Do your photographs keep getting cropped when you post on Facebook? Make sure your author page has the right sized pictures.

A recent infographic from PostRocket will help you calculate the proper dimensions for link images, photographs and profile pictures on Facebook. AppNewser has more details:

PostRocket shared a long list of practical Facebook tips in an infographic, looking at how you can optimize your stories, images and posts for Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. EdgeRank decides how many people see your posts, so you should follow all these useful tips.

(Via Alma Katsu)

Do you struggle to find readers on Facebook?

SocialTimes recently caught up with Facebook journalism program manager Vadim Lavrusik, getting a long list of useful storytelling resources and tips. Here’s more from SocialTimes:

With a longer character limit than Twitter (around 60,000 characters compared to Twitter’s 140), Facebook stories can unfold in real-time through text, images, and videos on the Page or serve as a preview for a longer article on a news website. Stories told on Facebook benefit also from community dialogue through comments, likes, and shares, Lavrusik said. Facebook recently launched a media portal for journalists to aid in their storytelling, with reports on best practices for journalists and media companies, as well as a case study on how Slate magazine doubled its Facebook referrals between the second quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013.

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Why do some Americans feel nostalgic for a culture “where everyone knows his place?” Cultural critic Mark Dery tackled that question for Thought Catalog, publishing an e-single on American Anglophilia called “England My England.”

We took the opportunity to republish Dery’s Morning Media Menu interview from last year, covering everything from Facebook etiquette to Christian comic creator Jack Chick.

Press play below to listen on SoundCloud. While talking about best Facebook practices, Dery also outlined a version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game that could be played with New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani.

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Penguin Group (USA)’s Viking imprint will publish Elizabeth Gilbert‘s new novel, The Signature of All Things, on October 1st.

Before the release date hits, the book needs “a face.” To resolve this matter, Gilbert and her publisher invite the public to vote for their preferred cover design. Visit Gilbert’s Facebook page to pick one of three choices. Please note that a deadline has been set for March 24th.

Here’s more from Gilbert’s announcement: “We are turning to you for this decision because, frankly, we were unable to agree amongst ourselves. (Anyone who has ever worked in publishing knows what I’m talking about here: Disputes over book covers can get REALLY INTENSE.) I got so tired of debating over ‘what the reader wants’ that I decided instead to just try asking you guys directly.” The image embedded above features all three covers–which one would you choose?

Does your Twitter or Facebook profile look unbalanced?

The strategic communication company Cerebra has created an infographic outlining the ideal image sizes for photos on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social Times has more information:

In February 2012, Facebook updated the look of its Timeline for Pages to include cover photos and featured posts, among other changes. Twitter’s December 2011 redesign, “Let’s Fly,” included new backgrounds for profiles. YouTube has changed quite a bit in the last year. The latest channel redesign, which will bring branded banners to all users, was announced a couple weeks ago. But it’s only available to select partners right now and is not reflected in this chart. Check YouTube’s channel art guidelines for updates.

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All writers and publishing professionals need to avoid posts that earn negative feedback from readers. These posts can affect your future Facebook performance.

Facebook recently revealed how the company tracks negative feedback from users. There are four kinds of negative feedback on Facebook, when a user makes the following decisions: to “hide all stories from a Page,” to “hide hide this story,” to “unlike a page” or to “report an object as a spam.”

Facebook’s secret EdgeRank algorithm takes into account this negative feedback, and it affects how many people see your posts. You should avoid posting spammy announcements, potentially annoying notes, unsolicited wall posts or other kinds of posts readers are likely to give negative feedback.

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Suzanne Collins and The Hunger Games dominated Facebook this year, her trilogy taking the first, second and third spots on Facebook’s Most Read Books of 2012 list.

Above, you can see Facebook’s infographic about the top books of 2012. Below, we’ve listed the top five books on that list…

1. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
2. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
3. Mockingjay by  Suzanne Collins
4. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
5. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling

Want to share your book with GalleyCat readers? We’ve upgraded our New Books page on Facebook where all our readers can share their new and upcoming work.

We receive an overwhelming amount of information about new books at GalleyCat, but we can only write about a tiny fraction of these new titles. Using this Facebook page, we will assemble a weekly list of upcoming fiction and nonfiction releases, helping us alert our readers to new books and cope with the overwhelming flow of publicity materials.

Submit your book to our free database of new books. Authors, publicists, editors, and readers can all make use of this new section. Our former “New Books” page has been removed, so feel free to reenter your book if it was previously part of our “New Books” section. As always, you can also post literary events on our Facebook wall.

Marvel’s Avengers Alliance game brought comic book heroes to Facebook, creating a highly successful new kind of storytelling on the social network. AllFacebook has more:

According to sister site AppData, Avengers Alliance has 5.3 million monthly active users. The game has also recently earned a spot on Facebook’s developers blog. According to the blog, the game was up and running quickly. It took just one day to prototype, and then there was one week of internal testing and one week for staging and going live. The game has become successful, Facebook notes, largely because of the quality of its open graph actions. The makers of the game wanted to ensure that the actions sent out by players would rise above the simple ones informing friends of achievements.

Press play below to listen to an encore edition of the Morning Media Menu where we interviewed Alex Irvine, the comic book writer and novelist behind Avengers Alliance.

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HarperCollins Canada created a special video to celebrate the 100,000 fans who have “liked” them on Facebook.

We’ve embedded the full video above–what do you think? Using the text from the jackets of their books, the publisher had this message for its readers:

Dear Facebook Fans, Thank you for helping create the greatest community of readers online. One hundred thousand strong and growing every day; made up of awesome, incredible book lovers just like you. We hope you’ll continue to share inspiration, share imagination and share reading.