Amazon posted a strongly worded announcement on its own forums to let customers know what went down, and to make it clear that it disagrees:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!.

I don’t know that anyone is surprised that a publisher wants to have the final say over the price of the books it sells. And to be honest, I don’t think $12 or $15 is a bad price for a new book, provided that the ebook version is released at the same time as the hardcover. If Macmillan delays release dates and tries to charge a premium, *shrug*, I can just go buy something else.

But–and I write this as someone who thinks the Kindle is awesome in a lot of ways–Amazon needs to drop the sanctimonious act. From the beginning of the Kindle, the company has strong-armed publishers on prices and profit agreements, and it’s screwed over readers like you and me by telling us that we’re “buying” ebooks when in reality we’re just licensing them. (Check the fine print of the agreement–you’ll see that you never actually own your digital copy of the book you “buy” on Amazon.)

I can put it even more plainly. Amazon calls its Kindle endeavor a “mission,” but it uses a locked-down format that prevents customers from buying ebooks from other stores, or from reading Amazon ebooks on other devices. The whole ecosystem, while fairly pleasant for consumers to participate in provided nothing ever goes wrong, is deliberately designed to give all the power to Amazon and keep publishers, authors, and customers powerless. And when Macmillan put up a fight, Amazon pulled all Macmillan titles, digital and print, off its website as a negative incentive to get Macmillan to cave. That’s the sort of dirty trick you pull when you’re a business, not when you’re on some sort of higher mission.

Okay, end of rant! My point is, this is bad news mainly for Amazon, because higher prices tarnish its expensive marketing campaign that promises $10 books, and because this means it might lose a competitive edge when it comes to pricing for Macmillan books in the future. In other words, from now on you’ll probably pay the same price for a Macmillan book whether it’s from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Apple.

But this isn’t the end of the world for customers. $15 for a new release is still a good price. And as Amazon points out, there are dozens–no, probably hundreds–of independent publishers and authors out there who would love to sell you an entertaining novel for $10 or less. (Edit: or you can just wait a few months for the ebook price to drop.) You shouldn’t worry too much about what two giants are fighting over when there’s so much great stuff waiting for you everywhere else.

(Photo: mikebaird)

(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)