Can Publishers Use Social Currency to Increase Brand Loyalty?

by Jane Litte

I read an article a month ago that someone tweeted regarding social currency (and I would link to it but for the life of me, I can’t remember the title of the article). It got me to thinking about the ways in which authors draw readers into the fold and how these tecniques could be expanded upon by publishers. A few caveats before I get started. My awareness of author activities is limited primarily to the romance genre. My theories are only useful to the extent that publishers actually want to build a brand for the house name versus promoting an author. I am a reader and know little about the cost and feasibility of the following suggestions.

Sherrilyn Kenyon and Karen Marie Moning are two frontlist authors with huge followings. They are also fairly tech savvy. In the early 2000s, both authors began role playing games with their characters. Moning currently has a free web game associated with her characters on her site. Both authors have extremely active message boards. Readers have become so invested in the series that fights have broken out amongst the readers over the roleplaying leading to Moning releasing a statement that Official Character Pages would be created instead of allowing the readers to co-opt those characters and run amok on facebook. JR Ward, another NYTimes Bestselling paranormal romance author, has an active message board. If you belong to the message board, you can read Ward posting as the different characters in her books, bantering back and forth as if those characters were actually part of the message board community.

Beyond the romance world, Janet Evanovich has engaged her readers by inviting them to compete for the right to title her next book. I’m not sure when she started this but the contest goes like this: you email or mail a title and if your title is picked, your name is given to a character in the book you titled. Avon Romance is having a similar contest, urging fans to submit a plot idea for a novella. The author of the winning idea will win $1,000 and four Avon historical romance authors will pen a novella collection using that plot.

How does this tie in with social currency? All of these ideas can be used to harness an audience, increase visibility of the house brand, and encourage readers to return to a webspace. By participating on the message board, by sharing a book widget, by tweeting about a book, the readers can earn social currency. This currency can then allow them the right to real world benefits such as buying the right to be named in a book, the right to participate (not make decisions, but simply participate) in a cover conference, the ability to help craft a cover blurb, to get a sneak peek at an anticipated release, be sent a specially bound copy of a book that is different from all the other mass produced novels, and the list goes on. The idea is to leverage the everyday activities that publishers undertake to produce a book and allow readers to use virtual currency to be part of those activities.