A Must Read for Book Authors

I literally just finished going through the Businessweek article, The Online Fan World of the Twilight Vampire Books, and cannot reccomend it strongly enough to anyone writing fiction or nonfiction books. This is a story of a woman who used online intelligently and imaginatively:

Meyers success isnt due simply to her vivid imagination for vampire romance. She also figured out before almost anyone in the book industry how to connect with readers over the Internet and inspire them to build on her work. Since Meyer published the first Twilight book in 2005, she has reached out to readers on social networking sites, such as MySpace (NWS), and participated in online discussion groups. Fired-up fans have championed her books on Amazon.com (AMZN) and set up their own sites, such as Twilight Lexicon and TwilightMOMS. That has helped propel sales of the series to 7.5 million books. "Other authors have pockets of fans online, but nothing to this extent," says Trevor Dayton, a vice-president at Indigo, Canada's leading bookseller. "Stephenie Meyers Twilight series is the first social networking best seller."

To be fair, her publisher, Little Brown, saw the possibilities and got behind her first novel, as it paid $750,000 for a three-book deal. But that could have flopped. And it's not as though she was a trained marketeer. Instead, Meyer started taking up opportunities that presented themselves. Will every book pushed online do this type of business? Absolutely not. Run quickly from any "silver bullet" solution to your marketing needs. However, the example shows how it is possible to go beyond what the publisher alone can or will do.