We’re changing how we communicate the @nzpost Children’s Book Awards

Posted on April 2, 2013 by booksellersnz

My greatest hope tomorrow – when we announce the finalists in the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards – is that people will want to share that information, comment on it and publish it.

Traditionally, we’ve announced the finalists on our website, Facebook and Twitter channels and through a release to mainstream and book media – the ones you’d expect like Radio NZ, The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post and Beattie’s Book Blog amongst others. We’ll still be doing this but we’re also adding another options.

A couple of months ago I watched an evening of live-tweeting from a ballet performance. The intention was for invited attendees to share the performance online to garner interest and new audiences. It was a great idea and something that I understand is being increasingly trialed around the world in various theaters.

I find live-tweeting can be rather annoying (yeah I know we do it too) and so the following morning on my train ride I considered what the intentions of the exercise were and how we could learn from it for the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

Clearly both we and NZ Ballet want to engage social media users – to have third-party users share our content in order to promote what we’re doing without our involvement; the ultimate soft sell. We already live-tweet the awards but I realised what we really needed to do was provide access to a source of correct, raw content online – where anyone can come to the website, take what they need and use it. To get academic about it we want to ‘democratise our information’- make it available for people to use as they want and where they want.

So this year we’ve created a media page on the website, which will go live at 6am (or shortly after) tomorrow morning when we announce the finalists. My intention is that people who are active online – in whatever form that takes – and love children’s books will be able to create their own content for their readers.

Our media page will have the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards logo, cover images for all finalists book information (title, author, publisher, ISBN, RRP, reading age) and author and illustrator photos and information. Anyone that wants to use our information will be able to access it without asking us.

They can blog, tweet, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr to their heart’s content in a way that best suits their audiences/friends/readers.

Hopefully they’ll tell us about it. But if they don’t it’s no great shakes because what I truely desire is not a return on investment that I can measure, chart and report on but a wider, more engaged online audience who is talking about our best children’s books how and when they want to.

Here’s the link to our media page.

If you want to chat to me then leave a comment below or email me at info@booksellers.co.nz

by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

A cute story about Digital NZ and the image on our homepage

Posted on November 14, 2012 by booksellersnz

In my job my greatest hope is to spark people’s interest in books, reading, buying books and talking about them. Here’s a cute story about why it pays to get reading. ..

This week I decided we needed a new feature image on the homepage. I often use Digital New Zealand so did a quick search on ‘reading’ (with the modify/commercial use filters to cover all bases) and came up with the image that’s now on our homepage of a man reading in bed.

Hamish Wright from Wright’s Bookshop in Cambridge emailed me this afternoon to give me the back story on our image. Here’s what he said,

“The “Man reading in bed” that is on the Booksellers website front page is George “Putty” Marston who was on Shackleton’s trip to the South Pole in 1907. Putty was an Art Teacher and was the resident artist on the trip. He turned 26 whilst in the South Pole. They actually produced a book about the trip and Putty designed and illustrated it. It was called Aurora Australis. They produced about 100 of which there are 70 that can be accounted for today.

“They had boxes of books with them on the trip. Dickens, Shakespeare, Browning were amongst the reading material available. Not sure what he was reading [in the photo] but I am sure it was “worthy”…

“With thanks to Neville Peat’s new book Shackleton’s Whiskey where that photo is reproduced and the material came from. I read the book and loved it!”

by Emma McCleary, web editor at Booksellers NZ

Give better books for Christmas – we launch our crowd-sourced book lists

Posted on November 13, 2012 by booksellersnz

This time of year tinsel goes up, television ads take on a more frantic tone and magazines, blogs, the supermarket, everyone you know starts making lists of what to buy for Christmas.

Of course we always recommend books for Christmas and know that if you trot yourself down to your local bookshop you’ll do quite nicely getting recommendations from the smart and clever people that work there.

However, in the spirit of good reading we’ve also crowd-sourced some of our own lists using Twitter. We started a Google document, let anyone add titles and books anonymously and now have 22 grand Christmas book lists of topics far more left-of-field than ‘books for Mum’ or ‘books for gardeners’.

We’ll roll out our 22 lists from here until Christmas and here’s what’s coming up:

Thank you so much to the avid readers on Twitter who contributed to our lists. We have no idea who you are but thank you for supporting this.

by Emma McCleary, web editor for Booksellers NZ

The post where I decide to let a complete stranger run our Facebook page…

Posted on May 9, 2012 by booksellersnz

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to attend Webstock and hear Kathy Sierra speak; she talked about online users and making things that were conversation worthy.

She spoke about the most powerful online content being that which lets people talk about themselves and that what you really want is for people to keep talking – to their friends, family, whoever, after they’ve encountered your content. In other words, make it less about you and more about them.

I’ve started this approach by developing a pool of book reviewers that have their own blogs. If I can become a matchmaker between publishers and book bloggers then maybe a wider group of readers will hear about books and potentially buy from their local bookshop, thereby helping our Booksellers members.

Next week I’m going to implement the “it’s all about you” idea on our Facebook page.

It drives me crazy when people use the number of followers/fans they have on a particular platform to indicate their success and I have to work REALLY hard when I see the “we’re on 800 fans – let’s see if we can get to 1000 fans by Thursday” notices not to immediately de-friend those pages. (How to get more likes on Facebook - contains swearing).

At Booksellers NZ we have a great online group of readers/book lovers/people working in the book trade/those who just like winning free books. Many of those people are on our Facebook page and I wondered what could I do to help make our content more relevant to them?

The obvious thing that sprang to mind would be that I could let them run the page.

So next week, (starting early Monday morning and ending Thursday evening) we’re welcoming our first guest editor to Facebook. She’ll have full access rights to our organisation’s page and will post her own content and use her own voice to represent Booksellers NZ. I’ll still be there in the background (I’m not treating it as a holiday) and it should be a fun experiment in what our fans are really interested in.

You can meet our first guest editor below and let me know what you think of this plan in the comments section.

Introducing our first Facebook Guest Editor: Melanie Wittwer

I chose Melanie Wittwer as our first guest editor because she’s a long-time Facebook fan, a member of the NZ Listener Book Club and seemed to genuinely enjoy books. Until she sent me her brief bio we were complete strangers:

Melanie Wittwer is a freelance translator (English and German) working from home who has an MA in English literature from a German university. She has been involved with Storylines and is a member of the NZ IBBY committee.

Her main interest is children’s and YA literature. Although she feels she should be reading the current NZ Listener Book Club book what she’s really hankering for is the second installment of The Hunger Games.

Melanie will be our guest editor from Mon 14 May – Thurs 17 May.

by Emma McCleary, Web Editor at Booksellers NZ

Introducing our first Facebook Guest Editor: Melanie Wittwer

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