30/10/06

Hacking Publishing

From Alex, an interesting proposal from WorldChanging - to mobilise purchasers of their new book to simultaneously order the book from Amazon - and to catapult it up the bestseller lists, hopefully to the top. The plan is to use this ‘viral’ technique to short-circuit the usually circuitous marketing endeavours of a publishing house to expose the book to a greater market. Their argument is that there is no greater marketing device than the bestseller list, and that Amazon’s is second only to the NYT,

ublishing is like the film industry (with its obsession about opening weekend ticket sales) or the music industry (with its focus on making hits). Big is everything. Big gets you into stores. Big gets you media coverage. Big gets enough people talking about your book that the ideas in them (if there are any) have a chance to spread. The Long Tail may keep your book in print, but it won’t get your ideas into the mix.

Our book is not Big. It is thick; it is packed with solutions; it is, we think, smart and important.

But we don’t have the blockbuster machine working for us. We have no marketing budget at all. Our publisher, Abrams, is terrific, but they are not a big company. They have a comparatively tiny promotions budget and don’t have the kind of clout with booksellers to manufacture bestsellers.

Here’s what we do have: you.

Anyone for crowdsourcing marketing?

Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Hardcover)
by Alex Steffen, Al Gore (Foreword), Bruce Sterling (Introduction)
Buy at Amazon

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Publishing, Web.