"From Tumbleweed to Twitter Fairy – The Petersfield Bookshop"

May 30, 2021 4:04 AM

In January 2020, the Petersfield Bookshop tweeted that it had made no sales that day. Its fortunes were turned around by Twitter support via Neil Gaiman. This is an update by the blogger, Matt Wingett, who brought it to Gaiman's attention, and here is a post by Wingett at the time. He also posted in January 2020 about the closure of another bookshop, Adelphi Books in Portsmouth.
posted by paduasoy (6 comments total)

Gaiman is always kind and generous on Twitter so it doesn't surprise me that he would do this. But does this mean that bookshops have a marketing/discoverability problem? How can a single tweet have this much impact long after it was posted?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:31 AM on May 30, 2021

Foci for Analysis > How can a single tweet have this much impact long after it was posted?

It's pretty much the 1000 True Fans concept in action. The usual rule of thumb for creators who make a living selling stuff online is that .1% of the people who follow your stuff are gonna be willing to buy stuff from you. Maybe .01%, if you're feeling pessimistic, or if you're a really popular account that gets presented as a first follow for new accounts and a way for bots to look more like real people - I suspect that there is a more complex equation needed to account for how that percentage changes as your reach changes. But my experience is that .1% feels about right for where that percentage is around the point where it can actually start being what pays your bills.

Gaiman, who is *dripping* in True Fans (2.8m twitter followers * .1%/.01% = 280k/28k), showed this sad, lonely bookshop to his fans, and enough of those fans decided to follow him that they now have 21.7k followers.

We went from having a fairly ordinary 1,200 followers to about 22,000 in just a few days. [...] We don’t need to do a ‘hard sell’, I just wave a pretty book at people on twitter and usually within the hour someone enquires about how much it is: direct messages, paypal and email mean that they can often have bought it and the book is in the post within a couple of hours of me tweeting it.

1200 * . 1%/.01% = 120/12.

21.7k * .1%/.01% = 2170/217.

And now any charming tweet they make about gnomes living in the dollhouse they've decorated their store with or whatever has a really good chance of going viral as their followers like/retweet it, with some tiny fraction of the people who see that deciding to follow them.

I really gotta spend some time doing fan art of the work of creators with several orders of magnitude more followers than me to see if I can get a little of this happening for myself...
posted by egypturnash at 8:34 AM on May 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's been fascinating to see a bit of this happening with Honest Dog Books, which a dog sledder bought up on the northern edge of Wisconsin a couple years ago. Dog sled Twitter isn't that big, but it's dedicated, and it's bookish. And so you've got a little book store in a town of 500, and it's got 2500 followers, and a monthly subscription books club, and virtual in-stores.
posted by wotsac at 9:00 AM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I really gotta spend some time doing fan art of the work of creators with several orders of magnitude more followers than me to see if I can get a little of this happening for myself...

I follow a few comics creators, including Molly Knox Ostertag and Noelle Stevenson. They're constantly retweeting fan art of their creations. It seems cool that they showcase the work of up-and-coming artists, and I often really like the art they retweet.

Until your comment just now, I hadn't considered that it also provides an incentive for artists to spend a bunch of time and energy on derivative works instead of their own ideas. I had just seen all that fan art as joyous and earnest.

So, thanks for the eye-scale-falling, I guess.
posted by gurple at 9:34 AM on May 30, 2021

Ideally the fan work should come from no small amount of delight in the work, too! I ain't gonna go do fan art of stuff I hate no matter how many followers they have.
posted by egypturnash at 10:13 AM on May 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

But does this mean that bookshops have a marketing/discoverability problem?

I’d assume that this type of antiquarian and secondhand bookshop used to cater mostly to the locality, and to collectors. However, as is mentioned in one of the posts, people are dropping out of the habit of actually going into shops (even pre-pandemic) which is going to cut down a lot on your business, meaning you need to try and focus more online. But there your vying for attention among hundreds of other shops, rather than just a couple in your immediate area. How do you differentiate yourself from the others?

The other problem is that at least in my experience secondhand books tend to be more about serendipity. I rarely go into a shop looking for a specific book, instead I’m browsing until something catches my eye. It’s a lot harder to replicate that experience online though.
posted by scorbet at 11:02 AM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]