The jury is out as 15,000 Little Monsters 'like' Gaga's Facebook tip, The Drunk Diet
Lady Gaga, literary type. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
As the internet consolidates its position as the dominant medium(s) of our era, it's not just Amazon's terrifying brand reach - with the new smart phone app that allows people to use bricks and mortar booksellers as 3D versions of itself - that's affecting the consumption of reading. More and more, we are getting to our information via Facebook, Twitter and other online networks, and that seems to go double for books: there is an exponentially growing number of people coming to their information and shopping via recommendations on social – or "socialising" as I like to call them – media.
So I sat up when I saw that Lady Gaga, one of the web's commanding giga-stars – with 21.5m followers on Twitter (Stephen Fry has a mere 4m) – has recommended a book, on Facebook. "Lüc Carl Buy his book. HE'S AWESOME!!!!! Great memoir about losing weight on your own terms."
Within a matter of hours, more than 15,000 people had "liked" it, a pretty reliable indicator of a coming "viral" success, since the socialising networks can magnify the book trade's treasured "word-of-mouth" marketing to a global scale in a matter of days. If Oprah Winfrey was able to make a star out of web sceptic Jonathan Franzen with her TV show, what Gaga might do for Lüc Carl boggles one's reading glasses.
And given that her 21.5m followers - the healthily "troubled adolescent" Little Monsters, as she calls them – are mostly the notoriously book-phobic but economically vital teen demographic, the potential for her to become a book trade player to rank alongside eminences grises like Jeff Bezos, is plainly vast.
Full story at The Guardian.
So I sat up when I saw that Lady Gaga, one of the web's commanding giga-stars – with 21.5m followers on Twitter (Stephen Fry has a mere 4m) – has recommended a book, on Facebook. "Lüc Carl Buy his book. HE'S AWESOME!!!!! Great memoir about losing weight on your own terms."
Within a matter of hours, more than 15,000 people had "liked" it, a pretty reliable indicator of a coming "viral" success, since the socialising networks can magnify the book trade's treasured "word-of-mouth" marketing to a global scale in a matter of days. If Oprah Winfrey was able to make a star out of web sceptic Jonathan Franzen with her TV show, what Gaga might do for Lüc Carl boggles one's reading glasses.
And given that her 21.5m followers - the healthily "troubled adolescent" Little Monsters, as she calls them – are mostly the notoriously book-phobic but economically vital teen demographic, the potential for her to become a book trade player to rank alongside eminences grises like Jeff Bezos, is plainly vast.
Full story at The Guardian.
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