#bcto09 on bookish communities

LibriVox
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Hugh McGuire is talking. He starts off with his introduction to LibriVox. It’s a project to make free audiobooks by reading public domain books aloud.

Asked a publisher about how communities affect her business. Answer is wish she knew. They have a website but it’s not enough. Now they have a Facebook group and Twitter, looking for a way to interact more directly with readers. Got suggested to add audio excerpts, etc. Not sure how else to engage people.

Someone else responded “Why does it have to be online? Why not in real life?” Personally I like to think that online is real life too. Maybe the better phrase is “away from keyboard.” Anyhow, engagement can happen by inviting people to events, book signings and the like.

Big point: As a blogger you don’t necessarily want to engage the author on a forum or twitter. You’d want to discuss on your own blog. Think YouTube’s embed feature. Can you do the same to show book covers, give reviews, etc. Social tools that make sharing easy is becoming more important. It’s not enough to just have a “download press kit here” link.

Big part of success is serendipity. A link from a popular blogger for example. It’ll only happen if your content is good enough for someone else to comment on it. Make it easier to share. Attention isn’t worth anything if you’re not engaged and therefore engaging.

The web is used to build authority. Don’t just tell an author to build a website. The author should have genuine interaction and if they are comfortable doing that online, they should. Behave online like you would at a cocktail party. Be yourself. It’s a long tail effect.

How do you have success on Facebook? Can’t just friend everyone. And author pages that just announce new books get unfriended because they’re not giving anything of value. Success happens from sharing and building authority as above.

Don’t build a community on your space. There’s enough spaces. Make it easy for someone else to build community.

O’Reilly might be able to have community editing. It’s a nightmare for fiction. Take a look at the wikinovel which essentially turned the entire community into a focus group. Disagreed: Fanfiction as an example. Look at how Lost treated the community by altering the storyline. Counterpoint: It’d be horrifying if that fanfiction made it into the official text. Countercounterpoint: It did make it into the official storyline in a few cases in Lost.

Newish theme of books through curation. Factfind through Twitter, get tipped off to good websites, filter, publish.

Goodreads doesn’t have a lot of value if the friend list you build doesn’t have similar tastes. Another crowd member votes for authority blogging leading to book recommendations.

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3 Comments to “#bcto09 on bookish communities”

  1. Keith Fahlgren 6 June 2009 at 6:14 pm #

    “”"O’Reilly might be able to have community editing. It’s a nightmare for fiction.”"”

    We developed OFPS after realizing that community *editing* and wikis were a (partial) failure. The current idea is to harness user feedback, but keep the authors in control of the actual text.

  2. lance_ 18 June 2009 at 1:23 am #

    @Keith,

    That does sound like a good idea. I wish that it was brought up in the talk.

    The difference in approaches in OFPS/community editing, citizendium/wikipedia would’ve added some interesting points. Community editing and feedback for non-fiction was barely talked about.

    Very happy to see that Bryan’s version of the feedback system is open sourced too. I’ll play around with OFPS when reading the Scala book. Looking forward to learning, and hope to see some O’Reilly reps at the next bookcamp. :)

  3. #BCTO09 – Summary | Random Musings

    [...] #bcto09 on bookish communities… [...]


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