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Last week I said if someone invented another social media site my head might explode.
Well…KA-BLOOIE!!!!
Yes, we bibliophiles have a new social domain: 
!
Named after the sound book pages make when thumbed, Riffle has been dubbed “the Pinterest of book discovery” by Publisher’s Weekly. Could it potentially change the way we learn about great new reads? Absolutely! Could your head also detonate? Let’s put it this way—if you ever wanted to sport a mushroom cloud, you’re in luck.
The Publisher’s Weekly article didn’t reveal much, featuring jargon-heavy quotes by Riffle founder Neil Baptista, like this beaut: “We’re going to focus on bringing the audience to the table and curating the information. There’s a ton of online expertise, and we want people to push their content through Riffle.”
So what the heck does this all mean? How will Riffle work?
Well, yours truly worked in high-tech market research for a decade (from 1993 to 2003), so I called upon one of my smartest digerati buddies to give it to us straight.
Chris Rechtsteiner is the founder and chief strategist of blueloop concepts, a boutique research and advisory firm focused on the mobile and digital media market. Chris has worked on many publishing projects, so he’s very knowledgeable about the intersection of books and digital applications.
Here’s what Riffle may be:
- The idea is to build a truly Facebook-connected social reading group/platform. How this isn’t GoodReads is a mystery, but apparently the need to build a GoodReads 2.0 is there.
- The company behind Riffle, Odyl, already has templated/socially-integrated foundations for bringing content about books to consumers, so they have a fast and easy starting point.
- The core objective is to really bring forward the content being created/discussed about a book (that’s what the curation reference hits). When Tweets, Facebook posts, blog posts, etc. are posted about a title, they’ll all be “magically” brought together to give you a complete look at the “conversation” and “group” around a book. (Again, GoodReads, but with MORE noise.)
- Odyl isn’t a novice at this stuff as they’ve been able to do a really good job of building publisher relationships, so they’ll have the “blessing” of the publishers to do this right out of the gate. (Translation: they’ll have books featured with deep, rich content day one and it will grow from there.)
And here’s how they may do it:
- Supposedly the “curated” information (e.g. people scanning blogs, reviews, Twitter, etc.) is going to be done by experts, so there won’t be “noise” (per se) but only the best information on a particular title.
- This means you’re going to have to have HUNDREDS of “experts” there to sift through everything in order to have any volume of books at all… which means scale is a serious issue because the books that get the Riffle treatment will be “selected” … and likely tied to the publisher relationships (read: publisher financed through marketing budgets/author marketing dollars). While that last part might not be true, it wouldn’t be surprising, as no one has yet deeply tapped the publishers’ book marketing dollars online like the brick-and-mortar booksellers and traditional media have.
(I applied for more information on Odyl, and I was asked, as an author, how much money I planned to spend on book marketing this year, so Rechtsteiner’s ideas sound spot on.)
If you had to bet your money, right now, on what Riffle ultimately does or becomes, you’re going to see a GoodReads that is a series of lists or collections of books that have a narrative by an expert. This is how the expert would really play. The question is how many people they employ (or allow?) to be experts as to how rapidly these narratives and book lists are created. And who will these “experts” be? How will they be vetted? Will they be Riffle employees, contractors (like About.com guides), or volunteers (like Wikipedia writers/editors)? All this remains to be seen.
So is anyone on Riffle now? Yes. What did we hear about it? “Pinterest for books sounds really interesting, until you realize that people don’t repin books on Pinterest today.” (True dat. The most repins I get are for recipes, home decor and fashion. Did I just say true dat?!)
So…only time will tell. But as Chris Rechtsteiner told me, Riffle is needed and welcomed. “While there are no shortage of book discovery tools and platforms coming to market today (Riffle, Jellybooks, etc.), it’s hard to argue with anyone’s efforts to make reading more prominent. I have some doubts regarding how social book reading really is (in the web’s definition of social), but one thing will remain constant and true for a while: there are simply too many titles to choose from and finding the next, best one to read [online] will remain a challenge for a long time.”
If you’d like a Riffle invitation, this link is your ticket.
Many thanks to Andy J. Smith, illustrator extraordinaire, and Chris Rechsteiner of blueloop concepts for helping me pull this blog post together while I tried to stuff gray matter back into my skull.
*Photo Credit: WENN.com
“Tara Lazar’s LITTLE RED GLIDING HOOD, with an icy twist on the familiar fairy tale, where Little Red is desperately searching for a partner in the upcoming pairs skating competition, to Heidi Kilgras at Random House Children’s, by Ammi-Joan Paquette at Erin Murphy Literary Agency (World).”
Thanks for making my announcement, Ryan. *blush*
It couldn’t have come on a better day!
This was a deal that required a lot of perseverance. It proved to me that writers should never give up on a story.
And I must say that I am thrilled beyond all beyond (is that even an idiom?) to be working with Heidi Kilgras, who has edited titles of industry legends such as Jane Yolen. WOWZA.
From the very beginning, Heidi had a particular illustrator in mind for this project. I hope to share that news with you soon because it’s pretty darn awesome!
Congratulations to all the writers and illustrators featured in PM today! In picture book news, Marilyn Sadler sold ALICE FROM DALLAS to Abrams Children’s and Susan Reagan sold PINGO AND PUFF to Hyperion Children’s.
And now, it’s time to PAR-TAY!
Photo Credit: Martha Payne
Thanks to new fan and friend John Evans, I just learned about NeverSeconds, a blog written by a nine-year-old Scottish schoolgirl named Martha Payne (a.k.a. “VEG”) who was tired of her awful school dinners. So Martha decided to photograph her meals, rate them (she counts the number of hairs included at no extra cost), and share them with the world.
A clever kid! But this story gets even better.
Once VEG’s school council got word of the blog, they banned her from taking photographs of her meals. But Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef who has been campaigning for healthier school meals worldwide, launched a social media support crusade via Twitter. After millions of blog hits and public outcry, Roddy McCuish, the leader of the Argyll and Bute Council in West Scotland, lifted the blog ban. McCuish claimed preventing the photos from being posted was a form of censorship. So VEG is online once again.
Not only is she still posting her meals, she’s receiving photos from children and educators around the world. Plus, Martha is raising money for Mary’s Meals, headquartered in Scotland and right here in New Jersey! This non-profit organization’s mission is to feed children in the most impoverished nations.
I have a passion for healthy eating, so I just had to blog about this young girl’s chutzpah! I hope you’ll support her over at NeverSeconds and maybe submit your own school lunch! If she posts your picture, VEG will even tell you how long she took to find your location on the globe. It’s a good food and geography lesson all at once!
So…just for fun…I wrote a song parody for Martha/VEG. Sung to the tune of Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”, this is “School Gives LUNCH a Bad Name”. Enjoy and mangia!
School Gives Lunch a Bad Name
Your meal’s a la carte
But it’s still lame.
Martha,
School gives lunch a bad name. (Bad name.)
A “balanced” meal is what they sell
They promise you chicken but give you dry spelt.
A plain white tray with no mashies,
And globs of brown stuff that stink like bad cheese.
Oh, it’s a load of yuck!
Oh, they told you don’t blog
But Jamie told Twitter,
“You’re righteous, photog!”
Your meal’s a la carte
But it’s still lame.
Martha,
School gives lunch a bad name. (Bad name.)
We read your grade; it’s a four you claim.
Martha,
School gives lunch a bad name. (Bad name.)
School gives lunch, oh!
Bring the fork to your lips,
Pull out hair with your fingertips.
Your school cooks bad, we don’t know why.
It’s not too hard to make fresh veggie stir-fry.
Oh, it’s a load of yuck!
Oh, they told you don’t blog
But Jamie told Twitter,
“You’re righteous, photog!”
Your meal’s a la carte
But it’s still lame.
Martha,
School gives lunch a bad name. (Bad name.)
We read your grade; it’s a four you claim.
Martha,
School gives lunch a bad name. (Bad name.)
School gives lunch, oh!
I just got back from a FABULOUS 1st grade school visit! I was so excited about it that I immediately had to vlog.
While this isn’t my first vlog (that was for EMU’s Debuts), it is the debut vlog for this blog.
If you want to start doing school visits as a pre-published author, I explain the way to go about it. I think. *Warning: DO NOT APPEAR AS CRAZY AS I DO IN THIS VIDEO.*
Apologies for the ethereal lighting. I was sitting in my breakfast nook with the blinds opened. But I rather prefer the Cybill Shepherd “Moonlighting” look, don’t you, dahlings? (What, you don’t know what that means? Oh, you young whipper-snapper, go Google it.)
More apologies for the mirror writing. If I knew how to flip a video, I would. Anyone know? Help?!
And hey, wanna know more about my school visits? I’m going old-school with a CLICK HERE. (Really. Click there.)
And please remember to leave me a comment about what we should name “vlogs” instead of “vvlawwwgz”. It’s an ugly word for an exciting medium.
The title of this blog post is a misnomer because no one has a crystal iPhone to see into the future. All I can report upon is what I heard at the NJ-SCBWI conference this past weekend. But I can say with certainty there is good news, not portents of doomsday.
In fact, according to Steven Meltzer, Associate Publisher/ Executive Managing Editor at Penguin Group USA, with every new technology, from the gramophone to the radio to the TV, came a prediction of the book’s demise. But the book continued to thrive and grow despite innovative forms of electronic entertainment. And today, Americans purchase 8 million physical books daily. In the 4th quarter of 2011, Amazon’s sales of physical books rose by double digits. It surprised them, too. But you cannot give an ebook as a holiday gift. Well, you can, but there’s nothing to wrap—and more importantly—unwrap. So physical books won out in the season of giving. Plus e-book sales remain a relatively small percentage of book purchases: 26% of adult fiction and 11% of children’s books.
Moreover, 74% of today’s readers have never even read an e-book, and 14% of those who own an e-reader have never read a book on it. The digital book market, despite what seems to be the e-reader’s ubiquity, is in a nascent stage.
Stacey Williams-Ng, author of the digital book ASTROJAMMIES and founder of Little Bahalia, a book app developer, also demonstrated how poorly imagined some digital books currently are. A swipe of the finger on an iPad screen blew the wind in one book, but the same motion also turned the page. This meant a child playing with the app could be easily frustrated with the next page when they really wanted to manipulate a tornado.
Also problematic, the vertical orientation of most e-readers creates double the page turns of traditional picture books, throwing off the timing of a story. Creating digital horizontal spreads is preferred, but then you’re also dealing with a much smaller version of the original. Sometimes the solution is to make digital books (that do not have a hardcopy counterpart) shorter than the traditional 32-page picture book.
But Williams-Ng learned the hard way it’s difficult to do traditional promotion with a digital book. She has a great relationship with her local bookseller, but when it came time to do an ASTROJAMMIES appearance, she realized she had no physical book for the store to sell. Moreover, there was nothing to sign. Williams-Ng warned, “You need a hardcopy book to sell the digital book.” She self-published the hardcopy version of her digital creation so she didn’t have to wait years to find a traditional publisher.
Right now there are three main forms of e-books: e-pubs, which are similar to PDF files and have re-flowing text (which means you can change text format and size); enhanced e-books, which are e-pub with embedded features like audio and video; and book apps, which can be anything that can be programmed, from a movie to a game and beyond. “The sky’s the limit with book apps,” said Williams-Ng.
However, the Big 6 are picking and choosing which picture books to digitize; one publisher is no longer making e-pubs of their entire list because most e-books do not sell. The ones that are popular now are the classics like Dr. Seuss—books everyone knows. A new picture book has to lend itself to interactivity for a publisher to consider the book app investment, which can run approximately $25,000, according to Williams-Ng. So if you, as an author, WANT to have a digital book, you should think about interactivity at the very start of your creative process.
Digital publishing is about five years behind the music business in terms of figuring out new distribution and pricing models. In 2011, digital music sales surpassed physical music sales for the first time. Album sales were up for the first time since 2004. The industry is adapting. Publishing will adapt as well.
Steven Meltzer believes picture book sales will escalate because parents will buy a hardcopy book for the home, and if their child enjoys it, they’ll purchase the digital version for their mobile device. “Bundling is coming, too,” he said, referring to the practice of selling a hardcopy and digital book together at a discounted price. “It’s good news for picture book authors.” (Insert Snoopy dance.)
So what’s next for digital books? The future could be digital readers with foldable layers, multi-screened with high definition graphics. The future might even be Xenotext: “encoding textual information into genetic nucleotides, thereby creating ‘messages’ made from DNA—messages that we can then implant, like genes, inside cells, where such messages persist, undamaged and unaltered, through myriad cycles of mitosis, all the while preserved for later recovery and decoding.”
“Remember M.T. Anderson’s FEED?” Meltzer asked. “Wouldn’t it be ironic to be fed FEED?”
No matter what the future holds, “people are still writing and reading…ain’t nothing ever going to change that.”
Thanks, Mr. Meltzer, I needed that reassurance.
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The brainchild of literary agent Kelly Sonnack, Save the Bookstores Day is a way to show our favorite brick & mortar stores that they still matter. That we support them. That we love them! That we CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT THEM!
I spoke with Kelly and three of her clients about this special day and how they plan to celebrate.
TL: Kelly, how did this holiday come to be?
KS: The Save the Bookstores event started one morning when, after reading about the obituaries of several indie bookstores in my publishing industry news, I got on Twitter and said that I was sick of hearing of these great stores closing and that there must be something I/we could do about it. I was met with immediate support when I suggested we pick a day and all go buy books together, across the nation, and the event was born from there.
Last year, we had a great response. The beauty of the event is that everyone can take the event and promote it as they see fit. Last year some book lovers took it upon themselves to print flyers and distribute them outside their favorite bookstore, in anticipation of the day. Others have blogged and emailed, Tweeted and Facebook’d. It’s been a unifying book lovers event so far and has reached to Asia and the UK (and probably more places I don’t even know about!)—it’s a simple way to support the books we love and the stores that sell them.
TL: What is your favorite childhood memory about books?
KS: One of my favorite childhood memories about books is the small library at the church we went to when I was a kid. It was nestled under a creaky staircase and chock-full of fabulous picture books. We were allowed to check out a book each, each week. But the choosing was the hardest part! I probably read 10 books before I picked which one I could take home with me.
TL: What is your hope for this new holiday? What is your ultimate goal?
KS: My ultimate goal is to save bookstores! I want to stop seeing postings of bookstores that haven’t been able to get high enough revenue to keep their doors open. It would be tragic to lose our brick and mortar stores; I want to remind people that their patronage really does make a difference. That we can keep stores in business by supporting them.
TL: And finally, what books will you be buying? What books do you recommend?
KS: The event is actually on my due date, so there’s a chance I’ll be phoning in my order to my favorite local bookstore instead of being able to browse the shelves for surprises and discoveries (hands down the best part about brick and mortar stores). If I get to browse, I’ll likely be browsing the board book section to see if there’s something I haven’t gotten for Baby Girl. But (aside from Bridget and James’ fabulous books, and Sharon’s which can be preordered), I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of Jennifer Bosworth’s STRUCK, Michelle Hodkin’s THE EVOLUTION OF MARA DYER, Tom Angleberger’s FAKE MUSTACHE and I want to get a copy of HOW TO BABYSIT A GRANDPA by Jean Reagan for my dad, who will soon be a new grandpa! As far as what I’d recommend to others, anyone who hasn’t gotten a copy of Anna Sheehan’s debut YA novel, A LONG, LONG SLEEP will be wisely spending their money on it. And Carolyn Marsden’s THE WHITE ZONE is a powerful read for anyone interested in the conflict in Afghanistan from a middle-grade perspective. For any new parents or friends of new parents, Heather Leigh’s HEY, LITTLE BABY is sure to become a family favorite. You can’t help but getting a little choked up by that one.
Thanks, Kelly! Three of your clients—Sharon, Bridget and James—want to weigh in, too. I asked them why bookstores are important to them. (Besides the obvious reason of selling their titles!)
Sharon Cameron
My mother took me to the library like she took me to church—regularly, once a week, no excuses. The library was our haunt. But she could never understand why I would check out the same book over and over again, signing my name on the little card slipped into the slot attached to the back cover (remember when we did that?). My signature would be beneath my own signature, which was beneath my own again, and maybe four more times above that. My mother would look at the card containing mostly my name and say, “Okay. We’ll buy it.”
There was nothing more special. The library was a reading free-for-all, but going to the bookstore was all about picking out a treasure. I got to take my time, pick the book up, feel its weight, know if the cover was bumpy or slick, see the size of the type, hear how much noise a page made when it turned. And then that book was not just a borrowed thing to be returned, but mine, a friend for life. My copy of Johnny Tremain stayed with me for dozens of readings until its unfortunate death from a broken (overused!) spine. My paperback of Pride and Prejudice has worn to bend in any direction, fitting perfectly into my left hand.
That is why children—why all of us—need bookstores, and why I will be celebrating Save the Bookstores Day at Parnassus Books (Nashville, TN). An image on a sales screen is only an image. It cannot show us what is so easily experienced when we hold a book: the heft and feel of an author’s imagination.
Sharon Cameron is the author of THE DARK UNWINDING, coming September 2012 from Scholastic Press. Visit her website at SharonCameronBooks.com.
Bridget Heos
I have a quote hanging over my desk by Anton Ego from Ratatouille: “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends.”
Bookstores are some of the first friends a book has, and that’s one reason I’m excited for my first bookstore book, MUSTACHE BABY, to come out next Spring. The neat thing is that readers want to befriend the new, too, and bookstores help us to do that. Bookstore workers have gotten my sons through many “I’ll never read again” moments that happen when you finish a series you love. They introduced us to Origami Yoda, Max (Bob Graham), The Dinosaurs of Waterhouse Hawkins, and so many books that, in a way, are part of our family.
I’m going to the Reading Reptile and the Plaza Barnes & Noble here in Kansas City, not as an appearance, but just to buy books.
Bridget Heos is the author of the non-fiction picture book series WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING (LARVAE, JOEYS, and other animals). She also writes YA non-fiction. Follow all her insects and antics at AuthorBridgetHeos.com.
James Burks
I think there’s something magical about walking into a bookstore and discovering a new book. A book that I’ve never seen or heard of before but I see the cover and it intrigues me. I pick it up, I look inside and I know that I have to own this book.
If I didn’t have a bookstore to go to I’d probably just be wondering the streets, lost, searching for that magical connection.
James Burks is the author of GABBY AND GATOR, BEEP AND BAH, and the upcoming BIRD AND SQUIRREL graphic novel. He is the illustrator of Tara Lazar’s THE MONSTORE, too! Check out this character and all his characters at JamesBurks.com.
If you want to help SAVE BOOKSTORES, please join the Facebook Group! Tell us where you’ll be shopping on June 16th and what you’ll be buying!
And please SPREAD THE WORD! Share the adorable poster on your social networks, blog about it, tell your teachers, organize a caravan to your local indie! Do your part to keep bookstores in business and bringing us great reads!
Thank you Kelly, Sharon, Bridget & James!
Writing for Kids (While Raising Them) 