Thursday, February 14, 2008

Word-of-Mouth Top Book-Buying Decision according to Publishers Weekly

Felicia Pride wrote an article for the February 11th Publishers Weekly stating the results of a survey conducted by Global Market Insight Inc. It states that "Among African-American consumers, 33% buy five to 10 books a year and they generally decide what to buy through word-of-mouth, according to an e-mail survey of 1,285 consumers."

Read the entire article here: Word-of-Mouth Top Book-Buying Decision - 2/11/2008 - Publishers Weekly

Monday, February 11, 2008

HarperCollins Publishers Promotion to Make Select Books Available Online for Free

According to Seth Godin at the O'Reilly TOC conference this week "Authors are really idea merchants. The ideas that spread best win. Free ideas spread better than paid ideas. The way you monetize this is to sell 'souvenirs'.... It's not a new way of promoting, it's a whole new business."

This was part of his take on HarperCollins new program to offer complete online access to a select group of books for a month at a time. They are also providing "sneak peaks" of selected books by activating online access (limited to only 20 percent of the text) two weeks before the on-sale date. The files can only be viewed via the web and cannot be downloaded or printed.

Author and marketing guru Godin sees the Harper announcement as a typical traditional book publishing mentality attempting a new initiative: "They took all the [viral marketing] things that work--that make it spread--and they're turning them off." His idea is that marketing is "trying to start conversations, and if that conversation takes place the ideas spread."

Godin may be correct, but the big houses are scrambling to recreate the old publishing paradigm within the expanding internet universe. Tor Books is now offering a program with "free digital books from bestselling and award-winning SF and fantasy authors" through a newsletter sign-up on their website. Random House has announced "a pilot project to sell individual chapters of a book online."

HarperCollins Publishers Promotion to Make Select Books Available Online for Free: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance