Twitter Creates a #1 Book

The book 'The Cuckoo's Calling' climbed to number 1 everywhere this weekend after it was discovered that J.K. Rowling had actually penned the book under a pseudonym. I'm not certain why she elected to author the book under a different name, possibly due to lackluster sales and reviews from her last novel, 'The Casual Vacancy' but what is really interesting is how it was discovered...via Twitter. Excerpts from the article are below, but essentially after an editor tweeted he enjoyed the book, she was sent a tweet from an anonymous source saying it was written by Rowling. This sent the editor on an investigation in which the anonymous tweet was confirmed to be true. While this was not a planned digital marketing tactic, it shows the potential power of social media as a tool. Before social media, people would not have been connected enough to communicate in such real time to discover this. Now the tens of thousands of people who would never have read this book are quickly picking it up, all thanks to Twitter solving a mystery that no one knew needed to be solved.

http://paidcontent.org/2013/07/15/j-k-rowlings-secret-book-shoots-up-bestseller-lists-months-after-publication-under-a-pseudonym/

“It started on Thursday, said Richard Brooks, the paper’s arts editor, after one of his colleagues happened to post a tweet mentioning that she had loved ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling,’ and that it did not seem as if the book had been written by a novice.

‘After midnight she got a tweet back from an anonymous person saying it’s not a first-time novel — it was written by J. K. Rowling,’ Mr. Brooks said in an interview. ‘So my colleague tweeted back and said, “How do you know for sure?”

The person replied, ‘I just know,’ and then proceeded to delete all his (or her) tweets and to close down the Twitter account, Mr. Brooks said. ‘All traces of this person had been taken off, and we couldn’t find his name again.’”

Brooks then poked around online and found that Cuckoo and Rowling’s previous novel for adults, The Casual Vacancy, had the same agent, editor and publisher. And he sent copies of those books, plus Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to “a pair of computer linguistic experts, who found significant similarities among them.” A Rowling spokesperson then admitted it.