Pinterest for Book Publishers & Authors

What is Pinterest?
Pinterest helps you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web-- it's sort of a more visual way to bookmark things you're interested in. People use pinboards for things like planning their weddings, decorating their homes, and organizing their favorite recipes. Furthermore you can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

How can Pinterest help a book publisher or author?
Because it promotes the curation of information in a very visual way, people are using Pinterest as a resource to find things they like. More importantly, Pinterest users aren't restricted to searches information only pinned on their friends’ walls- so you're able to reach more people than on Facebook. As a result Pinterest could drive a lot of traffic back to your site if you're posting relevant content. The network now beats Youtube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January, according to a Shareaholic study.

Some ideas for boards you can create:
Books I Love (great reads- your books and others)
Threads for Book Lovers (clothing related to books)
Bookcases (pretty ways to store books)
Libraries (beautiful reading spaces)
Food for Book Lovers (food themed from a book)
Accessories for Book Lovers (jewelry, purses, bookmarks, lights, etc)
Crafts for Book Lovers (diy ideas for book fans)
Gifts for Book Lovers (great books and accessories)
Books into Movies (books that got turned into films, or that should have been)
Book Illustrations (pictures from books, or of books)
Spotted (your books out and about)

For additional inspiration, check out some....
Publishers currently on Pinterest:
Randomhouse
Chronicle
Penguin Australia
Book Bloggers currently on Pinterest:
Stacy Millican
BookRiot
Rachel Krueger
Jessica Shover
Trish Collins
Mandi Ottaway
Sleepless Reader
Swapna Krishna

Innovative Ways Of Building Community Around Books

Book publishers vary widely in their use of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest, according to research Blogads assembled in advance of its February 15 #SMWNYC panel on book publishers and social media.

Scholastic has done the most on Facebook. Randomhouse dominates on Twitter. Only three publishers are on Pinterest, the photo curation service popular with women, and five are on Tumblr, a blogging service.

The State of Book Publishers' Social Media (An overview from January 2012)












There is a noticeable correlation between the number of tweets per day or per month and the number of followers (correlation coefficient is about ~0.62). Publishers who tweet a lot have more followers than publishers who are less active which makes sense!








Please join us in NYC for our book panel: Innovative Ways Of Building Community Around Books! Sign up here.

Hosted by Blogads.com at The Gershwin Hotel Wednesday, February 15 at 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Publishers and authors are increasingly connecting to their audiences in innovative ways through new social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and book-based social networks. Join four publishing industry marketers as they discuss specific ways social media is helping them promote books — and what the changes may mean for publishers, authors and readers.

Speakers:
Miriam Parker, Little, Brown, and Company
Emily Lyman, Crown Publishing
Ryan Chapman, FSG
Guinevere de la Mare, Chronicle Books
Henry Copeland, Blogads

Re-inventing the library

According to Good, Occupy Wall Street's "people's library" has helped popularize the idea of book lending that takes place outside of library stacks. As it turns out guerrilla librarians have been occupying street corners across the country with permanent community-curated micro-libraries for quite some time though.

In 2007 Corner Libraries was launched on a New Haven street corner and then evolved to New York City. There, the project has developed innovative ways to distribute books such as via a chained-up sidewalk school desk, a book shed built to mimic a newspaper stand, a doghouse-shaped library living on a hand cart in Williamsburg, and now, micro-libraries built into tree pits on the city's streets.

Another group called the Little Free Library has installed hundreds of micro-lending stations largely on private properties around the United States and Canada.

I've also seen a number of coffee shops and resorts with bookshelves stacked with good reads that encourage patrons to enjoy a title or two- by just taking it, or trading for it.

It's proven that knowledge sharing benefits everyone, so I'm fully in support of book lending in any form. If you could create one- where would you place your pop-up library and what material would be in it?