I've been toying around with the information posted on the Lulu Blog March 19th titled "Buy this Book!" Unless you're using Lulu to create a family photo album or perhaps a recipe book, or any other personal item, the assumption is you're trying to get your book sold.

The post lays out potential communications tools (Twitter, Facebook, WeRead) and marketing tools such as a website, press release, downloadable preview, book trailer and distribution.

The Lulu Blog, written and maintained by Lulu staff, includes tons of information about self-publishing and print on demand. I've found it very informative over the past few months giving me a window into a previously unknown world of Lulu and the self-publishing. Judging from comments in the blogs this information is not all known, as there are constantly new users surfacing on Lulu that aren't familiar with marketing or communications.

This post outlines how self-publishing writers can use communications tools such as Twitter, Facebook and WeRead to widen their potential audience and readership. E.g. Creating accounts and searching for those with common interests. Carol Housel, the blogger for this post, also points out Facebook and Twitter etiquette around frequency and number of posts to avoid alienating users.

This post also includes many links back to detailed posts on specific concepts/tools, such as Book Trailers (my previous post) and Twitter. There the detailed posts outline more information on how using these tools can help expand audiences.

All in all there is a lot of information to take in here if I look at the details, but most interesting is the notion of using what are commonly used as simple chat, general conversation type tools and forms (facebook, twitter) as commercial, marking and publicity tools.

The notion of consumers-to-consumer marketing.
I'm searching to for academic research in this area to help formulate a theoretical background.
Insights or aid anybody may have stumbled upon would be greatly appreciated.

2 comments

1. Lady Camelia on March 29, 2009 9:58 AM

   This is not an academic source but the "make it yourself", "sell it yourself" trend reports might be of interest to you:
   http://trendwatching.com/trends/pdf/2007_12_8trends2008.pdf
   
   I will still have a look to see if I can find something of interest in the academic journals in marketing.

    
2. Lorilei on March 29, 2009 1:30 PM

   Wow. 3D stuff! That is very interesting. At the very least I now have another way of searching for the trend. I think that's the hardest part of finding new things, is figuring out what people call them.
   Thanks.