Book Publishers: Learn From Digg, Yelp—Even Gawker

Book publishing could keep itself vital by taking a page from Web 2.0 technologies, but it has a long way to go. Here are some lessons
Amazon.com's Kindle electronic reader has come a long way since its late 2007 debut was met with mixed reviews, some derisive. Who could forget the moment at last year's Le Web Conference in Paris, when legendary designer Philippe Starck sniffed (BusinessWeek.com, 12/20/07), "It's a pity. It's almost modern." The audience erupted into laughter.

Amazon (AMZN) is laughing now. The Kindle, a device that lets people download, store, and of course read books in a digital format, could become a $1.1 billion business for the company next year, accounting for 4% of sales, according to a widely read Aug. 11 note by Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney.

Trailblazer that it is, Amazon knows well the benefit of applying a little technology to the stodgy business of publishing. Its flagship e-commerce business is one of the big success stories of the Internet, having revolutionized how people browse, shop for, and review books. Through Kindle, Amazon could do the same for how people read books.

Publishing is a subject near and dear to me—and not only because for the past two years I have been writing my first book. One of my parents was a philosophy professor and the other taught high school literature. Books were everywhere in my upbringing.

I want to keep it that way. A way to do that is to ensure that publishing learns how to exploit the full benefits of the social media tools now taking hold of the Web. Newspapers dragged their heels and look what's happening to them. As great as the Kindle is, publishing has a long way to go.

Herewith, five lessons that book publishers should take from the new Web.

Make it social.
Reading a book is an incredibly solitary experience. That's both a blessing and a curse. Like most busy professionals, I don't have a lot of downtime. What little free time I have could easily be filled by other pursuits—chiefly, time with a husband I rarely see. When I do commit to a book I love, I want to talk about it. This impulse explains why book clubs were all the rage in the 1990s.

There has to be a way for Web 2.0—a movement whose raison d'etre is to connect people—to meet the ongoing need for building community around books. Every publisher should at a minimum build a Facebook app. around its titles. The limitation with book clubs is time- and space-related. Not everyone can get their schedules (and geography) to mesh, and not everyone can read a book in the same time frame. But social networking could do for book clubs what Scrabulous did for fans of Scrabble—it let them play games together online, whenever they want

Yelp has mastered the art of making the most of online excitement in an offline world. The business review site became a force in San Francisco because of the real-world scene that grew up around it. Yelp events became raucous parties. It made the site stickier because it became an integral part of many people's social life. Suddenly, sitting alone at a computer penning a 1,000-word essay on why you love your dry cleaner became a social experience.

Take book tours out of the stores.
The conventional wisdom in publishing is that book tours no longer work. I agree, insofar as tours are confined to bookstores. The sad truth is that bookstores are declining in relevance. There are exceptions, of course, but even stores that draw big crowds for an author will struggle to reach the wide community of people interested in a particular author.

I'm learning this firsthand through what I'm calling my User Generated Book Tour, announced on my blog on a whim. My only rule: I'd go to 10 cities (not including San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) based on response and enthusiasm. With few exceptions, I've held no bookstore events.

And while I give huge props to my publisher Gotham for funding a very unconventional book promo, this approach hardly breaks the bank. Blogs and other social media tools including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace (NWS), and LinkedIn almost surgically pinpoint a writer's fan base in any city, rendering marketing easy and cost-effective. Any writer who's been savvy about social networking has at the same time been mapping a fan base and contacts throughout the country.

Digg founder Kevin Rose is a master of promotional tours. Once he established his Diggnation as a popular weekly podcast, he took it on the road. He'd hold a Live Diggnation anywhere and lines would form around the block.

There's a strong payback for intimately connecting with local audiences. Promoting anything—be it a Web site or book—is like running for office; nothing takes the place of face-to-face interaction. And by giving up on book tours because they happen in the wrong venue, publishers are throwing away a powerful tool.

Create stars—don't just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren't very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher's brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

Sure, publishers would have to spend more on promotion. But because they're spending less on an advance—say, $50,000 for a lesser-known writer than the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) they'd spend on a star—they can afford the bigger promotional budget. "It's taken some time for publishers to recognize that a successful site is as strong a 'platform' as a magazine, newspaper, or TV gig," says Patrick Mulligan, my editor at Gotham.

Even better: Tie that rising star to a multi-book deal from the beginning. Then any promotion is an investment in those next two books. It's basically the record-label model, made cheaper and easier via the branding-power of the social Web.

Go electronic from the get-go.
You might be stunned to learn that in book publishing, once you get to the final manuscript stages, there is no electronic version. The manuscript is FedEx'ed back and forth with Post-it Notes. If FedEx were to lose it, publishers lose months' worth of copy edits, legal edits, and other elements of the painstaking publishing process. There's not even a photocopy. No joke.

That makes publishing the book in other digital formats a challenge at the outset. Publishers would do well to keep the book electronic— even if it's PDFs of typeset pages. That would help them blast teaser chapters around the world (engaging bloggers and the long tail of the press). Presumably it would help get the book on Kindle and other e-books from day one.

This is as big a mindset change as it is a technology one. Many publishing houses just don't think about digital versions, relegating them to a few poor guys who work in a dungeon somewhere. Some publishers may want to force hardcover sales, but the music industry has learned the hard way: You can't control how people want to consume content in a digital age. Apple (AAPL) enshrined digital religion early on in its iTunes Music Store.

Make e-commerce even easier.
Yes, Amazon transformed how we shop for books. But the industry can go much further. Take the titles far beyond Amazon.com—through one-click widgets appended to blogs, Facebook pages, and other sites across the Web. Link these tools directly to PayPal and Google Checkout (GOOG). Think: one-click purchase, not one click takes you to Amazon.

Take these steps, book publishers, and stay vital.

How can book publishing better tap Web 2.0 tools? Share your ideas in the Reader Comments section below.

Lacy has been a business reporter for 10 years, most recently covering technology for BusinessWeek. Her book, Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0, was published by Gotham Books in May 2008. She is also Silicon Valley host of Yahoo Finance's Tech Ticker.