Maximum PC, of all places, has uncovered some new ventures into book marketing and distribution and provides a very brief news item in its May issue, just now hitting the newsstands. The news is so fresh that it’s not even up on the magazine’s home page yet. Of course, I had to dig deeper.
Random House has come up with a clever new marketing ploy, selling individual chapters of books. It describes the scheme this way:
Sometimes what you want is a slice instead of the whole pie. That’s why we’re offering a new reading experience– the ability to purchase individual chapters. Imagine that! Downloading and reading exactly the part of a book that meets your needs.
The publisher is testing this scheme with the book Made To Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, with a website page devoted to offering chapter by chapter downloads for $2.99 per chapter. Of course, such a scheme works best with books with “stand-alone” chapters. BUT perhaps this might lead to the re-invention of serialized novels, like those of Dickens a century ago.
Random House also offers at its website a very useful “Browse and Search” facility for many of its books, powered by Insight widgets. A click on any book cover with the “Browse and Search” tag will bring up pages that you can flip through, rather like browsing in a bookstore. Bloggers and writers with websites can even embed selected books into their sites to help readers find and buy the books. I’m intrigued by this feature and have posted a sample at the bottom of the sidebar of this blog.
Harper Collins has an even more audacious marketing strategy. It picks certain books to feature for one month on its Browse Inside page. From this page, one can open the book online and read the entire book for free. The premise of this scheme is that some of the readers who look into a book for free will decide to buy a copy. Maximum PC reports that this “enticement model” was pioneered by Boing Boing editor and sic-fi writer Cary Doctorow, who has offered his books for free downloads. His own publisher, Tor Books, has picked up on the idea by offering free ebook copies of some of its titles. A new Tor website is coming, but in the meantime, curious readers are invited to subscribe to the publisher’s newsletter, which will offer a different free ebook each week.
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Comment by
Book marketing newbie
13 Apr 2008
This is interesting, I know a lot of small presses and self-publishers have been offering free samples of their work online for some time now, but I guess the big publishing houses are finally catching up.
Comment by
Mike
14 Apr 2008
Well, I for one won’t be buying the “Made to Stick” ebook, too many bad experiences with the Adobe “Digital Editions” software and its DRM.
Comment by
Tom Colvin
15 Apr 2008
Mike, you raise a very interesting point.. I haven’t yet tried Adobe “Digital Editions” aside from a quick look after I installed it. Could you elaborate a bit about the problems you’ve encountered? Thanks.
Comment by
Jeremy Osborne
16 Apr 2008
Novelty is not something I’d think would be reapplied to novels in my lifetime, and I’m happy to watch this unfold. It doesn’t matter whether or not larger ventures produce something that is viable, or even liked by the general populace, but rather that they simply attempt these new approaches. After all, we went from dot-bomb to the new-age of money makers like Google. If new publishing schemes keep popping up, someone (maybe even someone reading or writing in this blog) will come up with a method to make money, and all of us writers will have her/him to thank.
Comment by
Tom Colvin
16 Apr 2008
Mostly, Jeremy, the internet seems to have produced many ways for writers NOT to make money.
Now that I’m following the blog world, I’m seeing so many people, perhaps not true writers in the first instance, trying to “monetize” their written blogs, in search of elusive income. So far, I’ve managed myself to stay away from these obvious monetization strategies — I guess I’m still a purist. [But some days I feel my purity slipping...]
I agree with you, however, that someday, someone will come up with something that really works for writers. In the meantime, I’ll keep throwing the new ventures I discover up against the wall to see if any of them stick.