Which is more likely to make you buy a book: a glowing writeup from a published book reviewer, or a bunch of four- and five-star Amazon ratings? Adam L. Penenberg, whose book Viral Loop explores social media and crowdsourcing, thinks with some empirical justification that it’s the latter. In a Fast Company column, he charts the declining influence of professional book reviewers, a shrinking group who are often agenda-driven. Exhibit A: the New York Times reviewer who dissed his first book.

From Penenberg’s column:

In my case, business reporter Alison Leigh Cowan of The New York Times wrote an over-the-top, scathing review of Spooked, in which she not only attacked the book, she questioned my ethics, because I refused to cooperate with the Justice Department, which was threatening to subpoena me so I would out a confidential source at a grand jury hearing and potential trial. I quit Forbes where I was a senior editor because the magazine’s lawyer was pressuring me to work out a deal with prosecutors. Who was the source? He–along with his minions–had hacked nytimes.com, replacing Times content with their own, which was largely obscene and highly critical of tech reporter John Markoff. (History buffs can read up on the incident here , here, here, and here.)

Not only did Cowan have a conflict of interest because The New York Times–and one of its best-known reporters–had been attacked by the person whose identity I was protecting, she was friends with a top Forbes editor who never forgave me for taking my battle with the magazine public. According to those who witnessed it, the editor danced in the hallway the day the review came out.

Penenberg doesn’t dispute the fact that online reviews are biased too, but he holds out hope that the sheer number of reviews gives the biases room to cancel each other out. Positively biased reviews by family and friends are tempered by negatively biased reviews by enemies and trolls, and with a healthy stock of unbiased reviews floating around as well, equilibrium will hit somewhere in the middle. He does mention, quoting a study by Yale economics professor Judith Chevalier, that “while positive reviews increase a book’s sales and negative reviews dampen them, ‘the impact of 1-star reviews is greater than the impact of 5-star reviews.’”

His pithy conclusion? “Cowan wasn’t reviewing the book. She was settling a score. And so do many of those littering book pages on Amazon with 1-star reviews. The difference is that these Amazon evildoers really do dampen book sales. Cowan’s ax job probably didn’t.”

The witty, light tone of Penenberg’s piece doesn’t take away from the weight of the shift he’s documenting. Book reviewers are an especially vulnerable flank of the media establishment, but all cultural critics are subject to the same logic. In the age of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, what individual film or music critics matter? Why bother with the incomplete catalogue and glacial pace of printed restaurant reviews when there’s Yelp?

The sanest answer to this line of questioning may be that for the new critics, voice, tastes, and style matter much more than definitiveness of opinion, which can always be crowdsourced away. Which means that as those jobs continue to vanish from newspaper and magazine payrolls, the survivors, ironically, will come to resemble the opinionated bloggers they used to pooh-pooh.

Senor and Singer point out that, despite Israel’s modest population of 7.1 million on an embattled slice of land in the Middle East, they’ve got more start-ups than far larger, more stable countries like Canada, Japan, India, Korea and the U.K. The authors calculate that as 3,850 Israeli start-ups at the time of the book’s close for publication — one for every 1,844 Israelis; they also note that there are six more Israeli companies on the NASDAQ than from all of Europe combined.

Something about coming from an embattled sliver of a country—home to just one one-thousandth of the world’s population—makes Israelis skeptical of conventional explanations about what is possible.

Senor and Singer use VC money — the mother’s milk of start-ups — as another metric for their assessment:

In 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the United States, more than 30 times greater than in Europe, 80 times greater than in China, and 350 times greater than in India. Comparing absolute numbers, Israel—a country of just 7.1 million people—attracted close to $2 billion in venture capital, as much as flowed to the United Kingdom’s 61 million citizens or to the 145 million people living in Germany and France combined.

They also point out that the Israeli economy keeps on growing, despite the ongoing conflict and frequent violence in the region. They write:

During the six years following 2000, Israel was hit not just by the bursting of the global tech bubble but by the most intense period of terrorist attacks in its history and by the second Lebanon war. Yet Israel’s share of the global venture capital market did not drop—it doubled, from 15 percent to 31 percent. And the Tel Aviv stock exchange was higher on the last day of the Lebanon war than on the first, as it was after the three-week military -operation in the Gaza Strip in 2009.

So what gives? A young entrepreneur, now on his second or third successful company, put it this way the other day in Tel Aviv: “The best thing Israel can export is our minds — we don’t have natural resources to export, so we invest in education and innovation. This is the best natural resource we have in Israel.” (By the way, this guy sold his first company when he was 16.) It’s not just founders, either — Israel is chock-a-block full of the IT technicians and engineers and experts that keep a company on the cutting edge. An eBay exec tells the author: ““Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, eBay . . . the list goes on. The best-kept secret is that we all live and die by the work of our Israeli teams.” For companies planted firmly in Silicon Valley soil, those faraway roots in the desert are even more amazing.

Does this mean you have to learn how to dodge Katyusha rockets and subsist on falafel to launch a successful start-up? Of course not, though falafel is delicious. Senor and Singer trace the stories of several Israeli companies, entrepreneurs and decision-makers, and come up with a few takeaways that can apply across the board (hint: a little chutzpah helps). On the next few pages, Mediaite has an exclusive excerpt from Start-Up Nation which shows a little of the Israeli start-up mentality in action.

>>>EXCERPT: Start-Up Nation (or, how to raise $200 million, and why hybird cars are like mermaids)

First-time author Kevin Connolly clearly gets that. And he’s put together a little promo video for his upcoming book, Double Take, that is sure to get attention.

I didn’t know anything about the book when I started watching the video. Initially I thought, “Good-looking guy, smart to put him on video” — because let’s face it, a nice-looking pitchman (or women) always helps. I had no idea how much Kevin’s looks would come into it.

It was at the point where he mentioned having no legs that I had my first double-take. What? He said it again. Then I double-taked back to the book’s description:

Kevin Michael Connolly is a twenty-three-year-old who has seen the world in a way most of us never will. Whether swarmed by Japanese tourists at Epcot Center as a child or holding court at the X Games on his mono-ski as a teenager, Kevin has been an object of curiosity since the day he was born without legs.

Growing up in rural Montana, he was raised like any other kid (except, that is, for his father’s MacGyver-like contraptions such as the “butt boot”). As a college student, Kevin traveled to seventeen countries on his skateboard and, in an attempt to capture the stares of others, he took more than 30,000 photographs of people staring at him. In this dazzling memoir, Connolly casts the lens inward to explore how we view ourselves and what it is to truly see another person.

The video shows Kevin first behind a desk, and then in a variety of other locations, doing regular stuff, except doing it without legs. Kevin has an advantage over the unsuspecting viewer: He’s not shocked by any of this. He does, however, damn well know you will be (see above re: those 30,000 photos). This video is mesmerizing, and when you get past the shock of this athletic, jovial kid having no legs, it’s also pretty funny. It is, however, one thing even more important than that: It’s effective. I want to buy this book. Hell, I want to buy two of them, and give the other one as a gift (possibly to a person who complains a lot). This is perhaps one of the most effective viral book videos ever made, because it does the one essential thing that a book is simply not built to do: Show, not tell. Wow, does it ever.

Video below; more information — including link to purchase for when you’re feeling sorry for yourself — here.

Find more great book coverage at our brand-new Mediaite Book Club!

In what I consider a rather satisfying bit of parallelism, an essay adapted from that book appears today in the Wall Street Journal on the same day that Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is the paper’s lead story. Rubens was a pragmatic, moderate man whose success as a diplomat was predicated on a combination of the high esteem in which he was held internationally and by his own great intelligence. Whatever one thinks about the timing of the Nobel, or of Obama generally, it’s hard to deny he shares these characteristics with Rubens.

But I’d like to think the artist can serve as a fine model for the president, or any diplomat practicing today. He was a serious and dedicated public servant, a master of what we now call “realpolitiks.” His world, like ours, was faced with intractable conflicts, and he was tireless in his efforts to resolve them. The Low Countries, then, was a land divided by sectarian violence, and his own Flemish homeland was ruled by a grossly negligent foreign occupier. (In the 16th century, Antwerp was almost a proto-Baghdad, with a full-scale Green Zone avant le lettre.)

Rubens was no revolutionary. He worked within the power structures of his day to shift policy and push ideologically opposed leaders toward reconciliation. There was never a more savvy negotiator, whether he was bargaining for European peace or setting the price on one of his very expensive canvasses. He was a peaceful man but believed in the use of military force, even its pre-emptive use, but in drastic situations only. Rubens had more than one contemporary who considered him as fine a statesman as he was an artist, and that was saying something, because in that field he was, indisputably, the tops.

“I should like the whole world to be in peace, that we might live in a golden age instead of an age of iron,” he wrote, and those words seem as applicable today as they did then.

Related:
Peter Paul Rubens, Diplomat [WSJ]

Mark Lamster is the author of Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) and writes on the arts and culture for many newspapers and magazines. He lives in Brooklyn.

Women’s roles had become a hot topic again thanks mostly to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run, and later Sarah Palin’s vice presidential one. Collin’s enormously entertaining survey of women’s lives over the past 400 years of American life seemed to strangely fit into to what was going on on the national political and cultural stage last year; a sort of primer to how we got from there to here. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

With her usual, often revealing wit, Collins has created a hard-to-put-down read that will leave you with not only a deep, and sometimes jarring, appreciation of the often terrible struggles women faced for most of this country’s history but also enormously grateful you were born late enough to miss most of it. Needless to say, just like her NYT op-ed columns, it’s also great fun.

Cut to a year later and Gail Collins has followed up with the soon-to-be published When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey Of American Women From 1960 To The Present, an advanced copy of which landed on my desk last week.

This volume begins in 1960, where the last left off and also the year Collins taps as the moment when everything changed. Or began to anyway, since it’s painfully clear from the outset that not much had changed. Says Collins:

In 1960, where our story begins, although computers were still pretty much the stuff of science fiction, almost all other things that make modern life modern — jet travel, television, nuclear terror — had arrived. But when it came to women, the age-old convictions were still intact. Everything from America’s legal system to its television programs reinforced the perception that women were, in almost every way, the weaker sex.

It is this point exactly that Collins spends the first hundred pages or so (which is as far in as I have gotten) illustrating. The scenarios she describes will be slightly less shocking to regular viewers of the television show Mad Men. In fact, the opening chapters of the book often feels like a companion reading piece to the show. In particular the lives of Betty Draper and Peggy Olson.

One of the genius aspects to both this book, as well as 400 Years, is that they are very quotable! It’s like a 400 page book of really well-written 500 word blog posts that you will want to copy and paste and send to people. Which is exactly what I intend to turn this reading experience in to over the next week or so…a series of quotable blog posts. Here’s a taste of what you can expect.

By 1960 television was big business, and if women were around at all, they were in the kitchen, where they decorously stirred a single pot on the stove while their husbands and children dominated the action. (In 1960 the nominees for the Emmy for best comedy series were The Bob Cummings Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Phil Silvers Show, and Father Knows Best.)

Do you have a question, comment or complaint about anything concerning Mediaite? Well if you do, today is a real chance to make your voice heard. We will be holding our Mediaite Office Hours at 3pmET.

Vaynerchuk, the host of the hugely popular wine web show, Wine Library TV, is the author of “Crush It!“, out next week and currently ranked #810 on Amazon.com. McDonald is the author of “Last Man Standing,” about JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, currently #302 on Amazon. And Sax is the author of “Save The Deli,” out later this month, currently #369 on Amazon. Follow Vaynerchuk (you probably already do) on Twitter here, and Sax here. Sax will be in studio – as will another guest, Spud from Inside Cable News.

Glynnis MacNicol, Steve Krakauer and Rachel Sklar host the live-streamed call-in show, and others in the Mediaite team, like, Colby Hall and our fantastic interns, will appear periodically, as well as special guests.

Our call-in number is (347) 632-8956. Also, we’re using Skype now, so you can video chat in to our username – Mediaite. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Watch us live here on this page at 3pmET, or check it out at www.livestream.com/mediaite.

As for the schedule, you’ll see McDonald first, followed by Vaynerchuk and Sax.

See you at 3pm!

I would post it anyway (Neil Patrick Harris! Obvs!) but today it’s significance is twofold: (1) It shows that the Letterman Bump isn’t just for TV, but spills over into online, too; and (2) I didn’t even know Craig Ferguson had a book! It’s called American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot — and now that I’ve so enjoyed Ferguson this week, I’m tempted to get it. Never mind the NPH endorsement. So the Letterman Bump applies to books, too. There’s also (3) Yet more proof that it’s not just enough to have a great book anymore, you also need to go the distance to promote it with clever ancillary content. We’ve discussed this before. Admittedly Craig Ferguson doesn’t exactly lack for exposure but still, we’ll do our part to support the book industry. Video clip below.

p.s. Everyone should hire Neil Patrick Harris to do this. Boom! The book industry is saved.

Related:
What To Expect When You’re Expected (To Sell Your Book) [Mediaite]

The October issue of Publishers Weekly, the book world’s premiere trade magazine for over 130 years, is quite forward-thinking for such an old-time product. One glance at this edition’s cover — an artistic recreation of the magazine’s Twitter page — and it’s clear that this isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Publishers Weekly. Actually, it’s the Viral Issue and it’s online and on newsstands now — what’s inside might surprise you.

In this doom and gloom time for publishers of all kinds, it’s refreshing to see a publication — and a cornerstone of the traditional system’s reign, no less — look toward the future not with fear and uncertainty, but with optimism and hope. PW‘s Viral Issue focuses on the ways in which authors and publishers can maximize the reach of their work using largely free online services. Not only are the issue’s pieces insightful and instructive, but it features contributions from some of the biggest names in the field — those trailblazers who have embraced change and seen results. Here’s a rundown of some of the highlights:

Rachel Sterne‘s “Creating Your Viral Loop on Twitter”: As the young founder of GroundReport.com, Sterne has made a name for herself in hyperlocal online news and here she provides tips for Twitter use. Sure, it’s been done, but for a new audience and written with flair, Sterne often hits the bullseye, as in this nugget of Twitter knowledge: “Pick your rhythm, and stick to it. Whether you’re prolific or concise, maintain your pace of tweeting so that followers don’t feel inundated or abandoned. Less is usually more.”

Kevin Smokler and Chris Anderson‘s “Virtual Book Tour”: The co-editors of Booktour.com push the practice into a digital age, imploring authors to take hold of their personal brand (a theme that runs through the issue) in order to best reach the “dedicated book fan.” As they write, “We should use the Web to empower that passion.” In other words, don’t fight the future — optimize it.

Adam Penenberg‘s “The Viral Loop” and “Blogging as Multiplier Effect”: The technology writer is creating his own marketing storm in anticipation of his new book, also called Viral Loop, and it’s entirely based in the culture he’s describing. Here, the author writes about using networks like Facebook, Twitter and blogging platforms to promote a book and spread ideas so everyone benefits.

Seth Godin‘s “Where Ideas Go To Die, Not Spread”: The online ad man and blogger extraordinaire wants to reinvent the local bookstore and thinks that technology is part of the answer. They don’t have to die, he writes, so long as they accept the “new rules of engagement.” They key is creating a “coffeehouse culture where ideas spread virally.”

Check out the rest of the Viral Issue here.

Full Disclosure: Adam Penenberg was a professor of mine at New York University.

Yesterday news broke that she had completed her memoir “Going Rogue” in just four months and that it would hit bookshelves November 17, far ahead of its original Spring pub date. Today the memoir has gone rogue on the Barnes and Nobles bestseller list, knocking over both Dan Brown and Mitch Albom on BN.com to grab the top spot.

Over at Amazon, ‘Rogue’ is currently clocking in at number three, behind Dan Brown (#1) and…Glenn Beck who holds the #2 spot. Which makes me wonder if there is some sort of Facebook vs. MySpace cultural survey to be done on the shopping habits of people who use BN.com over Amazon. Are BN.com city dwellers? They do offer same-day delivery in Manhattan.

Anyway! There is alas no “look inside” feature for Palin’s listing so as it stands your pre-order will have to be a sort of faith-based initiative.

h/t Mike Allen.

Also? The imprint “will select authors from within The Daily Beast’s cadre of writers, most of whom are paid freelancers, to write books with quick turnarounds.”

Also? Perseus is paying her “a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books.” From the article:

Ms. Brown said she believed books often missed opportunities to attract readers because they took too long to come to market. “There is a real window of interest when people want to know something,” Ms. Brown said. “And that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.”

*

Ms. Brown, a former editor of Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and the ill-fated Talk Magazine, said that there was a gap between online writing and full-length books that was no longer being fully met by a dwindling market for magazines. She envisioned most of the Beast Books titles as being 40,000 words—or about 150 pages. They would cover touchstone political and cultural topics first addressed on the Web site, as well as more personal memoirs. Perseus is paying The Daily Beast a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books, and Perseus will distribute the titles through its existing sales force. The writers will receive low five-figure advances from Perseus and then split profits from the sale of both the e-books and paperbacks with Perseus and The Daily Beast. Ms. Brown said writers are not required to give Beast Books a first right of refusal on any book ideas they might generate.

Why is this so smart? For a number of reasons, actually. One, with this deal Brown has harnessed the power of her (not-yet-profitable) brand and basically leased it out to a struggling industry in need of a lifeline. Two, the quality of writers Brown will be able to attract (which is already top-notch, particularly for a web-only publication) is bound to increase when the possibility of a book deal is dangled before them. Three, Brown is taking impressive steps toward cornering the still new-ish ebook market with her brand and her hand-picked writers. Plus, it’s a rather unique way to test the waters of the paid-content without actually charging for access to the Daily Beast itself.

This is not Brown’s first foray into the publishing world, of course. She launched Talk/Miramax books back in 2001 when she was editor of Talk, and earlier this year introduced the Book Beast page to The Daily Beast.

How much is your Facebook page worth to Facebook? Probably a few hundred dollars, according to a Facebook app, Viral Loop, that’s collecting data as it is promoting a book of the same name. How much are celebrities’ pages worth? For many, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

Viral Loop lets you quantify the value of your Facebook profile by weighting the traffic on your Facebook page, how many friends you have, and their Facebook activity, in addition to other factors, has begun pitting celebrities against each other in what we can only hope is an expanding feature.

We’ve covered Viral Loop in the past as both an interesting commentary on our times and a sly marketing strategy: as we wrote then, “what makes Penenberg’s take interesting is that while promoting the book, it is also entirely topical. It would be the equivalent writing a book about eBay and marketing the book through a series of online auctions.”

But the new leaderboard, available at  Fastcompany.com, takes it a step further by throwing celebrities into the mix and putting their values out on the line.

Here are some interesting findings:

• Michael Jackson leads with a value of more than $2 million, nearly quadruple the value of God
• Despite his Twitter dominance, Ashton Kutcher is in the middle of the pack, valued at $630,466 as of posting

• Megan Fox’s Facebook page is worth close to $1 million

• Federer beats Nadal: $588k versus $410k
• Vin Diesel comes very close to beating Barack Obama; why??

Check the full leaderboard out here. It’s fun, provocative, and not to be taken too seriously, but it underscores the wealth of data available on Facebook — and to Facebook’s creators.

• Whether or not these are the five funniest tweets or just easiest to put on film is for you to decide – the point is, this is yet another example of book-publishing viral content, the new drop-dead necessity of the industry unless you’re Dan Brown and you sell a million copies on your first day. Instead of goofy YouTube videos, he gets movies starring Tom Hanks. But for the rest of us – including bestselling authors like A.J. Jacobs (viral vid here) or Emmy-winning comedy writers like David Javerbaum (viral vid here) — there now exists the ironclad imperative to whip up secondary content in the hopes of going viral, or even viral-ish.

So! The Five People You Tweet In Heaven? The Twitter Wit version is probably gonna be very different from the David Pogue version, but here they are:

• michaelianblack: “When people pick their “5 people living or dead to have dinner with,” don’t they worry they’ll be the most boring person at the meal?”
• azizansari: “Made it rain at the club last night. Thought people grab all the money and give it back so you can throw it again. Not how it works I guess.”
• pagecrusher: “Why aren’t martini glasses shaped so that they don’t spill so easily on the bus?”
• fireland: “Why should I be the one to take the kids to see their psychologist? I don’t even love them!”
• thepeoplegeek: “Cranked the treadmill up to MAX for 15 minutes. When I finally took a break my roller skates were hot to the touch.”

(For the record, I think my entry in the book is pretty funny… funny because it’s true.)

So! What do we learn from this? That endless content is to be had from breaking out lists from larger collections (“The Five Best Lists of Lists From The Past Five Years of Lists!”). That having a Twitter-based contest without a Twitter address anywhere on the page – or a hashtag, for that matter – is pretty ironic.  That creating interactive online content is an essential tool of good marketing.

To that end, I invite you to leave in the comments your own list of The Five People You Tweet In Heaven, because I’m a little meh on this list. Pretty sure we can do better. Also, I would like to create some viral content that I can then break out into separate lists for yet more viral content. And also because I really, really wanted to use the headling “The Five People You Tweet In Heaven,” because amazingly, no one seems to have used it yet. FIRST!

That’s all. Your call for the funniest peeps on Twitter  in the comments below, please. Or you can write, shoot, edit and upload a YouTube video, but that probably means you have a little too much time on your hands.

Who

What: Reading for Homer and Langley

Where: Barnes and Noble Union Square

When September 15, 2009

Thumbs: Up

E.L. Doctorow has been called many things in his lifetime, most notably one of the greatest writers of all-time. But now he can add a new moniker to that list: prophet.

Anna Quindlen speculated that Doctorow knows something the rest of us don’t as he has published several of his books at opportune times. During the heart of the Civil Rights era, Doctorow delivered Ragtime; The March coincided with the Iraq War; and now, as we grapple with the consequences of economic excess, Doctorow releases a novel depicting the Collyer brothers, famed New York City hoarders.

The book, Doctorow said, covers the mythical side of the Collyer brothers, and not the historic. He says, in general, he prefers to imagine rather than to research. Yet, when Doctorow speaks about the Collyer brothers, he describes them in full detail as if he knew them personally and intimately. It was difficult at times to determine whether Doctorow was discussing the Collyers as men who once lived or as characters in his novel who come alive for him in his book.

If the 78-year-old’s vigor wasn’t enough, Doctorow showed off his exceptional sense of humor. He was outgoing and personable, proclaiming that he tries to add a level of playfulness even to serious topics. Along those lines, Doctorow said that he enjoyed the musical version of Ragtime because it showed a softer side to a controversial era.

He even made light of his own controversy, stemming from public remarks he made in 2004 at Hofstra University. He said that he’s kept his personal beliefs out of his work, seeing speeches and other public engagements as opportunities to do something else entirely. He then spent some time revealing what a thrill it was for him to deliver a speech at the 35-yard-line of a football field.

What They Said

“Characters come to you whole. You don’t imagine them. They’re just there.”

- E.L. Doctorow’s description of writing characters reminded us a lot of Quentin Tarantino’s description

“It’s probably a dangerous thing in a marriage to let your spouse read your book.”

- E.L. Doctorow, whose  wife is the first reader of his works, like to live dangerously

“I got to the end of the book and I burst into tears, and I offer that to you with admiration.”

- Anna Quindlen’s closing remarks to E.L. Doctorow, a fitting tribute

“There are three things in life that will never fail you: Chekhov, Mozart and vodka.”

- E.L. Doctorow says his schedule backs up this claim

What We Thought

• Quindlen began the night by talking about what she thought the book was about (brothers) versus what reviewers have argued (American consumerism). She has not only read the book in anticipation of the event, Quindlen has considered it and internalized it. This led to a natural dialogue as Quindlen got the chance to ask the author all of her questions from reading and examining the book.
• It was interesting to listen to Doctorow defend the Collyers’ lifestyle saying that pack rats is not an accurate term to use for them. He called them aggregators and curators of their own museum of American life. We were moved by the brotherhood that Doctorow seemed to feel for the Collyers.
• Doctorow entered publishing through the movie industry. He read a book a day for a film company and wrote memos outlining which books would be good motion pictures. He said he was encouraged to write a book after reading so many bad ones.

PANEL RULES!

Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Rabble Rousers

The first rule of asking a question at a panel is that you must ask a question. (The second rule is “Don’t talk about Fight Club” – unless it’s a David Fincher panel.) If the hostess has to ask you to phrase your point in the form of a question, you’ve already shown why you shouldn’t have been called on in the first place. Bonus Panel Nerds suggestion: to ensure you are asking a question, use the word who, what, when, where, or why.

Panel Nerds Etan Bednarsh and Danny Groner are New York-based writers and avid panel-goers. Want them at your panel? Email them here: PanelNerds@mediaite.com

Almost everything seems to be slagging right now (except Joe Wilson‘s Twitter followers!) and book sales are no exception. With advertising budgets down along with all else, many publishers are looking to a book’s author to be its primary salesman, creatively stretching what funds they’re allotted into some sort of viral marketing campaign, including websites, hashtags, and YouTube videos.

The Viral Loop application for Facebook takes a sci-fi aesthetic and proceeds to plot and value your friends on a futuristic web (check out the screenshot below), in a self-described attempt to illustrate how members of social networks participate with and “create value” for the networks they use.

But what makes Penenberg’s take interesting is that while promoting the book, it is also entirely topical. It would be the equivalent writing a book about eBay and marketing the book through a series of online auctions. It’s not unlike another creative (if circular) book advertising technique used by the creators of This Is Why You’re Fat — a Tumblr of “food porn” that scored a book deal, only to again turn to Tumblr to market the bound version of the site. What a world!

Check out Viral Loop here and if your worth is high enough, please email Mark Zuckerberg requesting, at the very least, a thank you note.

Full Disclosure: Penenberg was a professor of mine at New York University.

Since then a lot of authors (and book publicists) have asked about the program, wondering if it’s a good or bad thing to let anyone who wants to read an advance copy of your book for free. Here’s some answers for those interested in planning their own lending library.

What is it a success? Absolutely. 400 people signed up for advance copies. It enabled me to interact directly with people who read The Adderall Diaries, which is incredibly fulfilling for an author. One reader started a facebook group called “I Read an Advance Copy of The Adderall Diaries.”

The Lending Library itself got written up in a bunch of publications, which was surprising because I wasn’t doing it as a marketing stunt. I was doing it because I wanted people to read my book. But maybe that’s the same thing. I think of “marketing” as something you do for someone else. Wanting to share your art is something that predates the term and probably goes back to cave drawings.

I ended up doing a lot of interviews and people wrote reviews of the book before the book was available. HTMLGIANT even hosted a conversation about the book. Some people told me this was a bad idea. I was getting too much press at a point when people couldn’t yet purchase the book. I think the jury is still out on that. But it seemed OK to me. I was glad people were reviewing the book in advance. I figure when a book comes out people talk about it for a month, but you have four months before that happens to initiate a conversation.

When I was told I should do a large book tour, rather than going from bookstore to bookstore I sent a note to the 400 advance readers of the book. Now I’m doing a cross-country tour of readings and events primarily in people’s homes. It’s a lot less lonely, I think, to have someone responsible for your event in each town. And I’ll probably sleep on their couches (there’s no budget for hotel rooms). These are mostly people I haven’t met who liked the book enough to invite me into their homes. Hopefully none of them are crazy. They’re probably thinking the same thing about me.

Of course, I want to support local independent bookstores so often I’ll try to get the local store involved in the event. Book People, for example, is selling books at the Austin House Party September 22.

Was it worth it? That depends on what you hope to get out of it. For me it was worth it. But it’s expensive and it takes a huge amount of time. My publisher picked up the shipping costs, which came to about $800. The way the lending library was setup we paid the initial postage. But the real cost was in time. It took a lot of time to do this. I had to make a giant spread sheet (actually, a word document with a huge table). It turns out most people won’t forward the book to the next person without a gentle nudge. I didn’t realize that at first. I thought I could just send books, send addresses, and let the library run itself. But it doesn’t work that way.

Still, compared to the traditional route of sending galley copies to “opinion makers” it was very efficient. Instead of getting one read for every five books you send out I was getting five reads for every one book.

Still… you would think that if people agreed to read the book and forward it within a week that most of them would do that. Not true. Not even remotely true. I had to keep track of where the book was in the chain, notice when someone didn’t receive the book, contact members and remind them how easy it was to purchase postage online. The most common excuses for not sending the book on time were, “I’m in the process of moving” and “I’ve been out of town.” My favorite was the person who requested a book and then volunteered for a three month stint with the forest service.

But hey, nobody’s perfect. I once robbed a comic book store.

Ultimately, the thing you really have to ask is if you have the time to deal with this. It’s basically a customer service job. You have to field notes from people asking where the book is, then go figure it out and respond to them. It can take ten hours a week. I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t believe in the book. I feel certain The Adderall Diaries is the best book I’ve ever written. Part true crime part memoir. It’s at once the tale of Hans Reiser a brilliant computer programmer accused of killing his wife, an investigation into a murder my father confessed to in his own unpublished memoir, and a journey into the meaning of identity. It’s filled with false confessions and thoughts on what is and isn’t knowable. But more than anything it’s a book about being a writer.

One thing to remember: If you don’t write the right book nothing will work. The reader has to connect with the work. I would advise against putting significant time and resources into a work you don’t really believe in.

Got any advice? Why yes, yes I do. If you want to do a lending library tell everyone they have to forward the book using priority mail. I didn’t realize this until after two months. This will result in far fewer lost books. It’s $4.95 as opposed to $3.07, depending on the size of the book. But it can reduce shipping time from ten days to two.

Figure the average time with a book to be closer to seventeen days, including shipping. Organize based on city and state. People should send the book to people that live close to them. Often this enables people just to hand off the book, rather than using the mail. Send everyone an email every Friday asking if they’ve received the book and forwarded it to the next person. Once someone says they’ve forwarded the book, take them off the list.

Don’t spam people. Just because they signed up to read an advance copy of your book doesn’t mean they want to hear from you every time you update your tour or get a review. It’s not cool to add people to your mailing list. I think it’s OK to send everybody in the group one email when your book becomes available and also if you’re doing a reading in their town. That’s exactly two non-lending library emails. That’s just my opinion. In those emails you could also ask them to join your mailing list, if you have one. After that you should really leave the nice people alone.

What are you doing with the galleys now that it’s over? Asking the last person with the book to mail it to someone with an income of less than $25,000 who can’t afford to buy a hardcover. When I said that I would do this almost all the copies were requested right away, but I’m still collecting addresses in case anyone wants to donate a copy of the book to someone who can’t afford their own.

Would you do it again? In a heartbeat. But I’d have to write another book first.

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries and the founding editor of The Rumpus.

When pan-Arab newspaper Dar Al-Hayat asked the librarian at Guantanamo Bay what the most-requested books were, this is what they found:

1. The Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling

2. Don Quixote, by Cervantes

3. Dreams from my Father, by Barack Obama

…followed by Muslim holy texts.

In the article, no explanation is given for why these particular books were so popular, but one of the entries is sure to rile up a lot of conservatives — and it isn’t Don Quixote.

There’s lots more fascinating analysis of this list — including an analogy made by an actual Guantanamo Bay prisoner between Bush and Voldemort — at Times Online’s Comment Central.

(image from fanboy.com)

h/t Comment Central via The Morning News

Someone like Gary Vaynerchuk is a good example, whose book, Crush It, comes out next month. Vaynerchuk has been crushing it on promotion since day one, tweeting it out as a hashtag (#crushit) and making “crush it” part of the content he delivers to his extremely faithful online audience.

THE FIVE PEOPLE YOU TWEET IN HEAVEN
THE SOCIAL MEDIA SOMMELIER

Another good example: The usually behind-the-scenes David Javerbaum‘s recent video about his new book, What to Expect When You’re Expected: A Fetus’s Guide to the First Three Trimesters. You might know Javerbaum as a Tony-nominated Broadway lyricist, but it’s more likely that you know him from his comedy work: The Daily Show, where he has spent years as both head writer and then executive producer; America: The Book for which he was also of the three principal authors; and Stephen Colbert‘s A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All, for which he was the lyricist.

Javerbaum is usually behind-the-scenes (did you even know that was him above? It is), but when a book hits the shelves it’s time to get out there. And so, here he is, starring in a new video on YouTube promoting the book. It’s already got a respectable 1,940 views — but probably not from people Googling “Daily Show Writer” and “baby book.” Here’s where the help of friends comes in — I found this via John Hodgman‘s Twitter feed (at over 80K followers, that’ll get you nicely RT’d), and no doubt the video will start to make the comedy rounds soon.

Will it make that much difference to sales? Who knows? Either way, not doing it is no longer an option. Video below.

As it turns out, it’s not exactly like an album leak, since the book is really just a collection of Gladwell’s best writing for the magazine, but a musician metaphor is still apt. Essentially, Gladwell’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company, is releasing what amounts to the writer’s equivalent of a Greatest Hits album, in a move that stinks a bit of desperation. In a time when book sales are declining — not unlike all printed matter — publishers are desperate for the next title from Dan Brown, Nora Roberts or, say, Malcolm Gladwell. That is, authors guaranteed to sell and sell big, with Gladwell’s three titles moving millions of copies internationally. And so less than a year after the release of Outliers, instead of turning around and paying Gladwell another fat advance to dive down into months of new research, writing, editing and post-production, his publisher has decided to merely repackage old work that’s all ready to go. Remember, The Eagles’ Greatest Hits is the biggest selling album of all-time in the United States. But it’s worth wondering how much longer newspapers, magazines, and now books will be able to charge for information readily available on the web, a question complicated by the ever-growing paywall debate.

Sure, it’s convenient to have all of Gladwell’s New Yorker pieces in one bound book — it’s insightful but quick reading perfect for travel or a day on the beach. And, of course, there’s nothing like the feeling of paper between your fingers as you feverishly turn the page because you’re about to find out just why the hell ketchup tastes so good. But $20 for a hardcover? Conveniently, Jason Kottke has already provided links to the entire book, along with annotations and the dates of the stories’ original pub date. Now surely, in this day and age, everyone has a printer.