No Time to Read? No Problem!

Would you read them on the ferry? Would you read them on a Blackberry? As silly as it sounds, these are the types of questions that the folks behind DailyLit, Bit o’ Lit and Random House Audio’s “Make Your Commute More...” campaign have started taking very seriously. Each contender has respectively come up with some clever ways to help publishers squeeze books back into the quotidian grind. Below we save you (even more!) time by giving you the lowdown on each of their strategies...


The Practical Approach:

The Gimmick: Daily bite-sized installments of books served up straight to your virtual inbox via e-mail or RSS feed.
The Selection: Over 1000 classic and contemporary books (Titles in the public domain,plus various publishers including Berlitz, Harlequin and Chronicle Books)
Who Pays What: Public domain books are free. Copyrighted books require a small fee(on average around $5). CEO Susan Danziger told Publishing Trends that they
were exploring sponsorship as a way to defray that fee.
Extras: Reader rating system; public reading groups on Twitter; Wikipedia tours


The HyperLocal Approach:

The Gimmick: Washington, DC-based campaign to promote new books by handing out booklets of excerpts to commuters each week
The Selection: Primarily local authors, authors on tour (book events are advertised) and titles tailored to the D.C. market
Who Pays What: Free for commuters. Publishers pay advertising costs. Print and online advertising also available.
Extras: Excerpts also available online; events, feature articles and word searches featured in the back


The Marketing 101 Approach:

The Gimmick: Summertime campaign to promote audiobook listening by highlighting new titles and bestsellers that fall under one of a series of adjectives (ie thrilling,profitable, magical, entertaining, etc.). Bookstores, libraries and warehouse stores will feature posters, displays and branded (apparently pungent) air fresheners
The Selection: 64 designated Random House Audio titles (i.e. Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn as “entertaining”; Sebastian Faulks’ Devil May Care as “adventurous”)
Who Pays What: RH will focus on print media, radio sponsorship and online presence. Available at all the usual retailers
Extras: Free audio samples on www.MakeYourCommuteMore.com; the aforementioned air fresheners

UPDATE: DailyLit announced today that it launched its corporate sponsorship program by collaborating with GalleryCollection.com to make College Knowledge: 101 Tips, a college guide book, available for free.

Licensing Expo 08: What We Liked

Licensing Expo came to a close last week. Here are some things we liked:

• This fall, the Jim Henson Company will air its new show, "Sid the Science Kid," on PBS. The science show, which uses proprietary digital puppetry technology, is aimed at 3- to 6-year-olds, has a sketch comedy format, and covers topics like temperature, estimating, and measuring. In each episode, Sid asks a question like "Why do bananas go bad?" and he and his team set out to find the answer.
• Peter Rabbit . . . Naturally Better: "Socially Responsible Licensing Inspired by THE Classic 'Natural' Brand." As part of the initiative, Penguin Young Readers Group will release a new line of books, including a baby record book and board books, printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. (Look also for organic Peter Rabbit toys and toiletries for babies.)
• Scholastic's massive new Goosebumps initiative. We remember buying the original Goosebumps series from Scholastic's "Book Orders" in the 1990s. Things are a little different in 2008: The new 12-book Goosebumps HorrorLand series, launched this spring, is accompanied by a show on the Cartoon Network, multi-platform video games, DVDs, Halloween costumes, and, of course, Web sites (www.scholastic.com/goosebumps and www.enterhorrorland.com) with over 1.5 million unique visitors a month
• At Nickelodeon's orange-carpeted booth, the SpongeBob SquarePants Hour of Happiness on Tuesday, featuring square cupcakes with bright SpongeBob yellow frosting. Sweet, showy, not a lot of substance--a bit like Licensing Expo itself, you might say.
  

Licensing Expo 08: The New Consumer

Licensing International Expo 2008 landed June 10 at the Javits Center just in time for the summer’s first heat wave. Outside, temperatures hit nearly a hundred degrees. Inside, brands like Clifford, Goosebumps, and SpongeBob SquarePants were hot hot hot.

In a cooling economy, though, how can retailers make sure consumers choose their brands? In his panel “The New Consumer, the New Retail, and Licensing in the New World,” Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst of the NPD Group, offered some insight:

• For the first time, five generations of a family—a 5-year-old, 25-year-old, 45-year-old, 65-year-old, and 85-year-old—may influence one another’s purchasing decisions. There’s lots of growth in the teen market, and parents and kids share choices in entertainment of all types (you’ll see lots of overlap between the top 10 list of CDs that adults buy from stores and the top 10 list of artists kids download from P2P networks).
• The number one reason consumers buy a product is a recommendation from a friend or family member. Therefore, since friends and family members are such big influencers, retailers should find ways to market to them even if they are not the intended audience for a given product. “Find a second message for another audience,” Cohen says, citing anti-aging creams as an example: Young women “who say, ‘Mom, I love you, but I don’t want to look like you’” are a secondary, and strong, market for the products.
• Sell a lifestyle, not just a product. Customization and personalization are key, since the consumer thinks the ability to customize is the norm—think Nike iD sneakers, engraved iPods, and build-your-own Sony VAIOs with customizable colors and textures. “It’s not big dollars, but it’s a big connection point,” says Cohen.

Finally, Cohen showed an image of JFK. “Ask not if you should license product,” he said, “but who you should license with. . . . A picture is worth a thousand words, but licensing is worth 10,000.”

Déjà View? BookVideos.tv Relaunches

Hoping to shake up the world of online book marketing, today TurnHere unveils a new, expanded version of its BookVideos.tv site. And yet, while the promotional video platform has undergone many changes to presumably improve its functionality and overall consumer experience, only time will tell whether the bond forged between authors and readers through studio-quality shorts will actually result in higher book sales.

In the meantime, efforts have been made to maximize the site's networking component. With a range of newly available social media tools, visitors will now be able to embed videos on their own blogs, email them to a friend, Digg them, or tag them in del.icious. Substantiating this "organic distribution," TurnHere CEO Brad Inman says these features work particularly well with books because readers are such a passionate and verbal (duh!) bunch. And with book lover social sites such as goodreads and Library Thing (two of Bookvideos.tv distribution partners) ranking up to a hundred thousand registered users it's a hard point to argue. Coupling these tactics with other strategic moves such as adding a Facebook page for the site's fans and posting videos on TurnHere's branded YouTube channel, the company has made a hard drive towards online ubiquity.

Making their goal that much easier, currently there's only has a handful of contenders (ie Authorviews.com, bookwrap.com) vying to be readers' one-stop shop for behind-the-book footage on the web. And with unique visitor numbers dwindling in the hundreds per month, according to compete.com, and only a few if any publisher partnerships (Authorviews has a deal with Gibbs Smith and a couple other small houses) it seems the time is right for TurnHere to make the most of a niche market. And with a line up of big wig partners, there's a chance that they just may come out on top. While previously TurnHere partnered exclusively with Simon & Schuster, this time around the online video production company will showcase videos featuring authors from multiple publishers including Bantam Dell, Chronicle, Penguin Group (USA), Doubleday Broadway, Hachette Book Group, Loyola Press, Macmillan, Thomas Nelson and WW Norton.

BlogAds: What's Good, What's Bad

On April 22, we went to the Publishers Advertising and Marketing Association (PAMA) April Luncheon, which featured Henry Copeland, founder and president of BlogAds. Copeland talked about how publishers can better advertise on blogs—how they can, as he put it, "thrive in the kingdom of blog." Here's what Copeland says "smart ads" have in common:

• Multiple links. For book ads, even links to negative reviews interest people and and inspire thinking and conversation. "Sometimes the best friends you can have are dumb enemies," says Copeland.
• Cool images that attract the eyes and pique curiosity
• Faux video
• Hand-made feel
• Puzzle or something else to invite a click and promote curiosity

Conversely, bad ads have:

• No links
• Dull, text-heavy images—that includes book covers!
• A "designed" feel. "Overdesigned ads are less effective," says Copeland. "Blog readers are skeptical. These are fish that have seen a lot of hooks."
• Nothing to promote a click—the ad's the full story
  

If you're looking to improve your own book ads, monitor your clickthru rate and be ready to change course fast if something's not attracting enough clicks. And to see some examples of good and bad ads, click here.

A Whole New World? Try 50.

The land of make-believe is now charging admission. Okay, not exactly. But judging from what was discussed at this year's Virtual Worlds conference, which took place April 3-4 at the Javits Center in New York, this isn't too far off. Many would agree it was only a matter of time before someone thought to fuse kids' imaginations with a tangible prefab online universe. And now that they have, it seems no one can stop.

Over the next two years kids' worlds are expected to dominate growth in this booming space with over 50 virtual worlds set to launch. The keynotes from insiders at current virtual overlords Mattel, MTV, Whyville and Neopets reflected the collective anticipation at what's to come. Expressing both excitement and caution, Jack Myers, President, Myers Publishing, LLC, made the point, "Virtual worlds are the media of the future, and we need to build with new models, platforms and metrics."

Metrics continue to be a hot topic, as advertisers and marketers try to figure out how to both count up and capitalize on the millions of engaged eyeballs. At the moment, the easiest (and most widely used) audience metric is registered users, and as a general rule about 25% of registered users are frequent participants. Meyers added the caveat, however, that measuring users' emotional connections, focusing on the quality of their engagement -- not just size -- and measuring "in world" perception are all still important factors. Size-wise Neopets, the oldest virtual world of the bunch, currently reigns supreme with 45 million registered users. Stardoll has 15.7 million registered users with 30-35k new users/day (44% in the US, 46% in the EU, and a growing Asian market). Barbie Girls (introduced only last year) has already jumped to 10 million registered users, quickly gaining on Club Penguin (purchased by Disney last year) with over 12 million registered users and 700,000 paid subscribers. And Webkinz, the Ganz owned property that has sold over 2.5 million plush dolls, has converted those sales into an audience of over 1 million highly active registered users.

Publishers are starting to take notice - both looking to partner with existing worlds, and create worlds of their own based on new and established properties. Now with a toe in this space via '39 Clues' and their recent online/offline Goosebumps re-launch, Scholastic, for one, had numerous staffers floating around. And, Wendy Louie, New Media Marketing Manager at Random House Children's, sat on a panel about reaching teens in virtual hangouts. "I see publishing houses investing more of their marketing dollars into new innovative outlets and less so in traditional vehicles," Louie said. "With companies’ interest in the eyeball and stickiness factor, I expect sites to really ramp up their content to stay ahead of the game."

Some other key take-aways:

• Nickelodeon's online world Nicktropolis has 7 millions registered users, and 86% of Nick audiences say gaming is the key experience.


• There are 350 million avatars worldwide


• In South Korea, 90% of kids are in virtual worlds


• There is a huge growth in branded virtual worlds creating a "curated experience" for users- vMTV (MTV's network of virtual worlds including Virtual Hills, Virtual Laguna Beach, Virtual VMAs) has 1.25 M regular users, with 4,500 new users/daily, and 15,000 viewer clubs with as many as 2,000 members a piece


• Kids are constantly jumping around and between virtual worlds – an incredible amount (up to 60%) of vMTV traffic is coming from Gaia, for example

*Image from KZero

The Sweet Sound of SXSWi

It’s been one week since SXSW Interactive came to a close, and there are still two types of publishing people in the world:

1) Those who are counting the days until they can return next year
2) Those who think SXSWi is some kind of contagious eye disease

For those of you still stuck in the latter half, we’ve put together a few links to bring you up to speed. (And for those few type ones out there, a mini refresher course.)

What you need to know:

• SXSWi began in 1994 as part of a film and multimedia conference (it’s been it’s own interactive thing since 1999, and in 2006 they added Screen Burn – a subset focusing on the gaming industry)


• The festival covers everything from web development to on and offline marketing to internet theory to business management to design to social media to…


• If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to receive podcasts of the panels as they are posted here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SXSWpodcasts, or, if you don’t use a feed reader (another lecture, another time) check out the main site http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/ for updates as they appear.


• Save for a few SXSWi stalwarts in attendance (Will Schwalbe, ex-Hyperion and author of SEND, was back for the second year in a row, Little Brown’s New Media Marketing Manager, Scott diPerna clocked in his fourth year), the publishing community was notably absent


• The only publisher with a booth at the trade show was McSweeney’s


• B&N hosted the book signings at the SXSW bookstore

For more, check out the April issue of Publishing Trends on March 25th…
For PT’s coverage of SXSWi 2007, click here