Here’s some notes I took from the Bloggers & Books talk last week:
People are vaults of entertainment (iTunes playlist, RSS, Netflix queue, current books reading) This list of entertainment for each person becomes a way of defining this identity.
My comments: So What is this identity? Yes, we can find people who are Harry Potter fans. We can find the action movie fans. I would like to see this somehow cross-pollinated with Myers-Briggs personality character types.
This list of entertainment/interests defining people is just like a livejournal user page where a user can list 150 of their interests. It’s just so surprising that nobody has developed a tool that can identify which users have the most common interests with another user. For example, my livejournal user page has 149 interests. I would like to find the people out there that have 15 or more of those interests in common with me.
Virtual Book tour. One author of a book (or blog) goes to like 15 different blogs and does a guest post. (not a comments, but an actual post). This would not be recycled content from his/her blog or book, but posts that are fitting to each particular website.
My comments: This is an interesting idea to get some varying content on people’s blogs. And an excellent way to promote another person’s blog or book.
There should be a place for fans of a particular author to go and express their interest in this author. If you are the biggest fan of XYZauthor, then you should be ale to do something aout it. Not just site and twiddle your thumbs. There should be one centralized place to be notified of when an author is coming to town.
My comments: Oh yeah, this is centralized event notification would work greatly for the idea of one common calendar standard.
Getting a book deal. One of the bloggers mentioned that how a publisher may have said to her “not another book on weight loss!”, BUT with her blog she already had an audience of followers. This made it a lot easier for the publisher to decide to publish her book.
My comments: And not just any audience, this would probably be an following of people who are bloggers. For anyone wanting to do viral marketing, bloggers are an incredible resource as MarketingSherpa.com says in their article: How to Get on the Wall Street Journal’s Best Seller List via Online-Only Marketing & Distribution.
Here’s the official info from gapersblock on the event: Gapers Block proudly sponsors the Authors’ Roundtable: On Audience, Blogs & the Changing Literary Landscape at Sulzer Library, 4455 N. Lincoln Ave. from 7pm to 9pm. Authors Kevin Guilfoile, Wendy McClure, Erin Shea, Kevin Smokler and Claire Zulkey will discuss issues of audience, the changing literary landscape and the phenomenon of weblogs becoming books, and take questions from the audience. GB editor Andrew Huff moderates. This conversation should raise some interesting questions about authorship and readership in the digital age, and perhaps offer some insight into where popular literature may be heading, Huff said.
Here’s a list of blogs that wrote about the roundtable: My Sore (wished they talked more specifically about how to get a book deal). Loosetooth (awesome graphic interpretation of the talk) Fiftyfivehundred (argues that books aren’t challenging enough). Kittyjoyce (debates how technology can skew our views). Chicagoist (trends of bloggers getting books and links to flickr photos of the event).