I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

I found out about the offer through literary agent Janet Reid’s blog. Reid made her purchases from a local bookstore and reported back that the process is unnecessarily complicated, with each store bringing a different level of online competence to the transaction. I foolishly tried it out myself after reading her post, and I think she’s being too polite; I was stunned at how awful the purchasing experience was. I think Google is more to blame than any of the booksellers, though, because of how clumsily it integrates its Google Books service with each store.

But before I show you how it went down, let’s look at the good news here. These are the lowest prices you’ll find for these books. I chose three titles at random from Unbridled’s list and looked up their prices on the Kindle, Nook and Kobo stores, and here’s what they’re currently going for:

So it’s clear that 25 cents is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately, while the price is terrific, the actual process of purchasing the books is almost comically painful, especially when compared to how seamlessly you can buy music, apps, ebooks, subscriptions, and basically anything else online these days from other vendors.

Here. I took screenshots of every screen that I had to go through to buy two ebooks from one of the participating booksellers:

At this point, you can either log in to this new account you suddenly have with this particular bookseller, or you can say to hell with this, as I did, and just go over to the ebooks section of Google Books and find your purchases there. Either way, you’ll then be able to read your new ebooks online or download EPUB versions that are locked with Adobe Digital Editions, which should work on both Nook and Sony Reader—right after you’ve authorized it through ADE on your desktop, sigh.

If you choose to read it in your web browser, at least Google has made sure that the experience is fairly pleasant:

So that’s what you have to do to get these discount ebooks. If you want to give it a shot yourself, then the easiest way to proceed is to look at this list of available titles at Unbridled Books, then jump directly to Google Books, bypassing any indie bookseller, and buy the ebooks from Google. Of course, that shuts your local bookstore out of yet another transaction, so if you don’t mind the extra hoop jumping you can do this instead:

1. Choose a local indie bookstore from this list of stores that sell Google Ebooks. (You don’t have to choose a local store, but it’s probably a nice thing if you do.)
2. Visit the store’s website. If you’re lucky, the store you picked was thoughtful enough to promote the 25-cent sale on its home page. (See WORD and Greenlight for good examples.) If you chose badly, you won’t see any mention of the sale and will have to search for the titles yourself—or just hit your back button and try another store on the list until you find one that’s easier to shop from.
3. Take a deep breath and get ready to run the checkout gauntlet as shown above. Be brave!

Either way, good luck. Imagine how much more you’ll enjoy reading something that you had to hunt down and kill yourself, the way people had to do it back before all this one-click-purchase nonsense made us all fat and lazy.

Note: The downloadable versions won’t work on the Kindle.

[via Janet Reid, Literary Agent]
(Barbed wire: Eusebius@Commons)

Borders is actually an investor in Kobo, but not the only one. As for what would happen to Kobo if Borders went away entirely, Kobo writes, “[Borders'] ebook sales represents a minority of Kobo’s worldwide sales.”

“Kobo Update” [Kobo]

It’s become ubiquitous, too: think about how every social network service presents some sort of low-level and instant feedback on itself, from Twitter followers to Facebook friends, Diggs to Google Reader Likes (also now in use on Google Buzz). Older Internet communication, like email or instant messaging, tended to focus on two-person relationships and relied on self-evident participation measurements–you could ask the other person if she received your email, or see for yourself whether she responded in your IM chat. As soon as more than two people are involved in communication, however, the measurement burden begins to grow, and the PC is there to start measuring and reporting on that relationship.

The promise of analytics–data presented in a way that helps you make more money, to put it crudely–is a component of this new publishing world that has the potential to dramatically empower authors and help them make money. On the other hand, like every other aspect of new publishing it’s also potentially disruptive, or at the very least distracting.

In February, author Henry Melton noted that after he wrote a couple of iPad-related posts his site traffic jumped considerably, and coincidentally he sold more ebooks. But while he knows there might be a correlation that’s worth further experimenting (and data collection), his heart’s not into it as a writer. Heck, he doesn’t even want to deal with being on a social network when he writes:

I can’t understand how other writers can be bubbly and personable every day on Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social networking fad is trending today, and at the same time, get their writing done. For the past month I’ve been deep into a new first draft novel, and my social interactions have been suffering. My priorities put the new writing first, and the marketing aspects of the job second. That may be a bad thing.

That power for analytics to distract one from productivity is something Jonah Lehrer commented on just a few weeks ago. His focus was on personal relationships, particularly how the human brain seems wired to organize groups into hierarchies and then to constantly take a measure of one’s own status; he suggests that social network websites overstimulate this part of the brain by first making your social group much larger than what’s historically been the norm (never mind that we may not consider Facebook friends real friends; I think what he’s suggesting is even pseudo-friends may figure into the primal hierarchy-sorting behavior), and then by providing feedback–aka analytics–on their actions as they relate to you.

I thought of Lehrer’s primates-and-hierarchies post when I stumbled across Supernormal Stimuli earlier this week, a new book that argues that animal brains seem to have evolved to be attracted to outsized experiences and data inputs. It’s why we like really fatty or sweet foods, why we’re drawn to hypersexualized entertainment (porn), and–seriously–why birds prefer crude, over-exaggerated fake eggs to real ones.

Both Lehrer’s post and Supernormal Stimuli put me in mind of the kind of infoporn I’m discussing here. After all, the promise that you’ll be able to have an instant macro-view of how the world interacts with your or your content is incredibly appealing, even if it’s almost certainly an unbearable data load for any one person to handle even after a PC does the crunching and chart-building.

Even so, the data is too useful to ignore, and it will keep coming. It may also become as important a part of future publishing contracts as current obsessions with copyright protection and the carving up of rights into different distribution channels, according to Clive Rich, a lawyer with experience in the music industry who spoke at a publishing conference in London last week.

Rich’s argument is that it’s quickly becoming impossible for an author to exert much meaningful control over all the ways a book is sold. In one example, he notes that the practice of “unbundling” or selling a book piecemeal might become a market reality. Another example he gives is that it may become too expensive or time-consuming to negotiate approval over every licensing or business deal in a market with rapidly proliferating distribution channels. (Imagine in a few years: a publisher might try to sell an author’s book on three or four mobile platforms, as stand-alone mobile apps, as fodder for subscription-based online services, and as elements in one-off anthologies created by consumers at the point of sale, all in addition to traditional print copies.)

Rich thinks the trade-off for an author, other than potentially more sales, is that he can demand greater transparency into the business data–analytics, in other words. Here’s how he’s paraphrased in the Publishing Perspectives summary of his presentation:

Transparency is the pay off. Rather than a royalty statement every month, a “realistic objective” for authors might be to get notice of any deals and, in so far as publishers are receiving reports from a distributor, monthly or even weekly reports on consumer purchases and other activity.

[...]

There could be reports on number of users, hits, how many times an application is downloaded, average dwell times, or number of units sold,” Rich said.

[...]

As authors develop conversations with their readers (via blogging and social media) the digital service provider can collect information, which may then be used for more conversations and to up-sell. “It’s a legitimate area of interest for the author to be able to share in that data; they could send an email about the new book with a call to action.” Authors could collect the data through their own websites.

This also hints at a transition in how publisher contracts may be structured. Advances might be lower, says Rich, but “the contract looks more like a service agreement,” with publishers offering a customizable list of services and related fees instead of taking merely a flat cut of any sale. How much you pay to the publisher will partly be a function of how willing and able you are to deal with the business analytics side of things yourself.

Some published authors are already experimenting with publishing their back catalogues through direct relationships with retailers–Ian McEwan is doing it with Amazon, for example. But most of the news in these early days of digital bookselling has been about determining the right price, or determining if there is just one right price, or arguing over how to split the revenue fairly. It will be interesting to see how the discussion changes once some of the more business-minded writers out there begin to make deep dives into analytics and report back to the rest of us on how it impacts sales, marketing, fanbases, and the act of writing itself.

Some quick conclusions:

• The low transaction cost of communicating directly with readers is a double-edged sword. It can make a positive impact on revenue, but drain resources for producing further work.
• “Infoporn” is perhaps a more accurate term than I realized, in that it can be a sort of supernormal stimulus that the human brain naturally gravitates toward but that can distract from constructive productivity.
• Not every writer is going to want to deal with this, which is closer to the “business” side of writing and publishing than the “art” side. (I’d argue it’s actually its own domain and not inherently business or art, but clearly it will be used in the near future mostly for maximizing revenue.) Publishers will likely provide encompassing services for authors, although perhaps some agents will as well. Ironically, if we continue down the disintermediation path away from publishers and distributors, new third-party services may pop up that sell analytics services to authors. Perhaps a Google Analytics-style service will appear, but Google’s free products are justified by their direct connection to ad placement and sales and aren’t simply good deeds.
• Reader data might replace critical reviews in some conditions, for the same reason it would supplant traditional sales ranking reports: reader data is more granular and can offer more accurate feedback for a writer, including the demographics of his highest-spending readers, his works that are most commented on or shared, or which subsections are most purchased independently of the entire work.
• Analytics might be used to actually shape or help create new works, especially “live” writing or works that are deliberately left unfinished until adequate reader data is collected.

(Photo: pdinnen)

(Photo: Lip Kee)

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

Who uses Twitter?

A study of Twitter users published last October by the Pew Internet Project looked at the periods between Nov-Dec 2008 and Aug-Sep 2009, and the big trend was that Twitter is skewing towards both the young and the highly-connected (in a wireless sense, not in a get-me-a-job-in-DC sense).

As recently as last April, Twitter was still considered to be leaning towards an older user group. That’s changed. Based on the Pew Internet study, the median age of a Twitter user is now 31. (By comparison, MySpace is 26, Facebook is 33, and LinkedIn is 39.) Around a third of Internet users between 18 and 34 use Twitter, while only about a tenth of those over 45 use Twitter.

Additionally, the more connected a person is, meaning the more types of devices he has that have wireless connectivity (e.g. a Kindle, a Nintendo DS Lite, a laptop), the more likely he is to use Twitter.

And finally (this comes from a different study), we can estimate that approximately 45% of Twitter users are men.

Now compare that info to the demographic breakdown of the Lovereading sample:

Clearly, the average Lovereading member and the average Twitter member don’t overlap much. If you want to reach the heavy book reader who is a member of Lovereading, yep, Twitter is probably a waste of time.

Okay, so how do Twitter users use Twitter?

But is Twitter useful for marketing to other groups? The Bookseller notes that there have been highly publicized sales spikes pegged to specific tweets on Twitter–Stephen Fry has a sort of “Oprah effect” on books he tweets about, for example. But this sort of organic celebrity-driven event is still an exception.

The thing about Twitter–and this is key to understanding how to use it–is that it’s primarily utilized as an ad-hoc news and gossip source. Even The Bookseller notes this in a quote from a publicist at Penguin:

“You find out about things first. I knew that thelondonpaper was closing before anyone else in the PR department, for instance, because I was looking at Twitter when it was announced. It seems to me the fastest news source out there.”

That’s a great example of how professional gossip spreads quickly via Twitter. Here’s a look at how news media content spreads:

Current events and news

Technology sites

Medical sites

Video game sites

Celebrity sites

How-To sites

There have indeed been interesting experiments with using Twitter in non-news ways, for example when the cast of the Broadway Musical “Next to Normal” presented an adapted version of the show on Twitter, posting updates in their characters’ voices. The Bookseller notes that Philippa Gregory and R. N. Morris tweeted serializations of their recent novels. It’s hard to directly measure the impact of Twitter on sales figures for these campaigns, however. More important, these sorts of broadcasting campaigns are antithetical to how Twitter is actually used, which means they’re being launched in what could at best be called an indifferent environment.

Finally, celebrities and tech-savvy authors already know that Twitter works well as a pseudo-direct line to your audience. You broadcast updates; your fans respond, although not with the expectation that you will answer them directly, and they also retweet your updates to their acquaintances. Like a Facebook fan page, Twitter can be used as a ready-made online presence for publicity purposes. But be careful: overtly self-promotional tweets drive away users, because what they want is new content from you, not ads for your existing work. Look at the tweets from Kathy Griffin and John Hodgeman, two book-peddling writers who mix personal gossip, jokes, and updates with alerts about their next book signing event.

Conclusion

There are a few other things to consider about how Twitter works, and its role in online communication at the start of 2010:

Twitter doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It pulls in URLs and images from elsewhere, and more important, Twitter status updates are often fed into Facebook walls or displayed on blogs. In general, social networking services are growing more integrated, not less, so a mention one place may turn into a mention many places.

Twitter is a cheap way to build a community with younger fans. When it comes to creating a community between an artist and his audience, Twitter falls somewhere between an email campaign and an online group chat (which, by the way are practically relics at this point). This makes it a good way to interact with your audience without sucking up lots of real-time resources. If you’re constitutionally unable to enjoy Twitter and tweeting–and you’ll find no judgmentalism from me on this matter–find someone who can do it on your behalf. But be wary of trying to deliberately mislead people; you don’t really control your reputation online once you’ve tarnished it.

Twitter may be more effective at creating awareness than at actually converting anyone into a customer. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based solely on a tweet, but I certainly have found out about new songs, new books, and new TV shows because of Twitter. A real world example: I had never heard of the BBC series Gavin & Stacey before a Twitter friend mentioned it in an update about three weeks ago. But that good fortune relied on an old fashioned peer-to-peer recommendation, not on any sort of marketing campaign. If you can find a way to get users to spontaneously mention you in a tweet, you’re golden.

The demographic makeup of Twitter will continue to evolve, so don’t expect that what works/doesn’t work today will necessarily hold true in six months.

Twitter is mobile–it reaches people when they’re at work, in transit, or out shopping. This may not be the best time to encourage someone to go buy a book, but it might be a fine time to jog their memory that a book or author exists.

Don’t aim for viral hits, aim for seeding. This applies to everything online, not just Twitter. The more references to your product you can get out there, the more likely one of them will take root and produce a sale. And unlike ad campaigns, a lot of online “seeds” can stick around for years.

And finally, it doesn’t matter what social network service or status update service is popular right now; just shut up and use it. When the next service comes along, you’ll switch to that one. And so on.

(Photo: donjd2)

(Bird images: Lip Kee and donjd2)