The site had a single purpose: to recommend new books to readers who have just finished something. It would be as simple as Google: a search box asking for the last book you read (and enjoyed). The site would then go and query Amazon, Librarything and other booky API services, and deliver you some recommendations for what to read next. Very simple.

We (well, James) built it quite quickly, and I blogged the results after the pretty insane first month.

And now the dust has settled, I thought I’d update that with some stats for the first 10 months.

Who Visits Bookseer?

Since launch (June 1, 2009) until April 21st, 2010, we’ve had 739,565 visits, 592,969 of which are absolutely unique. 1,839,702 pageviews have been recorded (2.49 pages per view) and a bounce rate of 40.41%.

Across all visitors, there is an average stay of 1m 27 seconds, and 80% of our visitors are first-timers here. Here’s where they come from:

• 519,249 are from the USA (mostly California, then New York, then Texas)
• 47,879 are from Canada (really evenly spread out actually)
• 42,143 are from the UK (overwhelmingly, London)
• then it’s Brazil, Australia, Russia, Germany, Ireland….

What is also interesting is the difference in usage shown by the different type of visitors. There are two main types of visitors: those who are “referred” to the site by a link on another site (e.g. Stumbleupon) and those who find the site through search.

People who search organically for “what should i read next” and find Bookseer.com have a significantly lower bounce rate (27%), spend twice as long on the site (3m 23s) and view almost four pages, when compared to the average. We think this shows that these visitors have a genuine interest in finding another book.

Encouragingly, these visitors have increased a lot in the past few months. There is also some amazing loyalty: 5.47% of users visited the site more than 9 times. 2% visited the site over 100 times!

Most Popular Books

Without further ado, here are the most popular recommendations asked of the Bookseer in the past 10 months:

1. Twilight (15,260)
2. Harry Potter (11,438)
3. The Help (6,945)
4. 1984 (6,510)
5. The Road (4,286)
6. On The Road (2,195)
7. Breaking Dawn (3,559)
8. The Time Traveler’s Wife (3,381)
9. Pride and Prejudice (3,176)
10. The Bible (2,859)
11. Fight Club
12. The Lovely Bones
13. Enders Game
14. Catcher in the Rye
15. My Sisters Keeper
16. The Lost Symbol
17. The Perks of Being A Wallflower
18. Atlas Shrugged
19. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
20. Water for Elephants
21. Brave New World
22. The Book Thief
23. Lolita
24. The Catcher in the Rye (note double entry with above)
25. The Great Gatsby
26. Lord of the Rings
27. The Dispossessed

and many more. Note that these appear to be genuine searches (rather than being distorted, for example by referrals from popular sites direct to results pages). The only title to receive more than 1,000 page views as a landing page is The Dispossessed, just outside the top 20.

Obviously the two big titles are the Twilight and Harry Potter series. I find it interesting that whilst people search on a book name (”Twilight”) for Stephenie Meyer, they do a generic one for J.K. Rowling: “Harry Potter” is, obviously, not the name of a book.

I have a little theory that many people come to the site and test out their favourite book and see what comes back. In fact, I’m certain that’s what lots of people do, and this is why we have such a diverse spread of titles (over 104,000 different books have been entered into the Bookseer).

I’m delighted that the top 10, whilst influenced by Meyer and Rowling, contains some of the greatest works of literature from the 20th and 21st Century. The Road? On the Road? 1984? What a literate bunch of people with great taste inhabit the site.

I am also amazed and thrilled that we have had 104,886 different pages viewed in the period since launch. Ignoring the home page, I think that means we have had 104,883 different titles entered into the system.

And, whilst you might think lots of them have just been entered once (by the author?!) it is not until the 44,008th title (”كتاب السير”) that we start to see single searches. It’s pure long-tail stuff.

Oh and The Bible is quite a fun one, in terms following the author names attached to it:

• God
• Jesus
• King James
• Various
• Jesus Christ
• Peter
• Moses
• Anonymous
• Richard Dawkins
• The Apostles
• Many authors

Why (and how?) do People Come to Bookseer?

96% of our traffic comes from referrals, and only 4% comes from search. This is a bit disappointing, and we should work on that.

Search falls into two camps – branded and non-branded keywords.

• Branded – 70% of search terms are around ‘book seer’ (or a derivative).
• Non-branded / organic search: ‘what should I read next’ or ‘i’ve just finished reading’ (and derivatives) account for 30% of search (1.23% of visits)

.

As of today, bookseer is ranked no 8 for ‘what should I read next‘. The most common “non-branded” search terms, i.e. stripping out variants on “bookseer” are:

• what should i read next
• what to read next
• what book should i read
• what book should i read next
• what should i read next?
• what should i read
• i just read what should i read next

Which is great as this demonstrates the need that the bookseer is trying to fulfil. What’s also interesting is the impressive growth of these terms in the last 6 months:

Referrals

Stumbleupon sends a whopping 56.47% of traffic our way. I know very little about stumbleupon but that’s a huge slice of our visitors. Thanks to whoever is involved in that!

In terms of referrals, Lifehacker sent a chunk of traffic (16,745) but pretty much all in one day. Facebook sent 11,114, and Twitter 6,539.

I find this last particularly interesting as on March 5th of this year, Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly publishers, and with just under 1.5m followers on twitter) tweeted Bookseer:

I follow Tim, and dreaded it when I saw this – expecting it to fireball our server – but in fact only 210 visits came from Twitter on March 5th. Not sure what this suggests about our site, or Twitter, but I would have expected Tim’s followers to be bookish types who might follow the link. As it is I think it’s 0.015% of Tim’s total readership.

%age of visitors who actually submit a search

Many websites have a majority of visitors who come to the home page and then go away again without actually doing anything. So we thought we’d compare people who come to the site without actually putting in a book, and those who ask for a recommendation. Kind of a test of how good the home page is:

The number of visitors who actually search for something remains at a steady 50%. Not too bad, really. In the above chart, non-searches is visitors who didn’t look for a book, and searches is the ones who did: they’re roughly equal!

(Those who don’t search either just come to the site and “bounce” off again, without engaging any further; or who enter the site via a link to a results page [example])

Popularity by Region

We did some data wrangling to breaks out visits by Territory then Page Title, to see if there is a difference in popular titles in a given country. We extracted top 10 title data for each country in turn, for any time period, and thus saw trends for top titles in each country for any time period.

As an example, here’s a table of successful searches by country (USA):

Drilling down in the US gives us a list of top 10 book titles; we need to filter these by result pages to get:

Clicking on Twilight gives us the trending graph:

…and we can see that searches for Stephenie Meyer’s vamprance (rompire?) were rather popular in the lead-up to the US film release date in November last year.

Obviously the USA is a huge share of our audience – if there is interest we’ll show UK only titles up here by comparison.

Next Steps

I hope you found this interesting – we did. And it’s made us think a bit, and try a few things out.

So, here’s what we’re going to try and do next:

• Work on the page ranking to try and improve bookseer.com’s search visibility on a search for the non-branded, organic terms such as “What should I read next“
• Consider social features, such as adding Twitter and Facebook linking on each page, so that people can ‘like’ the recommendations. Compliment this by creating a facebook page for BookSeer.
• Use the Bookseer Twitter account more. We’ve been having some fun with this, making recommendations inspired by topical events.
• Consider a mobile app? Some ideas have included the ability to take a photo of an ISBN and get back recommendations immediately. So for example if you’re in a bookshop, you “scan” a book with your phone camera and get back recommendations. Last I heard, Amazon had banned the use of their data in mobile apps

Got any other requests for data or features? Let us know below.

Visit the Bookseer
Follow the Bookseer on Twitter
More about the bookseer

Watch a short film about the data we capture from ebook apps.

Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Visitors

• We’ve had 19,716 page views, across 4,403 page titles, with 15,181 unique page views.
• Visits are 7,123 with uniques at 6,602. Which suggests about 10% of people asked the Book Seer for advice on more than one title. (Or, if you felt generous, 90% of people got the answer they were looking for. Personally, I’m not quite that optimistic – if that were true, then we really should have set up an affiliate account on the referrals to Amazon… although I think that violates the non-commercial terms of service on the API.)

Pages

• The home page was the most popular, but only bounced 30.5% of visits. Which seeing as much of the referred traffic was from StumbleUpon, I think is pretty good – they are hard people to entertain. Having said that I find it really hard to see what StumbleUpon has said about a site or even to find a referring link.
• There are only two pages on the site- the home page, and the results page. The results page has the name of the book written into the URL (and the title) so we can tell from the logs what books have been looked at the most. If that URL had included the ISBN or something else abstract – we wouldn’t know anything. Nice work James. As a result we can tell which titles have been the most popular requests of the seer.

Books

And so the next bit is the fun bit. We have 4,406 different page titles, and 3 of those were the home page (we collected data when the site was codenamed “My Next Book”). All the other 4,403 are questions for the seer.

Here’s the top 20 – and it provides a fun overview of people’s reading habits. Note that some – not all – results are skewed by the fact that bloggers linking to the bookseer linked directly to a results page. So Stumbleupon appears to have linked directly to the Dave Eggers, What is the What page, a link which resulted in 166 of the 269 page views for that title. Still, What is the What remains a popular book among people who come to consult the Bookseer – or, looked at another way, one that people in aggregate find particularly hard to follow up to.

Top 20

Note that the links in the list below are ones I have made on the title only. Requests for an author only (e.g. Dave Eggers, without “What is the What”) are met with a demand for better information.

1. The Book Seer | What Is The What- 269 [This is slightly unfair as it is one of the pages linked to by StumbleUpon)
2. The Book Seer | Twilight - 116
3. The Book Seer | Harry Potter 74 [Note - Librarything has a lot of problems with this request]
4. The Book Seer | 1984
5. The Book Seer | The Road 55
6. The Book Seer | Neuromancer 52
7. The Book Seer | Atlas Shrugged 30
8. The Book Seer | Pride And Prejudice 27
9. The Book Seer | The Bible 26 [some great left-field recommendations for that]
10. The Book Seer | Outliers 24
11. The Book Seer | Enders Game 23
12. The Book Seer | On The Road 23 [Note the difficulty Amazon has compared to Librarything when no author is entered]
13. The Book Seer | The Catcher In The Rye 22
14. The Book Seer | ウェブ進化論 22 [No idea, sorry, but from the recommendations, looks pretty cool]
15. The Book Seer | Infinite Jest 21
16. The Book Seer | The Secret History19
17. The Book Seer | The Stand 19
18. The Book Seer | American Gods
19. The Book Seer | The Book Thief 18
20. The Book Seer | Catcher In The Rye 17

Whilst the top 20 is interesting, what I love is that the full list of titles is so broad. The vast majority of books only get one search on them; the bottom of the list is Q E D.

Titles 4000-4015 in the Bookseer list

Observations

• I think this is pretty cool, although I don’t know why. Taking aside Neuromancer – James’ test title – is it a really interesting zeitgeist of what people are reading? Or their favourite books? Or the books they find hardest to followup? Or the first book that comes to mind? Twilight, Harry Potter – OK, these may demonstrate a paucity of imagination as much as they show a teenage visitor set. But Infinite Jest?, What is The What? Atlas Shrugged? The Road? Whilst in the news, these aren’t exactly bestsellers. When Russell* linked to Rogue Male, I think the favourites is a good guess.
• Oops. We should probably strip out “The”, “A” and other prefixes to avoid duplicates such as [The] Catcher In The Rye.
• The Bookseer works much more accurately if you put in an author as well as a title, although James does a lot of clever things in the background (stuff learned from projects such as Bkkeepr for a start) to make up the difference.
• LibraryThing handles “title only” requests much better than Amazon. Amazon gets confused by “The Bible”, or rather, the number of titles in its database that include “The Bible”.
• LibraryThing gets confused quite often. Sorry Tim – do get in touch if we can find better ways to do this, or to query Unsuggester items (although part of me thinks the beauty here is in the simplicity).

And finally apologies to anyone using Internet Explorer 6 (and to my horror, this includes about 3.5% of visits and several large UK publishers) – you may have issues. Not sure what that says – we tried really hard to support you.

Visit the Bookseer

* [Russell - I'm with you. I recently re-read Rogue Male and loved it. I also gave my copy to David Simon, fan boy-style, because I read that he is apparently making a film based on Man Hunt, the Fritz Lang movie based on RM. He hadn't heard of the book, and wasn't very impressed by my gift.]

On the note of free, the beginning of this podcast from the BEA has Chris Anderson saying some interesting things about free and paid-for content. A word of warning though – the other guys are really boring.

While we’re at it, and at the risk of turning this into a Chris Anderson / Wired love-in, I found this interview (David Weinberger, author of the forthcoming Everything Is Miscellaneous, interviewing Richard Sambrook, Head of Global News at the BBC) rather relevant – in a horseradish kind of way.

Next – and by way of Mr Sambrook’s blog (as is the Second Life piece at the end of this), another comment on free, and the future of media:

Many readers and some journalists would have no difficulty accepting the argument that print and online really are complementary. But the real difficulty exists in the financial realm, where the economics of print and online are about as compatible as Evian and crude oil.

This is because of the web’s great secret – what economists like to describe as a marginal cost of production and distribution that tends to fall to zero.

In the online world, once media owners have written the necessary software code, added some content, and purchased some cheap web hosting, their potential to attract audiences is theoretically limitless.

The financial DNA of newspapers – and most forms of traditional media – is very different. As Pat McGovern, the American who runs both magazines and web sites at computer industry publisher IDG, says: “Without print, paper and postage, profit margins online are about 40 per cent.” Print magazines, McGovern suggests, make margins of up to 15 per cent.

Of course, there’s a catch. The problem with digital media is its tendency to radically shrink a publisher’s revenue base.

In the US, digital media consultant Vin Crosbie has calculated that each printed newspaper reader is worth between $500 and $1,200 a year in terms of reader revenues and advertising cash.

By contrast, Crosbie suggests that the average online newspaper reader is worth perhaps $8 a year.

read the whole piece: Blimey O’Reilly (Press Gazette) – and it’s nothing to do with the O’Reilly Tools Of Change conference. More on that soon.

Next: RIP FOPP. Another tipping point in the coffin of retail (and mixed metaphors). I used to like FOPP -when I started going, to the old Cockburn St store in Edinburgh 14 years ago, it was vinyl heaven, and they had represses of some amazing old deleted albums at silly prices. I used to spend a fortune there. Then something happened: they expanded, and lost that sheen of cool. Redesigned, more piled-high stock, and lots of emo kids hanging about outside. Don’t know why expansion and cool are mutually exclusive, maybe it coincided with the death of vinyl, but it went wrong for me. I heard that a couple of years ago, most of the founding partners left – somewhat acrimoniously, allegedly. And then last night, walking through Earlham Street in Covent Garden, the store was closed, with security guards outside – despite claiming to be open from 10am – 10pm. What a shame.

Might as well get it out of the way. The Long Tail has just won the Loeb prize for best business book of the year. Well done Chris!

Finally, the Edinburgh Book Festival really needs to sort out their ticketing. We (when Screenbase still existed) used to do the site, and the ticketing systems, for them, and never had a problem if ” demand surged far beyond what was expected”. We did the Book, Film , Childrens, and Science Festivals for a while. In fact, the Science Fest still uses the code and sells hundreds of tickets a day, sometimes in the thousands, through the site and the box office. What bothers me about this story is that it must be very embarrassing for both EIBF and their web company, seeing as they seem to trot out the same story – the Glastonbury-like spin that we’re so popular that all our systems crashed – every year. Surely systems total failure (and lots of frustrated punters) is no longer a way of defining popularity – if it ever was?

I’m really excited by this site, and think it represents a pretty bold move by the client, as well as being indicative of a larger tendency in publishing to (finally) see the merits in making book content available free online.

Our view was that seeing as we needed to update the promo anyway, it was worth doing something more ambitious than the hardback site, which really was just a wrapper for the promo, and a chapter download. (Still, the promo has been viewed over 75,000 times, and the chapters downloaded just a little less.)

The hardback site also didn’t have a load of google-friendly text on it, which meant that it wasn’t ever going to go very high up the search rankings.

Since the long tail concept first appeared in magazine form a couple of years ago, Chris Anderson’s Blog has talked a lot about the book (which has become one of those phrases like tipping point which everyone has started using). However, he was careful to not blog the exact content of the book – there were only a few thousand words I think which were on both blog and in the final manuscript. But Chris’ blog was hugely popular, and the business world has pretty much accepted “the long tail” as a concept.

In other words, there is a definite hunger for material from the book, but it’s not available online. We saw this was a chance to measure what effect giving away book content has on a book’s sales.

So, at the time we were briefed, I had been getting excited by building super-search-engine-optimised pages, serialising extracts of (non-fiction in particular) great books, with a view to widening the net of interest in the book. We’d done a similar job for the 2007 Granta List of Best Young American Novelists (which I have to say has pretty much done it’s job as regards the google rankings – although it could maybe do better by giving away more content…).

Additionally, there was some anecdotal evidence in the blogosphere about authors wanting to do exactly this (i.e. that obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy) – from the freakonomics guys , to Chris himself, to sci-fi dons. (In all the links here, I recommend reading the comments).

So, with Chris’ blessing – this is what we’ve done. Built a super-lightweight, fully valid, search-engine friendly, easy on the eye site to show off the range and quality of content in The Long Tail. There is also an exclusive new afterword to the book, which is only available online (and in the paperback itself)

I’m not claiming it’s unique – there have been a couple of other similar projects recently, which happened inbetween us planning this site, and it going live. For example, Headline’s one is It’s All About The Money (which I have to say isn’t the most google-able of phrases to use for a first novel), on which site a first crime novel is being serialised online. It’s now gone live.

But that’s a first novel, and I think that there is a perceived difference between giving away content from a book that sold very well in hardback (and seems to be going nuts in paperback) and a first novel. And that site isn’t so much about search engine optimisation as giving people a taste for the book. (Certainly their code says as much: it’s by no means semantically markedup)

Anyway, we’ve had one piece of (negative) feedback already – in this case apparently from an anonymous source at RH – about the design and structure of the site depending too much on the book and not being original enough.

But where the measure of this site’s success will be is in how much traffic it gets, how many links to it begin to appear in the coming weeks, an how well-indexed and ranked the site gets on searches for “The Long Tail“.

I’ll give an update in a couple of weeks.

Our new site for Chris Anderson’sThe Long Tail has launched (on the same domain as before, www.longtailbook.co.uk

What’s interesting to us is that the site gives away over 20 extracts from the book in quite some detail. It’s built to be search-engine friendly, super fast, and hopefully sexy too. Let us know what you think.

Long Tail site for paperback publication.

How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over or even disparaged smash hits like “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? … Conventional marketing wisdom holds that predicting success in cultural markets is mostly a matter of anticipating the preferences of the millions of individual people who participate in them. From this common-sense observation, it follows that if the experts could only figure out what it was about, say, the music, songwriting and packaging of Norah Jones that appealed to so many fans, they ought to be able to replicate it at will. And indeed that’s pretty much what they try to do. That they fail so frequently implies either that they aren’t studying their own successes carefully enough or that they are not paying sufficiently close attention to the changing preferences of their audience.

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 doubling your success. Those tools typically do not require big marketing budgets from publishers. Yet if you’re expecting publishers to do it, you’ll probably be disappointed. The solution is for you [the author] to do it.”

The answer (of course) is to leverage every Web 2.0 tool out there. Anderson’s success story of spending two years blogging the writing of “Tail,” giving review copies to every blogger who requested one (”we didn’t discriminate by size – the copies cost $2 apiece”), crowd sourcing the cover art, and throwing MeetUps rather than bookstore signings was just the beginning of a panoply of author-orchestrated success stories.

And Corey Doctorow,

Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin have been giving their books away online for free for several years now, in some cases before the title appears in print. Doctorow, a vocal opponent of restrictive copyright protection, goaded the audience. Alluding to the file sharing endemic in music, film, and video, he asked, “Why don’t people care enough about literature to steal it? I think that’s genuinely alarming. It’s because books are Web-invisible. The Web is all about serendipity. When you’re on the Web searching for food, you should find books about food. Book search should work like Web search…Free e-books make commercial sense.”

and Seth Godin,

“The enemy is not piracy. The enemy is obscurity. If books are invisible, that’s a really good recipe for not getting stolen from — but not for selling. The Web is the greatest distributor for the frictionless sale of books in history,” chimed in Godin.

“I’ve read seven of Carl Hiaasen’s novels,” he continued, “Still, the publisher has no idea who I am, so they spam the reviewers. Why can’t they just say ‘Seth, it’s ready?’”

She goes on (really, just read the whole thing, but),

Free Sells Books

Of course, publisher converts to online were also present to extol their success on the Web. “Free sells books,” affirmed Dan Weiss of Barnes & Noble’s study guides, SparkNotes. “Everything that’s in print is free online,” he said, and over half his site’s traffic comes from Google search.

Cambridge University Press’ former Managing Director Michael Holdsworth talked about the imprint’s “zombie titles” that don’t sell at all, then rise from the dead in digital versions. The company has instituted a “Lazarus program” to bring back books that have long been out of print and make them available on Google Book Search “It’s pretty cheap to do, and we love it to pieces. Book search visitors look at more Cambridge pages, are twice as likely to order, and spend 50 percent more per visit.” Springer, too, is successfully reviving its backlist online, making once-defunct titles available via print-on-demand.

and the response from the audience,

Over lunch, I chatted with a number of publishers in attendance. Reactions were mixed. One publisher, specializing in reference books for the K-12 market just doesn’t see the value of online. His titles are bought exclusively by school systems, primarily for classroom use. An author in the audience felt all the blogging was great — if you’re a best selling author like Godin, or, like Doctorow, behind the Web’s most popular blog. Many others were convinced, but dreaded bringing the message home to the higher-ups.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To do that, they need cooperation that won’t immediately be forthcoming from book publishers.

Next: BookSquare continues to talk to publishers about building brands, this time in reference to Warner Books’ move to being called Grand Central. No great insight, but as they say, a lot of crankiness.

Clarification on the etymology and use of ‘viral marketing’.

Brilliant expose of Machiavellian Microsoft and their transparency for a Wired article. Operation Channel 9

Slow-selling products have always been aggregated but when it comes to making money they have never rivalled the hits.

Anderson said that may well be true for the established media companies but the new players have certainly turned the long tail into real money. “Maybe Universal isn’t going to see a big benefit from the long tail. But look at YouTube — Google bought that for $1.6 billion (£840m),” he said.

Wrong. Abe will (and indeed, reading beyond the headline, is) be using the data collected by Librarything to create better recommendations. What does this mean? Librarything allows users to catalogue their books, and to create virtual libraries. As the data in these libraries is centralised, LibraryThing then has fun running comparisons across the data sets, and drawing conclusions about one user’s taste based on all other user’s taste. So, if I’ve read All’s Fair and Big If, then LibraryThing knows that OK, I may be a security risk to the US President, but that I may also enjoy The Testament of Yves Gundrun (which, actually, I acquired for Canongate years ago). And that’s pretty cool.

What makes it different to Amazon’s ‘people who shopped for’ or ‘people who bought’ is that it is based on book reading rather than shopping. It’s based on passion and taste. And that’s what makes it valuable.

LibraryThing is the purest example of ‘collaborative filtering’, i.e. using other people to (jargon alert) recommend stuff they like to you from the ‘long tail’ or millions of products. It doesn’t make these decisions based on newness, press coverage or bestseller status: it is probably more likely to recommend a book that was published years ago than last week. Which means it is meritocratic, personal and extremely valuable.

Abe are doing a very smart thing here and it will give them an edge. It is exactly how they should leverage their stake in LibraryThing, and what is cool about it is that Amazon can’t compete with it, and whilst publishers should be able to they can’t either.

This is very exciting and I can’t wait to see how it pans out. The only odd thing is the marriage with Abe: it is surely a better fit with Amazon. Who knows, maybe where this is going will lead to Abe moving more into focus on Amazon’s acquisition radar. If they can nail how to get people to buy more books that they enjoy more, Amazon doesn’t care if they are new or second hand. On paper, it could be the holy grail…

The central tenet of our strategy for this was to get the PDF (which is branded in the RHUK edition’s livery, and contains links back to the site) as widely distributed as possible. So the promo, Creative Commons production files, and iTunes distribution was all part of that. Random House are delighted. There was also a piece in last week’s bookseller (which isn’t for some reason online) about the work and the successes in the trade and beyond. Hopefully I’ll get some feedback from the client, Adam Humphrey, to post up here and to include in the lecture I’m giving on book promos in Dundee on November 22nd.

The YouTube Version has been seen (to date) 4005 times;
17,000 copies of the book are out in the trade;
The PDF has been hit 10,151 times;
The iTunes podcast file has been hit 1589 times (and the guy who did the voiceover for the audio version has just been in touch)
The ipod version has been seen 49 times – which is cool given that people will be searching for Long Tail at all, and finding what we’ve done (it shows iTunes is a viable distribution channel)
The hi def version has been downloadad 454 times;
The mashup files are in the couple of hundreds each;

The ironic thing is that all of the stats we’re looking at suggest that the promo and campaign itself is following a long tail model… let’s wait and see what to do for the paperback. I’d love to amend the artwork from the promo for the jacket, but I’ve not yet ever managed to persuade a publisher to do that. Adam?