So this morning, I was hopping around between the BEA Bloggers Conference and the BookExpo America (BEA) conference. I will be crazy like that all week – because Blogworld Expo is in the same building. I’ll plan on tagging my posts #BEA, #BEABloggers, and #Blogworld.
First off, I listened to Patrick Brown, Community Manager & Author Program Manager at Goodreads, talk about Goodreads for librarians, publishers, and booksellers. My library uses Goodreads, so this should be interesting!
Goodreads: largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world. Think of it as social networking around a love of books. 9 million readers! It includes recommendations, reviews, shelves, and book clubs.
They get 21 million monthly unique visitors, and 140 million page views a month.
Wow – goodreads users have added 315 million books to their shelves so far.
Goodreads’ mission is Discovery – help people find books they love and share them with friends.
Your goal (publishers, authors): get reviews, especially early in the life of your book.
- it helps new readers discover your book
- help readers decide if they want to read it
- spread beyond Goodreads (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, syndication to Powell’s, Google Books, USA Today)
Publishers can place ad campaigns in Goodreads.
Erica Barmash, Harper Perennial – explanation of an ad campaign for a book.
- banner ad on the homepage and throughout the site
- total impressions – 4.7 million, 10,315 actual clicks. Goodreads got them more clicks that People or Entertainment Weekly.
- Cost per click as about $1.12
- she felt they got the best ad value with Goodreads – Goodreads gives stats on how many people added the book to their shelves and marked the book “to read.”
- did a video chat with the author (had hundreds of viewers).
Back to Patrick:
42,000 Goodreads authors. Benefits:
- build your community online with an author profile
- find new readers with giveaways and text ads
- connect with fans
Advance giveaways generate pre-release buzz
- 35,000 people enter giveaways each day
- average giveaway gets 850 entries.
- it shows at least some engagement, and an interesting way to get interest
- give more books in a giveaway – helps get more reviews (so like 25 books to give away)
You can also purchase text ads (around $50) to drive readers to a giveaway
Goodreads Groups:
- 20,000+ book clubs on Goodreads
- create a masthead (use this for branding), add prominent links to videos
- add your events and invite friends
- host an author chat in advance of your event
Use your staff picks to good use!
Salt Lake City Public Library (or maybe Salt Lake County Library System – he sorta mixed both libraries up a bit) group case study:
- librarians act as moderators to control group content
- use challenges and polls for easy participation (i.e, read 5 short stories in May, then post about it)
- Some groups use Google Plus hangouts, Skype, etc to get more interaction happening
Tips for a successful group:
- book clubs around a single title are stifling
- reading challenges let people choose
- don’t ignore the long tail reader
- anticipate conflict and plan ahead (set up ground rules in advance)
- let all users join in – more fun that way.
And if you can believe it, I’ll attempt to blog the whole thing! Well, my view of the whole thing, anyway. So – look for a bunch of session notes type blog posts next week about anything from ebooks and publishers to how to improve a podcast. Maybe even a video or two.