Social marketing boosts book sales

Move over Harry and Hermione. Edward and Bella are the star couple in the young-adult section of bookstores now. 

The “Twilight” series has sold more than 22 million books. It spent 19 weeks at No. 1 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list in 2008. It has helped author Stephenie Meyer step into the shoes of J.K. Rowling . But Meyer’s success can’t be completely attributed to her detailed imagination for vampire romance. (Vampires are old hat for the novel world.) A large portion of her success is due to her use of online social media to generate hype for her stories. 

Photo courtesy of hstoutzenberger/Flickr.com

While using the Internet to boost sales is nothing new in the book industry, Meyer took it beyond the traditional videos and Web site to get fans as involved in sharing news surrounding the book as her marketing team. When advertising for the original novel, “Twilight,” began in 2005, Meyer did the usual interviews with bloggers and her publisher, Little Brown, created, in true vampire fashion, a dark and spooky Web site. But Meyer wasn’t satisfied, so she started a more cheerful and personal site of her own and filled it with personal pictures of her family and stories of her own teenage years — that are strangely opposite to the teenage angst reflected in her novels, by the way. Most importantly, Meyer engaged with online readers by providing her personal e-mail to create a detailed Q&A session about Edward Cullen, Bella Swan and their eerie romance. 

After the release of “Eclipse” in 2007, the popularity of the series forced Meyer to remove her personal e-mail address from her Web site. But the conversation didn’t end. Instead, Meyer used the several popular blogs dedicated to her writing to connect with readers. On TwilightMOMS she wrote, “Hi, my fellow moms. It’s just so cool that I’m not the only 30+ mom and wife in love with fictional underage vampires and werewolves.” 

Book publishers are following Meyer’s lead in the hopes of garnering the same epic response. “Her success has inspired other authors,” Jennifer Northcutt, fiction buy at Borders Group, told BusinessWeek. “They’ve learned you have to be active online.” But as they say, success comes with sacrifice. Prior to the release of “Breaking Dawn” in the summer of 2008, Meyer was ending the very online conversations that sparked her success. She asked her top fan sites to close their forums three weeks prior to the book’s release date so that none of the juicy details were released. Extreme fame caused the once open author to close her forum door (or leave it ajar instead of wide open). 

What do you think Meyer can do to balance the interactive social media tactics she pioneered in the publishing world and her extreme fame?

Alyson (@ Twitter)