Censorship, exclusion, disinformation.”

Todd Babiak vs. toddbabiak.com

In a sardonic post announcing his reluctant embrace of the blogosphere, Edmonton author Todd Babiak (The Book of Stanley, The Garneau Block) expresses his instinctive distaste for self-serving author blogs:

I used to make fun of writer friends who had websites and blogs. Given our busy lives, with families and jobs and leaves to rake and, most importantly, BOOKS TO READ, where was the time to express unconsidered opinions about, say, chocolate? Besides, it always seemed an embarrassing exercise in self-love. “Shoot me,” I remember saying, to my friend, William, “if I ever get a website. The sound of it: toddbabiak.com. Tasteless! Boorish! Actually, don’t shoot me. Stab me, with something that isn’t even sharp. Just press really hard, again and again.”

Three months later, I had a website.

Maybe Babiak is on to something here – after all, so few Canadian authors’ websites are truly compelling. That may be because, these days, the blogs people actually read tend to be more akin to news aggregators than personal diaries. All of the self-obsession of first-wave bloggers has generally migrated to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

For now, though, Babiak shares his thoughts on chocolate, airport security, and watching a man throw up on a bus here.