Want to promote a book? Forget about trying to find the most relevant comp title and digging endlessly through conversations trying to somehow divine which people matter. Now you can simply go to your own book’s most granular BISAC subject code in our Trending platform and see all the other books already populated and analyzed under that subject. And right there are all the key influencers for that entire narrow subject, ranked by order of influence. The people listed are also not just for books tracked as of yesterday, or even last month, but as far back as 6 months or even a year ago.

Social media monitoring & analytics have historically been performed on a one-off basis, where nothing gets done until the customer asks for it, and then it’s only what the customer asked for, and data is only gathered from that point forward. This type of solution is useful on a single-case, one-time usage basis, but even so for this methodology there will always be a severe deficit of data in three key areas:

Historical Data
Context
Category-Wide Data

CoverCake has already solved the historical data and context problem by creating a unique system that tracks thousands of relevant books on an ongoing basis before anyone even asks for it. This allows you to see not just what’s happening for a given topic or book going forward, but also what’s been happening for that book since 6 months ago. This means that if you were to publish a book similar to “Fifty Shades of Grey” or even a less well-known title such as “Girl Hunter: Revolutionizing the Way We Eat…”, you could go to our Trending product and see the conversations for those books from a year ago, discover who the most influential people were and engage with them about your own book.

The one remaining hurdle to gaining deep insight into your own campaign directly and into industry-wide trends is the ability to map conversations, and thus people, to an industry-standard categorization system.

Everyone knows that categorization systems in the book industry are far from perfect, yet for all their troubles and contention they remain useful. The BISAC Subject Headings system has the widest adoption in North America, and CoverCake is quite proud to announce that it has now deeply integrated BISAC categories into its Trending platform. Our clients can now see mappings of influencers, their conversations and trends not only to individual books, but across entire BISAC Subjects.

And this is all thanks to the data sharing agreement that CoverCake has signed with Ingram Content Group – click here to see more. Ingram Content Group is a very established and prolific services provider to the entire book industry and beyond, and the agreement allows both parties to weave relevant social media book data in with book industry data, creating a cohesion that the whole book industry will benefit from.

In the last few years the publishing industry has been at times pronounced dead or at least dying many times, and if not dying then at least having completely lost its mind. Everyone can agree that there’s certainly a massive amount of change in a very short period of time, but at CoverCake we aren’t too concerned, really. Sure, consumption patterns and platforms are changing and self-publishing is taking off, but this isn’t really surprising to us here. You see, it’s all about the ability to see what’s happening. CoverCake sits very high up at a social crossroads of sorts, and we can see what’s happening all the way down to a boots-on-the-ground kind of level. We think the reason everyone is so up in arms is that most people can’t hear or see what’s happening every day. That’s really sad, because we can hear it all, and because we can hear it all we can describe the trajectories of where changes aren’t taking us. The book industry isn’t dying and it certainly hasn’t lost its mind.

Because we map the winding paths of people, conversations and books, we’re also able to finally give people something truly new and pretty inventive, really – the ability for anyone to instantly understand what books everyone else is talking about. We’ve done this by partnering with Books-A-Million (BAMM), a leading book reseller. Have you ever wished you could just walk into a bookstore and without being rude just yell out “What the heck are you all reading and what makes it good?” Well now you can, but you don’t even have to yell. Books-A-Million will use some of CoverCake’s really valuable tools to let its book customers know what everyone else is thinking and talking about. They’ll really be making buying books simple and fun.

We think that the insight we have into this social crossroads where people, books and publishers cross paths shouldn’t only benefit publishers and authors. We want to let authors, readers, publishers and sellers get to know each other all over again, but this time without any hassle. Sure, it’s a part of all the change, but this change will actually take us somewhere… somewhere better.

Take a few seconds and imagine this simple analogy – a world where Coca Cola has 40 million small sweet-tasting variations of each of its products, every single one of those product names contains hundreds of direct references to unrelated subjects, everybody loves soda, but nobody actually cares or even talks about the brand name “Coke”. Now try to efficiently use a social media monitoring and analytics platform to gather all – and only – the conversations about those specific products. Then try to understand all of the differences in opinion that people have about all 40 million products. Or just try to analyze people’s opinions about just one of those product variations. Either way, after the first 24 hours of search-phrase testing, mind-numbing keyword filtering and report-building, you’ll probably give up. The bottom line is that using any analytics platform that does not have esoteric knowledge of this strange beverage industry and is not designed uniquely for that industry will always fail Warren Buffett’s First Rule of Investing: Don’t Lose Money!

That is how every social media monitoring and analytics platform that’s not CoverCake Trending sees the intersection of books and social media. The book industry is highly fluid, extremely congested in terms of numbers of products and spinoffs, and is filled with millions of product names that are unspecific, commonplace and undifferentiated. Because of this, successfully utilizing an application-agnostic, brand-focused social media monitoring and analytics platform is extremely difficult. To make it even more complex, deriving actionable intelligence for a single book requires monitoring many other books and users in order to provide marketplace context for that one book. For an average social media monitoring and analytics platform, this is a worst-case scenario.

The positive ROI that results from actionable intelligence derived from dedicated research on a single ubiquitous product, brand or unique event is what drives the use of modern “open” analytics platforms. The time and technical prowess required to derive the same degree of actionable social media intelligence on one book as for a ubiquitous brand or product reduces the ROI ratio to a huge loss. This doesn’t even factor in the heavy customization & training costs as well as the administrative overhead that every “open” analytics platform incurs on setup for use in such a specialized industry such as books.

The volume of products, noise and the constantly shifting tides of conversations and mindshare makes the marketplace of books in social media highly obscured compared to other social media markets such as automotive or fashion. Whether your intent is to promote an already successful book or to create a little buzz for a brand new book by an unknown author, successful analysis of books in social media and the people who talk about them requires tools designed for the job that can cut through the noise and make order out of chaos. This is what CoverCake Trending was designed for, and what it’s being used for. Our toolset gives publishers, authors, publicists and many others unprecedented capabilities that range from viewing total conversation volume and tone by men about the Western book genre over the last year, all the way down to instantly viewing and connecting with the most influential women that have talked about romance books in the last week. At the intersection of books and social media, CoverCake has the right tools for the job, and you can try them out for free.

Well we’ve had an incredible couple months since our beta launch, and we’ve received a ton of great reviews.  Interestingly though, last month someone posted a comment talking about the groundbreaking nature of CoverCake’s Trending platform, but also how it may pose a threat to literary quality in general.  It seems the theory ran that if people are shown what books and genres are trendy in social media, authors will start ‘coming up with’ stories that are tailored to fit what they think is the hottest trend of the day, and creativity and originality will be lost.

This train of thought, while rightly passionate about protecting literary integrity, is based on a misconception of where stories come from and the process of how they’re written.  The best stories, whether funny or sad, truth or fiction, always come from a very deep place.  The first seeds of a narrative in an author’s mind won’t be smothered or their growth redirected by the writer knowing how people are thinking and talking about books in social media, no matter how powerful CoverCake’s social media book analytics may be.

The core assumption here is that the story gets somehow fitted or tailored to the market.  A music producer might dictate that a certain number of a band’s tracks don’t get put on the album in order for the record to get slotted into the correct genre.  Similarly, a movie might be directed or edited in such a way as to fit better within the intended demographic.  With books, however, a story is, well, a singularly different animal.  There can be some ‘outside’ persuasion of course, sometimes motivated by contracts and deliverables, sometimes purely out of good intent.  Nevertheless, changing course mid-journey will sooner sink a literary ship than send it to a better destination.  Similarly, expecting public opinion to change the type of plant that the seeds of a story will grow into is saying that narrative seeds are somehow like stem cells, and can grow into anything, which, of course, is also untrue.

The growing trends of the last few years within the book industry have led to what some feel is the commoditization of books.  This may be true, but it might be more accurate to say that it has led to the commoditization of the consumption of books, not the actual stories themselves.  Books are not “user generated content”, because they are simply not “content” as we now define it.  They are books, and the hidden birthplace of great novels, autobiographies, true stories and countless books yet to be published will always be safe from the ravages of industrial economics, bottom lines and consumer whims.

The sweet reality is that for the first time, authors and publishers, no matter how large or small, can now intuitively understand how millions of people think about books and how they talk about them.  With CoverCake’s Trending platform, anyone can see deep into the three-way intersection between people, the book industry, and social media.  Trending will highlight exactly where the value is, where the pain points are, and which marketing spends would be best spent in which channel.  Trending users can examine global genre sentiment and demographics, trends in social media sources such as Facebook and Twitter, measure outsourced PR campaign effectiveness (even across multiple business units), and find countless other insights and measurements.  Authors and publishers can now understand exactly how people are perceiving any given book, genre, or author, and CoverCake’s data will allow them to explore why.

An accomplished author can publish many books, and then experience a small but steady decline in sales in newer book without really knowing why.  Our Trending platform can actually show that book readers are feeling like that author’s books have become progressively harder to read, and we can instantly reveal the correlation between small changes in perception of the author’s writing style and reduced sales.

The incredible key to recognize here is that in the last century, the only means that publishers and authors have had to fully assess the state of book performance & reception has been quantitative sales analysis.  This is because the only mechanisms that were in place that could automate mass analysis were mechanisms based on sales.  In the past, there was no alternative to obtaining a full market assessment of quality and appreciation automatically.  The catch is that quantitative analysis can only consistently provide qualitative analysis across a large population by distant inference at best.

With the introduction of CoverCake’s Trending solution, we have now come into an era where true quality analysis, derived directly from millions of people’s conversations – not just small focus groups – is available for everyone.  This analysis is real-time, highly detailed, and extremely accurate, and provides key insights that were never available before to anyone.

The truth about CoverCake Trending is that while we will never affect the course of a story to the market, we can always affect its course through the market.  We’re here to help you navigate.