Simon & Schuster is teaming with Milq, a new social media platform, to launch a books category on the content curation venture.
Milq is a social media platform designed to let users collect and share a wide range of content, be it music, art, movies, sports, TV, and now books. The site was launched earlier this year by Don MacKinnon, Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen and is looking to team with major content brands to establish its content categories. The venture has already partnered with such brands as VICE, Vanity Fair, Tribeca Film Festival and other companies.
Like most social media platforms, Milq is free to use on personal computers and mobile devices. Users can open an account using Twitter or Facebooks (unfortunately you have to make a direct email request to Milq if you’d rather not use those networks to open an account). Milq offers a list of established categories like movies and now books, under which are “Beads” or individual threads of content posted by members.
Beads are generally presented as a question, “What Book is On Your Nightstand?” or “What Book Should the President Read,” but Beads can also just focus on a writer’s work like the Sara Paretsky bead “By The Book: Sara Paretsky.” The posts in a Bead can be a video, a photo or audiobook passage or text post and, like any social media platform, each post in a Bead offers the user the ability to make comments, or share the item via other social media platforms. Milq users can follow people they find interesting and as people and content attract interest and clicks, the best (or at least most popular) content is even more discoverable. The site offers the potential to be a discovery and marketing platform for book content and authors.
Milq’s partnership with S&S will bring a number of S&S authors to the platform's new Books category. Starting this week, Walter Isaacson has posted several videos about women digital pioneers, content related to his new book, The Innovators, out this week. Anna Todd, author of After, a Wattpad sensation that attracted more than a billion reads, has started a post asking for music that evokes the novel (After was acquired earlier this year by S&S in a six-figure deal). Other S&S authors are also starting Beads and contributing to categories like “Books That Changed My Life.” S&S’s backlist blog Off The Shelf, is also working with Milq to create new content Beads.
Milq co-founder Don Mackinnon said S&S and its authors are using Milq “to create new experiences around books and engaging ways to connect with the authors themselves.”
Ellie Hirschhorn, S&S executive v-p and CDO, said the publisher is always on the lookout for “new methods to satisfy the seemingly insatiable public appetite to learn more about the lives, interests and pursuits of their favorite authors.” Milq offers “an exciting new and wholly original forum that will enable authors and readers to connect in a way that extends well beyond the previous limits of author-reader interaction.”
