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

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.

As reported by Mashable, Microsoft is getting rid of its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. The company will be “reaching out to participating publishers and libraries. We are encouraging libraries to build on the platform we developed with Kirtas, the Internet Archive, CCS, and others to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.”

Google Book Search will press on, however. Microsoft’s departure from the field leaves Google as one of the sole major players in the task of digitizing published material.

You remember James Frey, right? The guy who wrote a “memoir” about his drug addiction? And sold five million copies? And was praised and lauded by Oprah? Of course, Winfrey — and others — took it all back when it was discovered that Frey faked a lot of the details in A Million Little Pieces.

His then-publisher, Random House, offered to buy back books from any reader who felt cheated. Less than 2000 copies were returned.

Frey has returned to the literary scene, and with a work that is admittedly fiction. And two weeks after the launch of Bright Shiny Morning, the title is already on The New York Times bestseller list.

The story of Frey’s climb back to the top is fascinating. You can read more about it at The Independent.

Elizabeth Day of The Guardian recently did a great interview with Christina Crawford, author of Mommie Dearest and adopted daughter of Joan Crawford. It’s Christina’s first interview in over a decade.

Mommie Dearest, published in 1978, was the first real tell-all celebrity memoir and was on New York Times bestseller list for 42 weeks. For the book’s 30 year anniversary, Christina is reissuing the book with a new introduction and a new afterword, as well as 100 pages and photos cut from the original edition.

Since her child abuse claims have been oft disputed throughout the years — even by her two sisters — the new version also has supporting commentary from people who knew the family.

You can read the full interview at The Guardian’s website.

News from the publishing industry from the last week (or so):

1. “Little Orphan Artworks” - The New York Times - 5/20/08
An op-ed piece from Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig about the possible reform in Congress of the copyright law regarding orphan works.

2. The 2008 National Indie Excellence Awards have been announced.

3. Published authors can upload and format their published books into Kindle format at Amazon.com.

4. “B&N Mulls a Borders Buy” - Business Week - 5/21/08
Barnes and Noble considering taking over Borders bookstores.

5. “Who killed the literary critic?” - Salon.com - 5/22/08
“Has the role of the professional critic become obsolete in an age of book clubs, celebrity endorsements and blogs?”

6. Publishers Weekly is cutting pay to its book reviewers, effective June 15. You can read more at my friend Kevin Allman’s blog.

7. “Lessing: Nobel win a ‘disaster’” - BBC News - 5/11/08
Doris Lessing gives her views on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Photo by GiniMiniGi