SmartSymbols^tm

A way to find out what readers are interested in is to look at the Icon Usage chart in SmartSymbols Analytics. (See picture below).
To get to the chart, simply login and then select the SmartSymbols set you are interested in.

Icon Usage Chart: January 2010, click to enlarge

(Click the chart to enlarge the picture)

This simple pie chart shows some pretty valuable information: people who were researching this particular sample book spent most of their time on Author Information (over 12 minutes) and almost equal amount of time on Social Networking buzz (about 9 minutes). The Book Content captured their interest for half the time of either Author Information or Social Networking buzz.

There is another interesting data point in the chart: people spent almost as much time researching the location of the plot of the book (Location/Compass icon - read more on Compass icon usage here) as on the contents of the book. In fact location seem to be of more interest then Reviews and News.

It could be that adding illustrations from the book to your SmartSymbols, as well as pictures of the places where the book is taking place could become a tipping point in the sale process of this particular book.

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Celebrate Green - Valentine's Day

Lynn Colwell & Cory Colwell-Lipson’s book Celebrate Green has a unique quality: it’s useful year round. Unlike typical abstract ideas about how to have a more eco-friendly lifestyle in general, the ideas in their book are practical. They are also specific to a particular holiday that’s coming up on the calendar.

Check out their suggestions for the Valentine’s Day for example: “one high quality organic chocolate bar instead of a handful of conventional candy on Valentine’s Day”. It turns out, that organic chocolate bar also tastes a lot better than typical candy, as testified by people who know best - kids.

You can also explore SmartSymbols for Celebrate Green book above. To buy the book simply go here: http://www.celebrategreen.net/buy/

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“Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat” is a book by Australian author David Gillespie.  The book is an interesting research into how sugar contributes to the wight problem, as well as to the overall health problem.  David has done a lot of research and has been interviewed by many news organization on the subject.  He has Facebook fan pages, Twitter followers and up-to-date blog.

We are fortunate that David chose to use SmartSymbols for book promotion on his blog: http://www.raisin-hell.com/, he uses the vertical version of SmartSymbols because it fits neatly into the sidebar of his blog platform.

An interesting side-story has emerged while we were working with David’s book information. It turns out that it is not easy to buy his book in the US, but at least we can benefit from some of his research if we listen to his interviews and read people’s comments on various social networks - SmartSymbols presents this information in one place in an easy-to-find way. “Sweet Poison” also a has personal side to it, but I don’t want to spoil it here. Check out David’s blog and his book site, and of course - explore SmartSymbols to learn more about “Sweet Poison”.

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We have officially released a symbol set for books: “SmartSymbols Offers Advanced Marketing Solution for Book Publishers and Authors“. It looks like this:






Here is the excerpt from the press release:

“This new industry-focused symbol set organizes real time social network and social media content, book reviews, interactive maps of the story’s geographic locations, calendar of events, video based author bios and both written and audio book excerpts for display across any number of Web-based environments including: ecommerce sites, publisher and author Web sites, blogs and mobile devices.


SmartSymbols™ social media marketing support includes real time feed capabilities from Twitter, Facebook and blog/RSS. SmartSymbols™ is the only author and book publishing marketing tool to combine traditional internal marketing material with external social media marketing strategies, bringing the total book community experience to all points of distribution.”

You can see a full demo here: http://www.smartsymbols.com/demo.html

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“What this means is that we shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation. ” - Edward Tufte

In addition to the Compass icon , that we discussed in the Secret of the Compass Icon article, SmartSymbols for Books has a number of other interesting icons. In this article we will discuss the Author icon .

Author Icon
Author icon provides basic summary about the author, such as his or her bio, books they have written and additional books related to the one you are viewing. An example would be an audio version of a book and other books in the series. You can see Author icon in action below, just put your mouse over to activate.

The neat thing about the Author icon is that you can put up-to-date interactive information right there. Example: a map of book signings for this week, something that is very easy to do with SmartSymbols - all we need is dates/times and locations; the map will show up automatically. Because all updates are instant anywhere SmartSymbols are displayed - you can update the info as often as you wish.

Other Uses
If you would like to collect feedback from readers and route it to the author, you can put a message textbox right into the icon pop-up to simplify the process.
In addition, you can pipe-in a feed directly from the author’s website.

There are many possibilities for the Author icon, the key is to figure out which information is the most interesting and relevant for your readers and site or blog visitors.

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