Why Not?
One the things that really stuck with me from Michael Tamblyn’s 6 Projects That Could Change Publishing For Ever presentation at the BookNet Tech Forum in March was the idea that publishers have to “place lots of little bets quickly.”
It tied into another idea that’s been kicking around recently about reframing ‘Why?’ questions into ‘Why Not?’ questions. That is to say, whenever we — publishers, book distributors et al — ask “why would we do this?” we should flip the question on it head and ask “why wouldn’t we?”.
This doesn’t mean we should pursue every idea that someone puts forward. Sometimes there will be good reasons not to try something — “it costs too much” and “it’s illegal and/or evil” are perfectly valid reasons that spring to mind to nix something (and no doubt there are plenty more). But, in my experience, reframing the ‘why?’ question encourages people (me included) to think creatively and be more positive about ideas/projects we might otherwise dismiss out of hand.
#rainfall09
This is all a roundabout way of explaining how I ended up twittering from the Raincoast Books Fall 09 Sales Conference last week.
Before we got under way on the first morning, a few of the early birds were laughing about using Raincoast’s Twitter account to micro-blog the presentations as they happened. Although it started as a joke, the near-inevitable “why would we?” and “who cares?” questions came up, and that raised the stakes. I turned the questions around and couldn’t actually think of any good reasons why we shouldn’t ‘live tweet’ the conference. I had my laptop, wireless access and a power source, so it seemed easy enough to do. And I figured people would tell me pretty quickly if they were bored and I should stop.
Decision made.
We quickly adopted #rainfall09 (an identifying reference tag for twitter posts or ‘tweets’ which was accidentally shortened to #rainfall on more than one occasion) and, with some help from my colleague Siobhan, I covered all 3 days of the conference in a series of posts of 140 characters or less.
To people who live their lives online and are accustomed to social media rather than the slightly conservative book publishing world, the response to all this is probably a very sarcastic “big whup”. But sales conferences are not usually open and inclusive, and, needless to say, there was a degree of skepticism and resistance to overcome. Certainly it was experiment for us, if not, admittedly, a very large one. And we were, as far as I’m aware (and someone please correct me if I am wrong), the first publisher/book distributor to Twitter their entire conference.
20/20
With the benefit of hindsight, the drawbacks were predictable. It was very intensive and time-consuming and I found it was difficult — at least initially — to interact with the people actually in the room and tweet. I’m sure I missed a lot of nuance and I passed on more than few book samples with the barest of glances. We probably over-tweeted and lost a few followers as a consequence.
That all said, the positive outcomes vastly outweighed the problems. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We learnt as we went along — becoming better organized and tweeting less — and we gained far, far more followers than we lost over the 3-day period. Our posts were re-tweeted. Followers asked questions and made requests. We raised awareness of Raincoast, the publishers we work with, and the books we distribute. And we were able to connect with reviewers and bloggers we weren’t previously aware of.
I would do some things differently next time for sure. But, ultimately, it was definitely worth doing.
If you are thinking about live-tweeting your conference, here are my 5 Tips:
- Be Prepared — Whilst Twitter is great for spontaneity, making sure you can set-up your laptop with internet access, and a power source is essential (our conference days were 10 hours straight). And knowing the books (at least a little) in advance, definitely helps — I was often scrambling to find additional information on particular titles and bookmarking a few pages in my browser in advance would have been a plus.
- Be selective — Raincoast Books is primarily a distributor. We have something like a thousand titles a season from a variety of publishers. It is impossible to tweet about all of them, and it became quickly apparent it isn’t desirable to try. Our followers just wanted the highlights.
- Link — Readers also wanted links to more details if a title caught their eye. I had publisher websites and google open in separate tabs at all times. Even so, linking wasn’t always possible. Put your marketing materials online early and encourage your authors to update their sites (and join Twitter!).
- Be creative — If you can’t get your marketing material for your key titles online before conference, or something comes out of left-field, use the resources you do have to find an interesting work-around. When we had some very immediate reader interest in a book called The Quotable Douchebag and there was no information available online, the publisher Quirk Books quickly threw up a blog post with details.
- Tool-Up — Twitter management tools like TweetDeck and HootSuite are always useful for professional Twittering, but being able to quickly monitor replies, retweets, and references, not to mention conveniently shorten URLs was essential during conference.
Did you follow @RaincoastBooks or #rainfall09 last week? If so, how did you think it went? What could we do better next time? Leave a comment below or email me.
Note: This is my personal blog, and this post is my personal opinion. Neither reflect the opinion or official policy of Raincoast Books.
Illustrations from the Inspired Magazine Social Bird Icon Set (From the top: Chimero’s Birdie by Frank Chimero, Burdy by Tad Carpenter, and Jacque by Jessica Gonacha).
