From The Telegraph:

Mills and Boon, the Harlequin-owned book publisher best known for its saucy women’s fiction, is embarking on a new chapter in storytelling, with the launch of digital series The Chatsfield.

The series is not just an eBook, or an eBook with hyperlinks or video added. Harlequin has taken traditional storytelling and turned it on its head, creating non-linear stories in bite-sized chunks that are designed to be told in real-time.

The series is set in a luxury hotel called The Chatsfield. The main character is an executive assistant called Jessie Loe, who after an embarrassing break up accepts a challenge from her best friend to stay single for three months.

. . . .

The characters tell their stories side-by-side using multiple digital, social and mobile channels – including their own Facebook, YouTube, blogs and Twitter accounts, as well as traditional publishing. It is up to the reader to find all the pieces of the story and stitch together the bigger picture.

“The intriguing nature of a hotel is that anyone can come and stay. From politicians to footballers, to newlyweds or stag parties… there are always scandalous stories to tell, and who better to tell them than the people who see all the spectacle; the staff,” said Harlequin.

. . . .

For people who want to engage on a deeper level with stories, there is a hotel check in, where a profile can be created, a mystery can be solved, and badges can be awarded.

Link to the rest at The Telegraph

From The American Conservative:

Back a couple years ago, I started using Goodreads: it’s a useful tool to keep track of books read and enjoyed, and it’s a great place to discover books not yet read. But now I’m considering a step away. And it has nothing to do with the social network itself—it has to do with me, and the susceptibility to self-consciousness as a reader.

Tania Unsworth, an author of three books, described this tendency well in her recent post on Nerdy Book Club. She reminisces on reading as a child, the utter abandonment it proffered, and compares it with her reading now:

There was an intensity to reading then, a kind of total involvement in story that is hard to reproduce as an adult. I know too much now about tired plots and clichés. I am always comparing one thing to another, recognizing devices, identifying styles. No matter how good or bad I find something, I’m always aware of my response, slightly detached, consciously enjoying or not enjoying.

She writes of a time when she was a “girl of eleven, with a flashlight under the covers, devouring The Chronicles of Narnia”—when there was a complete immersion in the world of the novel, when one connected with a book’s protagonist and experienced the world through the eyes of the “other” in a powerful, beautiful way.

Why do readers lose this sort of joyous abandonment?

. . . .

 There’s also the siren call of list-making: we all love watching a list of accomplishments grow and grow. This is perhaps the largest reason I find Goodreads dangerous, personally: it enumerates the books I’ve read, and organizes them into admiration-worthy lengthy lists. It encourages me to look not at the quality of reads, not at the specific beauties of various works, but to admire and venerate the amalgamated monstrous whole. Thus, I begin to rush: I want to finish this book, that book, and the next—not to meet a deadline, necessarily, not because I’m so engrossed in the book I can’t stop—but merely because I want to check another book off my list.

Link to the rest at The American Conservative and thanks to Randall for the tip.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The usual formula goes something like this: Marketers and advertisers spend huge budgets to craft their campaigns, then refine them over weeks or months until they find just the message that will reach their target audience.

Now some companies are trying to squeeze all of that work into mere minutes.

These advertisers are watching Twitter and other social networks to see what topics are getting the most attention, and putting together short blog posts, tweets and videos that match those themes—in hopes that the online audience will become more aware of the brand and see it as relevant to their interests and needs. Then, if one topic isn’t getting attention anymore, the companies can drop it without much fuss, and switch gears quickly to follow the next hot discussion.

. . . .

“The data comes into the room from many sources, and you have to use that data like a modern-day orchestra leader, blending the inputs in real time in a combination that is as much an art as a science,” says Louis Paskalis, Bank of America senior vice president.

The bank’s attempt to use the [Davos] conference to promote its brand seems to have paid off—97% of people who clicked on BofA’s content on social media during the economic conference were engaging with the bank for the first time, Mr. Paskalis says.

. . . .

Companies should look for people who are tweeting about the company’s core strengths and see what’s on their minds.

Ms. Boff’s team, for instance, searches on Twitter for hashtags and conversations about science. When the companies have a sense of the kind of content that these communities care about, they can craft similar content and tweet it, perhaps using the same hashtags these communities are using.

“We try to behave the way you would if you were meeting somebody in a social gathering—you don’t accost them, instead you try to find a commonality of interest,” Ms. Boff says.

. . . .

Rather than publish content on a huge range of topics, focus on where your brand has built expertise and can add the most value to a conversation. GE, for example, sticks to messages about science and technology on social media—rather than try to sell its products or take shots at competitors.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

From Buffer:

Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much?

I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media, but I want to do it in the right way.

Curious, I dug around and found some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everything in between.

. . . .

Twitter’s best practices reference research by Buddy Media about tweet length: 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

Creativity loves constraints and simplicity is at our core. Tweets are limited to 140 characters so they can be consumed easily anywhere, even via mobile text messages. There’s no magical length for a Tweet, but a recent report by Buddy Media revealed that Tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate.

The Buddy Media research falls in line with similar research by Track Social in a study of 100 well-known brands that are popular on Twitter. Track Social also found that the perfect Tweet length was right around 100 characters.

. . . .

The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters

Forty characters is not much at all. (The sentence I just wrote is 35 characters.)

But 40 is the magic number that Jeff Bullas found was most effective in his study of retail brands on Facebook. He measured engagement of posts, defined by “like” rate and comment rate, and the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

The 40-character group also represented the smallest statistical set in the study (only 5 percent of all posts qualified at this length), so best practices on Facebook also include the next most popular set: Posts with 80 characters or fewer received 66 percent higher engagement.

. . . .

The ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters.

To maximize the readability and appearance of your posts on Google+, you may want to keep your text on one line. Demian Farnworth of Copyblogger studied the Google+ breaking point and found that headlines should not exceed 60 characters.

. . . .

The ideal length of a headline is 6 words.

How much of the headline for this story did you read before you clicked?

According to a post by KISSmetrics, you might not have read it all.

Writing for KISSmetrics, headline expert Bnonn cites usability research revealing we don’t only scan body copy, we also scan headlines. As such, we tend to absorb only the first three words and the last three words of a headline. If you want to maximize the chance that your entire headline gets read, keep your headline to six words.

. . . .

The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words.

When measuring the content that performs best on their site, Medium focuses not on clicks but on attention. How long do readers stick with an article?

In this sense, an ideal blog post would be one that people read. And Medium’s research on this front says that the ideal blog post is seven minutes long.

Link to the rest at Buffer

From re/code:

Lots of people have wanted Facebook to build an ad network for a long time.

Here it comes. Facebook will take the wraps off its plans for a mobile ad network at its“F8″ developer conference in San Francisco at the end of the month, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Facebook will pitch the ads to publishers and developers as a way to leverage the social network’s vast database of user information for better ad targeting. And Facebook wins by expanding its ad reach — now it can make money from its billion-plus users even when they’re not on Facebook’s own properties.

. . . .

 In the last three months of 2013, mobile ads generated $1.24 billion for Facebook —  more than half the company’s overall ad revenue.

Link to the rest at re/code

Note to Self:

See if AdBlock has an iPhone app.

And an Android tablet app.

Or delete all Facebook apps.

From GigaOm:

Thanks to the web and real-time measurement tools, the media industry has gone from having virtually no hard data on readers and attention to an embarrassment of riches — not only can we measure what people click on, but we can measure how far down the page they got when they were reading, whether they posted a comment, which social networks they came from, and a hundred other pieces of data. The only problem is that this is very much a double-edged sword.

. . . .

But is paying your journalists based on pageviews or other metrics a smart way to align their incentives with your goals as a business, or does it poison the well when it comes to enhancing or encouraging creativity?

This fear of well-poisoning has even led some outlets — including The Verge and MIT’s Technology Review — to deny their journalists access to the statistics about readers and attention, because they’re concerned that it might distort their judgement about which stories to cover or how much time to devote to them. But then how do writers know whether their work is reaching an audience?

. . . .

“If you are a slave to the numbers, then you start creating more stuff like that… and pretty soon you will have a site full of trash and salacious garbage,” the BuzzFeed CEO said in an interview with Capital New York last fall.

As Haile put it in a similar piece he wrote for Time magazine earlier this year, media companies are “getting a lot wrong about the web these days — we confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading.” As absurd as it sounds, according to some of Chartbeat’s research, whether someone shares a link to a particular story or blog post has virtually no relationship to whether they have actually read it or not.

Link to the rest at GigaOm and thanks to Matthew for the tip.

From the Goodreads blog:

Our members have been asking for a long time for a quick way to add their Amazon book purchases to their Goodreads shelves. So, we’ve come up with a new way to help: Today, we’re starting to roll out an Add Your Amazon Books feature! You can now add books you’ve purchased on Amazon – both print and Kindle books – to your Goodreads shelves. This will be available in the next few weeks to members in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.

. . . .

How do you know if you have the feature? You’ll see the Add Amazon Book Purchases link in the Tools list on the left hand side of the My Books page (and a small announcement at the top of the page). Click on either link and you’ll be asked to sign in to your Amazon account. You’ll then see your Amazon book purchases. You can go through and rate each book and select the appropriate shelf for it. We give you full control over which books to add so you can avoid adding any books bought as gifts. Any book not rated or added to a shelf will not be added to Goodreads.

Link to the rest at Goodreads blog

From The Digital Reader:

It’s widely accepted that the anonymity of the internet can turn almost anyone into a troll, and nowhere is this more true than in the comment section. This unfortunate trend has led a number of sites to respond by either removing any aspect of anonymity or taking a more extreme step of killing their comment section entirely.

The Chicago Sun-Times is the latest media organization to take the latter path; they announced over the weekend that the comments were going to be temporarily disabled.

“The world of Internet commenting offers a marvelous opportunity for discussion and the exchange of ideas,” wrote managing editor Craig M. Newman this weekend. “But as anyone who has ever ventured into a comment thread can attest, these forums too often turn into a morass of negativity, racism, hate speech and general trollish behaviors that detract from the content.”

. . . .

This paper is not the first to to try to fix online comments, nor will they be the last. Many sites have adopted comment management platforms like Disqus as a way of managing the troll problem, but that solution comes with its own problems. Other sites require that commenters create accounts, but when the bar is set that high it tends to discourage casual commenters.

. . . .

South Korea first started requiring internet commenters use their real names in 2007. The rule initially only applied to sites with more than 300,000 users, but was later tightened to sites with more than 100,000 users.

The rule was scrapped in 2011 because it was deemed largely ineffective at curbing trolls.

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader and thanks to Meryl for the tip.

PG is grateful that The Passive Voice generally avoids troll problems and appreciates the many visitors who spend the time necessary to leave intelligent and insightful comments.

From author Anne R. Allen:

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.

That’s true even in a thread where a lot of people are being snarky and you’re simply going along with the crowd. I’ve done it myself and ended up hurting good people’s feelings. Remember when you’re online, you’re “in public” and anybody can see what you’ve written.

If you’re planning to publish traditionally, the reason to follow mom’s rule is simple. Editors and agents will Google you (often before they decide to read your pages) and if they find a bunch of nasty Tweets, forum flames, and bullying blog comments, your career is going nowhere.

Why do they Google you before reading your writing sample? The same reason any prospective employer Googles you. Most people prefer to work with level-headed, rational human beings who are not prone to drunk-posting, dissing their co-workers, or dancing naked with tighty-whiteys on their heads. Just the way it is.

. . . .

The tech world was invented by young, rule-breaking types, mostly males. So an early Internet culture evolved that tended to be adversarial, snarky, and intolerant of newbies—more like posturing teenagers than adults doing business.

But the publishing world is the opposite. It’s a business that has always been powered by the gentlemanly art of the schmooze.

Making people angry may drive people to your blog, and you may hear that “troll posts” and creating controversy is a way to get traffic. But it’s probably not the kind of traffic you want, even if you self-publish.

. . . .

1) Thou shalt not spam.

I realize I’m repeating myself, and some authors will continue to post endless book spam to every social medium until the whole thing has gone the way of MySpace, but here I go again:

What is book spam?

• Repetitive links, blurbs, and quotes in your Twitter stream.
• Compulsively posting your book blurbitude in 100s of FB, GR and Google+ groups and forums.
• Putting somebody’s address on your mailing list when they haven’t subscribed.
• Posting endless, non-news, non-informational promos for yourself or other authors. A little promo is good. Nothing but promo…is nothing but annoying.

People want news and personal connections on social media, not robotic advertising.

. . . .

2) Thou shalt support other authors.

Your fellow authors are not “rivals”. Authors who band together do better than antagonistic loners. In fact the number one thing a beginner should be doing on social media is getting to know other authors in your genre and subgenre and making friends.

One of the hottest sales tools in the business right now is the multi-author bargain boxed set with several titles by different authors. These boxed sets are getting on to the bestseller lists and raising visibility for all the authors. Yes. The NYT and USA Today Bestseller lists.

Another is the joint 99c sale. I participated in a 99c sale with other chick lit authors last year and it got my boxed set on the humor bestseller list where it stayed for 8 months.

Authors who band together get their books in front of the fans of all the authors in the group. Supporting each other is fun and profitable.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog

From author Andrew Updegrove

Are you one of those bloggers that always has a nagging thought in the back of her mind that goes something like this: “I really need to do something about optimizing my site so search engines can find it”?  And are you also one that finds, when they do look into search engine optimization (SEO), that the whole process seems bewildering, laborious, and, well, dubious as well?

I’ve had a site since 2003 – you can find it here – that I launched when optimization was a far different animal.  Google’s algorithm was a lot simpler (get enough valid links in, and you’d start to rise in the rankings), and there were many billions fewer Web pages to compete with. Between that and the fact that the site focused on a narrow and fairly obscure topic, I was able to build traffic up to over a million page views a month within a year or so, and haven’t really had to give a thought to optimization ever since.

Now I’ve got this author site, and it’s a completely different story. Leaving for a later date whether you should even care, how in the world can just another genre writer expect to be found by a search engine today?

. . . .

Google’s algorithm has changed in ways that make it much more likely now to lead a user to the good, as compared to the simply optimized, stuff. That’s great news on several fronts. First, it means that most of those laborious, dubious, artificial, traditional SEO tasks, like liberally salting your site with keywords, are now a lot less likely to do you much good, so you’ve now got a great excuse to keep procrastinating. Second, it means that the playing field has become more level, with two sites of equal significance being more equally discoverable, regardless of the fact that one site owner is spending a lot of time and money on SEO and the other isn’t.

. . . .

What I take away from this is that if the success of three different book sites to maximize search visibility varies so widely, yours trulyisn’t likely to be able to do any better. So why spend my limited time trying to play SEO tricks, as compared to adding content and expanding direct connections with who are into books?

For my part, the answer is clear: I’ll stick to putting out quality content and establishing relationships. And when it comes to spending my time externally using the host of author sites that continue to spring up, I’ll continue to use Alexa as one source of data to help decide which three or four sites are most worth spending my time, effort, and sometimes small amounts of cash.

Link to the rest at Andrew Updegrove: Tales of Adversego