Earlier I wrote about the possibility that the new channels of e-book marketing might soon be saturated by the efforts of a new generation of publicists, agents and book promoters—once these had mastered social media and other techniques for getting their message in front of readers—to the detriment of indies or individual self-publishers. Now it seems this is happening before my eyes. To the right is a screenshot of my Hootsuite Twitter feed for the hashtag #pubtip, which as many self-publishers know, is a well-regarded search term for advice and tips for authors, originally started by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in...

  By Colleen T. Reese As a social media manager, my content consumption habits tend to get wildly out of control if I’m not careful. And a lot of readers face this same issue. When we first started looking into TeleRead’s reading habits, we learned that a great majority of you continue to rely on word-of-mouth to find new e-books. In the digital age, weeding through the crowded muck can be overwhelming, to say the least. So to help ourselves—and yes, you too—we’ve curated a quick list (in no particular order) of our favorite heavy hitters on Twitter. We found this list to be...

The majority of you out there who follow this site on a regular basis have long been aware of the fact that TeleRead's once mighty Twitter account has sat sadly dormant for quite some time now. Sleeping, as it were. But thanks in no small part to the crackerjack social media team that toils late into the night inside a top-secret, restricted access bunker—which just so happens to be located three stories beneath the basement of NAPCO's World Headquarters building in North Philadelphia—we're back online once again. We'd be pleased and honored if you'd consider following our account, @teleread, where you'll find links to our stories, retweets from...

I had never heard of this Ewan Morrison person before blogging that story quoting him the other day, but all of a sudden it seems like he’s coming out of the woodwork everywhere. I saw a mention on the E-Book Community Mailing List of a column by him on The Guardian. It says it’s third in a series, but I’m not sure what the other two are because there aren’t any links to them there. In this column, Morrison basically pooh-poohs the idea of social networking to sell self-published books, pointing out that if you’re spending 80% of...

Last December I mentioned that the Library of Congress was planning to archive every tweet ever tweeted publicly for use in research and the edification of future generations. Lately there have been some rumors that the LoC was backing off from the project, but a recent post in the Nieman Journalism Lab reports that the plan is definitely still happening, though the Library is still in the process of figuring out how to archive the data and what kind of access to permit. While this doesn’t necessarily have a lot to do with e-books, it’s worth pointing out in...

We’ve probably all seen that famous photo of the victorious President Harry S Truman triumphantly holding up a copy of the Chicago Tribune that called the election results for the other side. For decades it has been the exemplar of the hazards of jumping to conclusions, as well as the problems of gathering facts quickly when the speed of communication is limited, But could such a thing happen in the high-speed Internet age? It seems the answer is yes. The Dewey vs. Truman incident happened because at the time the Tribune had to go to press several hours earlier...

A number of websites are going dark tomorrow to protest the SOPA legislation that could impose harsh restrictions upon the Internet. These sites include Mozilla, reddit for 12 hours, and Wikipedia for a full 24 hours. Google will also place a SOPA-related link on its homepage. Wales explained that the Wikipedia blackout comes as a result of feedback from the Wikipedia community, Not everybody is sanguine about the blackout. On just-launched Silicon Valley news site Pando Daily, Paul Carr writes in agreement with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s tweet calling the decision “foolish”. Carr blasts Wales for “[making] a...

The Library of Congress is where not just books but other documents deemed to have great historical significance are stored. And soon those documents will include an archive of every single public Twitter posting ever sent. Twitter and the Library of Congress have reached an agreement whereby an archive of those postings will be transferred to the library for inclusion in its electronic archives. "We were excited to be involved with acquiring the Twitter archives because it's a unique record of our time," [LoC digital initiatives program manager Bill] Lefurgy said. "It's also a unique way...

On PaidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports on some interesting findings from a Twitter discussion about e-book buyer behavior based on comments from book industry research organization representatives. The research reps suggest that limits on e-book sharing are limiting e-book adoption. The reps point out that consumers really like reading free e-books (about half of e-book buyers read free e-books) and expect e-book prices to stay low or drop lower. Half of all e-readers are given as gifts, but less than 1% of e-books are. Barriers to widespread e-book adoption are limits on sharing,...

Authors have experimented with Twitter fiction before, and even fictional characters from a musical have taken to Twitter to do a little world building (and marketing). But Reif Larsen's enigmatic matryoshka doll piece is the first I've seen in a while to make such effective use of the format. Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book: here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th: Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing. That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a...

Scribd is launching an iPhone app called the Float Reader, through which it hopes to become “the Netflix of reading.” Unfortunately, I can’t try this app out on my first-gen iPod Touch—it requires iOS 4.0—but from the news coverage it looks like an interesting attempt to bring some of the benefits of iPad-only reader apps like Flipboard to the smaller smartphone interface. The Float Reader provides access to a user’s Scribd documents, as well as to articles from 150 partners including The Atlantic, Time, Salon, and TechCrunch, and to excerpts of articles friends have shared on Facebook, Twitter, or...

Although this doesn’t have anything directly to do with e-books, it points out a way that authors can use digital media to help raise money for worthy causes. Yesterday, tornadoes ripped through Joplin, Missouri, a city about 90 miles west of my home in Springfield, killing at least 89 people and leaving many more homeless. Galleycat reports that to help raise money for a relief effort through Shelterbox, authors Maureen Johnson and Robin Wasserman are auctioning full book critiques on Twitter. Johnson led a similar fundraiser for earthquake victims in New Zealand...