26/08/07

The 100,000 hits of Gil Scott Heron

Talking of Canongate. When I worked there (from 1997-2001), I came up with a crazy idea to reconcile my love for pop videos / the web with my frustration at publishing books that couldn’t reach a wider audience.

The idea was simple - give my film-maker /animator mates a copy of a Canongate book, a little bit of cash, and ask them to respond to the book in their own way with a five-minute short. “Pop Promos for Books”. We’d (i.e. Canongate) promote the film at film festivals (at the time I also had a couple of mates who ran Mirrorball for the Edinburgh International Film Festival), through the Canongate site (which I ran at the time) and the all-round PR and traffic buzz would be a virtuous circle for filmmaker, author and publisher alike.

I wrote a business plan for the idea, developed it a bit so that it was less film- and bandwidth-intensive; and the Scottish Arts Council awarded us a boatload of cash to take the idea further.

Anyway, we did a few of them. The Life of Pi promo has had over 2.5 million views since it launched in 2002. The Gili Dolev directed one for the Book of Genesis never saw the light of day. And this weekend, the first promo we completed, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, for one of “my” authors at the time, Gil Scott Heron, saw it’s 100,000th view on YouTube.

Now, that’s not a huge amount, but the comments for the promo and the Google ranking it achieves gives me some small glow. I was always very proud of the promo - directed by Intro’s Julian House, who is a fantastic talent - but because of the success of the Life of Pi promo, and the bandwidth costs of hosting it at the time, it never had a “proper” release until we put it on YouTube a year ago. I just wish that it had done as the business plan predicted, and sent sales of the book it was promoting - a collection of Gil’s lyrics and poems called Now and Then - through the roof.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Apt Studio work, Music, Publishing, Web.