Book Project : An Introduction

Social media, social media, that is what everyone is talking about. I recently found this video which is of course advertising a book called "Socialnomics". The last two years has been an upswing on the social media. It has literally exploded where now companies have a blog, Facebook page and/or Twitter. How will this translate into work ?

Well, I'm about do a little experiment.

Many of you know me as Eric or Ejen and know me from PIX. Some of y'all know I'm currently collecting days to get into the union for production stills for the motion picture industry and many of y'all may know I've been working on a photography coffee table book for the past year.

In 2009, I travelled to six anime conventions in the United States, photographing over 1,600 people for a book project. The book is edit down to 260 people representing 30 states. I've contracted a printer in Shanghai to print the books - 272 pages, hard cover, 8x10 and will be sold at $40 each. Currently thousands of copies of my book is on a freighter heading to Los Angeles.

As I have no publisher or distribution, my experiment is to see how well I can sell this book via two methods :

1) going to conventions where I'll have a table to sell the book
2) online on my website using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, deviantART, YouTube, Flickr and Model Mayhem for exposure.

Currently here's my stats

YouTube - 42 subscribers
Facebook - 2,863 fans
MySpace - 1,482 fans
Flickr - 131 contacts
deviantART - 329 watchers
Twitter - 990 followers
Model Mayhem - 386

Total : 6,223 people.

I started many of the site last year as I began the project. Obviously there will be many crossovers as the same person can be flowing me on multiple platforms. Some platform lend itself better than others. Model Mayhem for example does not provide a way to update your viewers - they do not see any new images you placed while on Flickr, every new image you post will alert your friends.

My plan is to use social media to connect me with the fans. Every convention I go I'll be tweeting, facebooking, myspacing, as well as making videos. I'm creating a story that folks can follow on my adventure through America. I'll be updating you about my progress throughout the year and my thoughts on how social media is working for me. I'm interested as you are to see how far and how many books I can sell just by using the two methods mention.

(By the way, this is on top of everything else I do for PIX's social media. In my world, I update two blogs, three Facebook pages, and two twitters as well as assorted other social media for my book. Luckily, the conventions are on weekends so I can still work on the PIXFeedLA.)