Collaborative book reviews on Twitter

Posted on May 21, 2009 at 1:09 pm (UK)
in: Books, Innovation, Marketing, Reviews, Social Media, Twitter

wossybookclub Hmm, wonder if this idea would work with the kind of books I’m currently reading, and have queued up to read, for doing reviews.

IT Pro reports that TV and radio celeb Jonathan Ross has launched WossyBookClub on Twitter where he has over 270K followers.

[…] His first choice, Jon Ronson’s non-fiction title, ‘The Man Who Stare at Goats’, is climbing up impressively at the bestsellers chart. The Amazon sales of the book rose incredibly by 7000 percent, after it was picked by Ross as his first choice for the book club.

Asserting on his innovative online book club, Ross quoted in his Twitter update, “If you want to join informal book club read Jon Ronson Men Who Stare at Goats by next weekend & we will chat about it”.

Although Ross described this book club as ‘informal’, but it will surely provide a boost to literary works, where users will post mini reviews on any of the selected book.

So Ross gets his followers (well, some, not all) to read the book in question and then they talk about it a tweet at a time.

A collaborative review.

Why not? Certainly far more dynamic than the static and subjective reviews you currently might read from, well, book reviewers. And possibly more interesting.

Wonder if it might work with three of the books I’m currently prepping (ie, reading or about to start reading) for reviews. I had in mind to record commentaries about each book that would be published as FIR Reviews podcasts.

I’m not sure if there’s enough desire for a load of people to rush out and buy any of the business books I currently have. So maybe I could do something like this:

  1. Record a 5-minute review on Audioboo and/or iPadio.
  2. Tweet the Audioboo / iPadio links
  3. Then chat via Twitter with anyone who wants to talk about the review, capturing the chat stream to a hashtag thus making it connected and discoverable.

Anyone interested in experimenting with a Twitter book review like this? Do you have a better suggestion? Or should I just stick with the traditional way of doing a book review?

I’m game for experimenting, though. Might do that anyway.


Related Posts with Thumbnails

Print This Post Print This Post

{ 2 trackbacks }

Twitted by pr_marketing
May 22, 2009 at 8:08
The Kindle Chronicles - TKC 44 Roxanne Darling & Shane Robinson
May 22, 2009 at 13:48

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

1 jangles (Neville Hobson) May 21, 2009 at 13:41

Twitter Comment


[Blog] Collaborative book reviews on Twitter [link to post]

– Posted using Chat Catcher

Reply

2 David Phillips May 21, 2009 at 13:49

Well, I have a vested interest but I just love the idea. The idea of three or four networks (and channels) coming together is good.

Chapter by chapter would be even more fun.

Reply

3 simonsanders May 21, 2009 at 15:06

Let’s just hope no-one ruins the book publishing industry – tweeting the whole book, line by line, page by page, 140 characters at a time.

Reply

4 Bryan Person May 22, 2009 at 11:49

I like the idea too, Neville, and I’d certainly be willing to give it a try. And if you wanted to create an FIR Reviews podcast out of it, you could also string together the audioBoos that we all put together. It’ll be collaborative podcasting, too!

Bryan @BryanPerson

Reply

5 Bryan Person May 22, 2009 at 11:49

I like the idea too, Neville, and I’d certainly be willing to give it a try. And if you wanted to create an FIR Reviews podcast out of it, you could also string together the audioBoos that we all put together. It’ll be collaborative podcasting, too!

Bryan | @BryanPerson

Reply

Leave a Comment

You can use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Twitter Users!
Enter your personal information in the form or sign in with your Twitter account by clicking the button below.

By submitting a comment to this site, you warrant that the information in your comment does not infringe on anyone’s intellectual property rights nor breaks any laws. See Terms of Use for more information.

Previous post:

Next post: