Archive
Links, March
In brief:
Another review of Google’s Unbound event for publishers. Quoting Chris Anderson, who notes that the average book sells 500 copies,
“If [authors] are writing books to be read, how can we maximize that?,” he asked. “De-stigmatize the mid-list, de-stigmatize the long tail — 999 readers is success! If you can turn that into 2,000, that’s [...]
Published: March 29, 2007. Read more →
Steal These Books? I’m not bothered…
Freakonomics and The Long Tail were two books which successfully used the web to market the ideas behind them, and ultimately the products. How did they do this? Well, of course the books and authors themselves were of a very high standard, and had the support of accomplished and professional PR companies. But also, the [...]
Reaching Readers Online :: Follow Up
It’s been a couple of weeks since the Bookseller’s Reaching Readers Online seminar. It was interesting, and I’ll be posting more about it soon – hopefully with a checklist of things that I think publishers should be doing with the web.
I’ve had a load of feedback from people who were there – unfortunately it wasn’t [...]
Are books becoming even less relevant?
Russell Davies, in conversation with Richard Huntington (again) and Mark Earls.
In this podcast (MP3 here) they pretend to talk about a specific planning brief set by Russell to readers of his blog (part of the “how to plan” series of posts). In fact, they end up revealing how smart people like them approach a [...]
Published: March 13, 2007. Read more →
Londonstani Graffiti & Film
So, the final post on this campaign. (Read the background here, here and here)
The plan was that we would to do something wild, something that totally circumnavigated the mainstream media (the very same media that had had the knives out and so very sharp for the book when it was published in hardback).
We agreed [...]
Published: March 12, 2007. Read more →
Read this article
From Medialoper,
“while publishers are rolling out tools (see: HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster), they still don’t seem to grasp the whole concept of search. Search, to publishing houses, is something seen, not done well. Don’t believe me? Type press releases into the HC search box. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
My point, of course, is one I [...]
Published: March 9, 2007. Read more →
Astroturfing, the income of crowds, and other fake stories
I’m about to be quoted in The Bookseller, I think, on how publishers run the risk of screwing their brands and authors long term – and devaluing their relationships with readers – by making the mistake of short-term astroturfing to appear as if they are popular with the kidz.
The idea of astroturfing goes hand [...]
Published: March 6, 2007. Read more →
Browse inside: MediaLoper on HC
Another Medialoper Nutshell, this time on the new ‘widget’ introduced by HC to allow bloggers to embed an extract on their sites:
HarperCollins is facing two key challenges with this feature. In order for this experiment to work, users must associate books and authors with the publisher. When I think “Michael Crichton”, I don’t automatically think [...]
Social Bookworking: the Karoo Test
It’s possibly heating up a little bit now. Just as AbeBooks.com announces that they are finally rolling in LibraryThing recommendations (which has to be a good thing), I thought I’d link to a few of the other sites doing similar things to Librarything.
Masterplan
Here’s a quick one. Great animation, interesting looking film, if a little paranoid. MasterPlan movie. (Follows on from last year’s – or even the year before’s GoogleZon)
Published: March 5, 2007. Read more →