The power of twitter (and social networking / online presence in general) to shift books has been forcefully demonstrated by the almost impromptu launch of the #wossybookclub.

Jonathan Ross, the tv celebrity who tweets using @wossy and has over 250,000 followers, decided last week to set up a book club on twitter. Browse over to his twitter profile and go back to March 15th and you’ll see the idea in evolution, up until the point when two days ago he decided that the first book to be discussed would be Jon Ronson’s excellent The Men Who Stare at Goats. No sooner said than done, and Ronson’s book stared flying off the virtual and physical shelves. Ronson’s book shot up the amazon sales rank charts to #292 – an impressive feat given that the book was published a number of years ago (for example, his other best-selling book Them has an amazon sales rank of #4750 ).

It’s early days, and I’d be inclined to hold out until the third book proposed for the bookclub comes up – Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass a classic of American poetry much beloved by academics. If the #wossybookclub can turn that into a bestseller and trending topic its reputation will be cast-iron.

The initial success, though, does show up some important lessons – particularly for writers. It shows that just as tv book clubs like Oprah or Richard and Judy bucked the prevailing wisdom – that tv wasn’t a medium for book lovers – there’s plenty of hunger online to discuss books, and to find great new titles.

It shows that building up a community (Ross has over 6,500 updates, including a tireless live-tweet of the Eurovision song-contest) where members feel involved can have real paybacks. It also a great example of the changing paradigm. Ross puts a lot of effort into his twitter account, and this effective use of it goes to benefit not himself directly, but a cheery and well-deserving author who has a more modest 3,000 followers at the time of writing.

The interesting thing about the wossybookclub is how improvised and out-of-control (not necessarily a bad thing) it is. For example, there is a site http://www.wossybookclub.com, but it’s not official and just brings together the tweets at #wossybookclub. Given that anyone can post to #wossybookclub, it will be interesting to see how spammy it gets – browsing through it right now most comments are legit, but a couple of clued in authors have already started posting in their own titles.

Tags: #amazonfail, #wossybookclub, clever use of social networking, pr on social networks, writers using the web well

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 9:43 am and is filed under general thoughts, promoting writers online, social networks, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.