Five by Five PR: Online publicity tips and tools, especially pertaining to books, authors, and the publishing industry.

Posts I’ve written this week at the FiledBy Author blog:

• How Might Google Impact The Future of Books?
  The settlement over Google Book Search is causing as much of a stir as the class action suit itself.
• BookExpo Canada Canceled
  Reed Exhibitions Canada has canceled their annual publishing industry trade show BookExpo Canada (BEC), along with the inaugural Toronto Book Fair, a consumer show scheduled for October.
• 1-Year Delay in Strict Safety Testing for Children’s Books
  The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced Friday that it will grant a one year stay of testing and certification requirements for certain products affected by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA).
• Amazon’s Kindle Rekindled
  Amazon will be hosting a media event in New York City on February 9. Despite Amazon’s secrecy so far regarding the topic of the event, speculation abounds that it will be to announce the next generation of the e-book reader.
• Self-Publishing On the Rise?
  The growing number of self-published authors means financial success for “vanity presses,” but are the authors feeling that success, too?

* Kindle vs. iPhone… Again
The e-book business is growing. In turn, business for e-book reader devices is also growing.

* Authors Create A Spectacle Online
Authors have been pumping up their web presence in recent years.

* Lev Grossman on the Future of Books
Lev Grossman had a great article in Time magazine last week about his predictions for the future of the publishing industry amidst current financial and technological changes.

* Children’s Books and the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act
A new law enacted by Congress in August 2008 has created quite a stir in the publishing industry.

* Libraries & Publishers Try New “epub” Format
The Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and 29 other libraries in the CLEVNET system are the first in the country to offer e-book downloads in industry-standard “epub” format.

Publishers Weekly announced yesterday that Sara Nelson, its editor-in-chief for the past four years, was laid off due to restructuring by the publication’s parent company, Reed Business Information (RBI). The restructuring has resulted in the layoffs of about 7 percent of the staff at various RBI publications.

Brian Kenney, editor in chief of School Library Journal (JSL), will now be editorial director of the entire publishing group, including SLJ, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

Already, the news is inspiring disappointed feedback. The New York Observer says:

[She] has come to serve as something of a den mother for an industry that, on its worst days, seems to be crumbling. Her ubiquity on panels dedicated to the future of books and her largely unflappable public optimism about the health of the business has made her one of publishing’s most visible cheerleaders.

Nelson says, “I feel like it was a great run and I am very proud of the changes that my staff and I have made. I am sorry that the magazine and I are parting ways.” Her last column, published yesterday, does not directly mention the layoff. Instead, it focuses on optimism for the future of the industry.

SOURCE: “Top Editor at Publishers Weekly Is Laid Off,” 01/26/09
SOURCE: “Editor-in-Chief of Publishers Weekly Sara Nelson Laid Off Amid Restructuring,” 01/26/09

Posts I’ve written in the past few days on the FiledBy Author blog:

* New Book Video Site Launches: YourBookTube
YourBookTube launched this month. It’s a site that allows authors to upload videos that promote their books, otherwise known as “book trailers.”

* Obama Rocks the Publishing Industry
In recent months, Barack Obama has been a boon to the publishing industry.

* Three TV Tips from the Media Coach
Media coach Susan Harrow has some great tips on Examiner.com for managing your TV exposure.

* “Instant” Book on Obama
Chicago-based Triumph Books, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, is publishing an “instant” book on President-elect Obama’s January 20 inauguration.

* Fiction Reading on the Rebound
The 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), shows that the number of adults reading fiction has risen.

Photo courtesy of foolstopzanet, used under its Creative Commons license

MinnPost has an article on changes in the publishing industry towards conserving paper resources and other green practices.

Read it at the MinnPost site.

• Twitter has acquired Summize, a tool used to search recent tweets for keywords. The URL http://www.summize.com will now redirect to http://search.twitter.com.
• I’m checking out TweetBeep. Supposedly, it’s like Google Alerts for Twitter. I stress the importance of Google Alerts to anyone who doesn’t know, so this will probably be an important resource as well.
• Larry Chase has compiled a list of 18 of the Top Twitter Tools & Resources. He’s got some on his list that haven’t made it to my Online Publicity Resources page yet. But I’ve got some listed that he doesn’t have, too. (By the way, that Resources page will be evolving pretty heavily pretty soon. I’m breaking the list of resources up into different pages for authors, artists, and musicians to make it easier for people to find tools relevant to their fields.)
• Andy Beal wrote an article about 5 Twitter Tactics for Building a Stellar Brand. The first line in his list is what I consider the Golden Rule of Twitter: “Don’t be the guy that jumps on Twitter, “follows” 10,000 people, then tweets “@” them every two minutes.” Thanks to Ivana Taylor at Strategy Stew for tweeting about this article.

Jennifer Perkins of Naughty Secretary Club is a celebrity in the indie/DIY craft scene. A member of the Austin Craft Mafia which launched dozens of chapters worldwide, Jennifer’s jewelry has been featured in numerous magazines including Bust and Seventeen. She also has her own TV show, Craft Lab, on HGTV.On top of all of that, Jennifer is a soon-to-be published author! Her book, The Naughty Secretary Club: The Working Girl’s Guide to Handmade Jewelry, hits bookstores on August 11.

In her blog this week, Jennifer evaluates some of the social networking opportunities for authors.

Jennifer’s also a good example of how the use of online video can help boost publicity for a book. She filmed a video of herself making one of the projects for her book and it’s now syndicated in various places on the web.

What is the best way to blog? Be yourself.

Marrus, an artist and acquaintance of mine, maintains a blog at LiveJournal. A friend of hers, Jeff Simmons, recently wrote about her in his own blog, Can Someone Please Explain?. In his post, Jeff credits Marrus’ achievements in integrated marketing.

One of the reasons that Marrus’ blog is such a delight to read is because it seamlessly blends the lines between her artistic profession and her life outside of work. Some days you’ll read about her pet chicken and other days you’ll hear about her fight to sell prints of her artwork in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

The strongest reason, however, that Marrus has so many cyberfans reading her blog is that it is sincere. She keeps an online journal because she wants to — not, I believe, with any marketing slant in mind.

So if you want to check out a good example of an artist’s blog, whether for inspiration or pure enjoyment, jump over to Marrus’ journal.

I’m a newbie to Twitter. I was in social networking overload (well, I still am…) and didn’t want to bother with something new. But as of last week, I’m a convert. It’s fun, and I can definitely see the potential publicity uses for business.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” tool. You communicate with your Twitter followers with 140-character or less updates — called “tweets.” You post your updates and read your followers’ either via the web or a mobile device.

There are some cool resources for Twitter that I’ve discovered in the past week, including a couple sent to me by my friend and former co-worker Loki:

• Summize - Search Twitter conversations to find people with similar interests.
• Loud Twitter - Automatically send your tweets to your regular blog.
• twitAbit - Queue up your tweets when Twitter is down — which lately seems to be quite often!
• Twitter Feed - Send your regular blog posts to Twitter.
• Twitter Fox - An interface for Twitter via an add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

What are some of your favorite resources for Twitter? What are some of your favorite uses for Twitter, either for your business or from a personal perspective?

Follow me on Twitter!

Paulo Coelho, author of The Witch of Portobello, is doing a pretty cool promotion on MySpace. Users of the site can submit videos based on his book in order to create a “mash-up” that will become a feature-length movie entitled The Experimental Witch.

It’s neat publicity for the book, as well as a chance for aspiring filmmakers and musicians to get some attention. Winners will be featured on the MySpace home page as well as in banner ads.

Read more about it at Paulo’s website.