Apt Portfolio
Us, Elsewhere
January 2008. Peter talked at last year’s Bookseller Seminar “Reaching Readers Online”. He’s been asked back for the 08 update at the end of January.
October 2007. The Evening Standard puts us in the “Literary Life” section of its 1000 Most Influential Londoners supplement:
“Apt is responsible for the most innovative new media and film projects in publishing. At a time when promoting books through short films was radical, Collingridge had 2.5m people hitting a film about Life of Pi. Bridle, an expert in artificial intelligence, joined Apt this year and was responsible for London Lit +, the open-source literary festival.”
Please note - The Bookseller requires subscription for some articles. Sorry about that.
Direct Action: isn’t it time that publishers teamed up to create a new internet channel that could take on Amazon? Column for The Bookseller LBF Daily (Direct Action: London Book Fair Daily, 18 April 2007)
A Way With The Web . Interviewed for The Bookseller about viral marketing. We ended up talking about astroturfing:
“I think [the Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom] were brilliant pieces of PR-driven lazy journalism, or tactical marketing gone right,” says Peter Collingridge, who runs Apt Studio, a publishing web consultancy. “The bands were never what they were said to be, but the label stuck and they got branded the ‘MySpace’ bands. It was fantastic marketing for MySpace and the bands and labels.”
“But publishers need to tread carefully. Collingridge warns against a practice known as “astroturfing,” where companies pose as grass-root fans and post fake praise online. “I have been frustrated by clients who want to buy friends on MySpace or think that employing agencies to go and talk about their products online–i.e. copy and paste the jacket copy into some teen forums–is a good idea,” Collingridge says.”
Out Of The Box: a column for The Bookseller about publisher sites:
“Publishing is an industry where, very often, the only “customers” publishers have in mind are the retailers. Despite needing to get closer to readers, to find out what drives purchases, publishers remain at least one step removed from their “end users”. Any company in as competitive and difficult a market as entertainment should have its consumers higher in its mind.”
Cutting out the middle man - an article from The Bookseller in which we are quoted on publishers selling books direct to consumers.
Publishers must learn to whisper on the web: The Observer on how publishing campaigns (such as ours for Lunar Park) are using the web to sell books.
“You can spend money on a radio or newspaper ad and you’re effectively shouting at your would-be readers,’ he says, ‘an online campaign is more like whispering in someone’s ear.’”
Google’s Print and Library programs have polarized opinion on the future of publishing. Here’s where we stood on it when interviewed by The Bookseller in 2005.
Much older stuff:
Click-Lit, The Guardian, 2003
Word-wise web, The Guardian, 2002
Pop Videos a Novel Way to Make Books Cool, Sunday Herald 2001
Books Go Pop for Publishers, The Bookseller, 2001