A free WEBcast from Digital Book World and sponsored by Ingram.

Thanks to Ingram’s sponsorship, this WEBcast has been made available as an archive for a limited time.

Click here for the PC version and here for the Mac version.

This WEBcast aired on October 25th at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT for the latest trends in online book marketing.

When your titles move off of book store tabletops, publishers are increasingly challenged to keep their titles top of mind. Luckily, smart ebook marketers are finding ways to build buzz, gain marketing traction, and ensure that books remain discoverable well beyond pub date. In this free WEBcast, “Ebook Marketing: New Skills and Fresh Opportunities” we will explore the opportunities that ebooks present for marketing your titles and how to optimize your titles for discovery.  These tactics often fall into two silos: the “active” efforts done by publicists and marketers to make sure their titles hook an online browser through reviews and other media and the more “passive” effects of sound metadata strategy. Taken together, these approaches make great titles both desirable and findable.

We’ve assembled experts in marketing and metadata to show you how to get your ebooks in front of readers across all major retail channels and into the hands of fans.

ATTENDEES WILL LEARN

• Tips and case studies in successful online marketing campaigns
• How to connect with non-traditional markets during your publicity campaign, and how some publishers are breaking out of niche communities to reach a broad audience
• Using facebook demographic data to find the right audience for your titles
• Creating an authentic connection with readers through your marketing
• How to optimize your title metadata to make sure readers can find it from the web and devices
• What retailers are really looking for in your metadata
• Top mistakes in publisher metadata that are costing them sales
• How you can enhance your metadata to get picked up in search engines and storefronts

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

• Publishers interested in increasing the discoverability of their titles in their frontlist and backlist.
• Marketers looking for new audiences for their best titles.
• Agents and authors exploring digital possibilities for their work.

PANELISTS

• Miriam Parker, Marketing Director, Mulholland Books
• Buffy Bales, Manager, Digital Products, Ingram Content Group
• David Bernheisel, Client Integration Specialist, Ingram Content Group

MODERATOR

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

If you’re on Twitter, why not tell your followers about this WEBcast?

I’m attending “Ebook Marketing: New Skills and Fresh Opportunities” on 10/25 @ 1pm ET http://bit.ly/p72Ao9 #DBW

SPONSOR

As a leader in distribution, print-on-demand and digital solutions, Ingram provides librarians and booksellers with immediate access to the largest selection of trade books, e-books, interactive textbooks, audio, magazines, and other book-related products in the industry. Publishers rely on Ingram as a key provider of demand-driven printing, digital, and marketing solutions. We provide secure, cutting-edge, and profitable answers to the questions our publisher partners have about the changing opportunities in the book industry.

In this exclusive interview, Fauzia Burke, Founder and President of FSB Associates, discusses online book marketing, improving discoverability, her new program Amplify, and building better publicity relationships.

From the interview:

What we’re seeing now is a lot of authors coming to us, and when I talk to them, I tell them that yes, the book is one of the things you’re doing. You may do an ebook, you may do a webcast, you may do an iPad app, you may do a lot of different things, and our job is to make sure that anything you do has some traction. So the ROI a lot of times is building that brand for the author so they can take advantage of different opportunities. A lot of times the authors will see things come to them, like speaking engagements. Things that came to them out of thin air and they’ll go, “How did they even find me?”

But for publishers, one of the things that we’ve been doing is that we’ve lived in publishing in this kind of event marketing model. We have a pub date, we throw a party, we do a little publicity, we throw in a few ads, and then we move on to the next event. That doesn’t really serve the author very much at all, because they work 3, 4, 5, 6, sometimes 12 years on a book and we’ve got this very strict structure in publishing about how well we’re going to promote the book. So what I think we have to do is break that event marketing model. Whether it’s taking the author’s entire list, so if they have 6 books, if they have 8 books, and promote them all. And yes, the new book is going to get a little bit more exposure, because it’s new and because it’s shiny, but everything should have credibility and everything should be promoted equally almost.

If you’re a publisher,  one of the things we’re doing with our ebook publishers, which is where the discoverability comes in, is that we’re creating a program called Amplify. It takes six titles and promotes them for six months, and they’re similar books. So you have an opportunity to really brand, bond with that audience, because you build trust with them. You don’t have a dialogue where, “ok, I’m really interested now, but then when the campaign’s over I’m not going to be talking to you.” You really kind of build a relationship with them, you come back to them with more content, come back to them with more resources. I think that’s going to make a much bigger impact than the event marketing model.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Rich Fahle, Founder, Astral Road Media |

In this exclusive video interview, Melanie Notkin, Author and Founder of Savvy Auntie, discusses niches, marketing, and communicating with your audience through social media.

Savvy Auntie is a business. There’s no question it is a business. Going back to the fact that we have this powerful niche of women with discretionary income and time relative to mom – they spend on kids and spend on themselves. Marketers were eager to talk to these women. In fact, I launched SavvyAuntie.com on a Wednesday at 1 PM. At 1:23 PM, I had an email from Hasbro. Two hours later, Sephora emailed. The next day, I got an email from Disney. When marketers realize that there is a niche – an untapped niche, a niche with heart – then they want to talk to those women. Women, of course, have so much influence on the economy, and they’d been talking to moms so much it was time to talk to the other 50% of American women. What’s interesting about this group of women is that they want to be spoken to. We want to know what the cool toys are for kids. We want to know what they’re into, what movies they want to see. We want to know the healthy new food products that are out there.

The great thing about social media is that everyone is so focused on the media part that they forget it’s social. If you’re able to get dressed up and go to a cocktail party and have a conversation, you’re probably able to get on twitter and have a conversation. Nobody went to school to learn how to tweet.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

The Debut Novel: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

Already much anticipated, this high-profile debut novel from Erin Morgenstern has garnered the attention of reviewers at Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and GoodReads. For Morgenstern, an artist and writer based in Massachusetts, The Night Circus is an incredibly strong debut novel: already optioned for a film adaptation, already creating buzz among the book review community, already such an anticipated story that there was a bidding war over rights back in September 2010.

As if this weren’t enough, the Random House Group is also taking innovative steps in digital marketing for The Night Circus‘s worldwide release set for September 15th. In the weeks prior to launch, a complementary storytelling experience will roll out at http://nightcircus.co.uk/.

The online marketing campaign will represent a trailblazing collaboration between Random House UK and Failbetter Games, a transmedia and digital fiction company, founded in 2009. Failbetter’s first game, Echo Bazaar is a browser-based role-playing game (RPG) based on a freemium model and boasting over 600,000 words of truly original narrative set into an interactive and social story engine. Set in the dark, Victorian-inspired land of Fallen London, its critically acclaimed narrative style and game mechanics have brought the company numerous accolades, including The Escapist’s Best Browser Game of 2009 Award. Far from a niche game for “hardcore gamers,” in mainstream media, Echo Bazaar has been called “beautifully moody and lusciously written” by The Guardian while The New Yorker mused that it was “rich with clever machinations.”

Based on my own experiences in Fallen London[*] as well as rumors of what the upcoming Night Circus campaign might look like, several elements from Echo Bazaar are clearly informing the proposed online experience. For example, collecting memories and mementos from five virtual performances of the Night Circus, readers will be able to create diary pages and interact with The Night Circus storyworld, sharing their discoveries through social media like Facebook and Twitter. Other anticipated game mechanics, such as “storylets” and “opportunity cards,” will likely be familiar to the over 90,000 visitors to Fallen London.

But, in many ways, the digital marketing piece for The Night Circus is an important test case, perhaps even signaling a paradigm shift, in how publishers leverage technology and new forms of storytelling to promote books, interact with readers, and expand story worlds.

The Editor on the Edge: Dan Franklin

Meet Dan Franklin, an editor that’s been on the technological edge for some time now. In fact, we profiled Dan in December because of his work on Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro iPhone app for the indie publisher Canongate UK.

Now Digital Editor for Random House UK, Dan bridges the gap between the “book” side and the “online” or “gamey” side. I caught up with Dan to ask him about how the collaboration came about:

Had you played Echo Bazaar before getting in touch will Failbetter?

I went and had a look at Echo Bazaar and played it a bit, and I really liked it because it was a text-based narrative game, really, and I could see what it was doing with story, in the form of these little “storylets” and really sophisticated ways of using gaming strategy to get people invested in a narrative that I thought was really interesting. So, I looked at it and had it in my mind that they would be something– you know the way publishers approach all these things is they see a company or an agency that they find interesting and then think… how can I crowbar this idea or crowbar an idea to fit with them.

Tell me about making the initial connections between The Night Circus and Failbetter.

Actually, when we started to talk with them, The Night Circus is clearly a huge priority title here, and we did have a budget and wanted to do something innovative with it.

It was then that I thought of Echo Bazaar, really just because of the aesthetic and sensibility of it, and I thought it really resonated with what The Night Circus was about. It just had the right aura and feel around it, and I guessed that Failbetter would have a real sense of what to do with The Night Circus. And so I got in touch with Alexis and met up with them and just said, “Look, I’ve got this book,” outlined roughly to them what it was about, and then I handed the proof to Alexis and literally the hairs on the back of his arms stood up.

But at that stage, I wasn’t too prescriptive with what I was thinking that they could do with it, but I was aware that they had a really interesting story engine that we might able to bring to bear on it and also that they had a sort of captured community of people who I think would appreciate the book.

So it was a kind of “twin” thing there: They had created this technology for storytelling as well as having an audience that I think would appreciate it without being “sold to” strongly as well. I think it’s quite honest in that way.

And then I took it back to Vintage and Harvill, the originating imprint, got Failbetter in, and then they came up with this proposal, this sort of card mechanic narrative and the idea of having five performances of the Night Circus, which don’t ever really occur in the sense of you being able to watch them happen but which leave these traces, these mementos and bits of story, which you could then access once they’ve transpired, and this could be a way of building up to the book’s release.

Why a digital marketing campaign of this kind for The Night Circus?

You know to me, it ticks all the boxes because it’s a really useful digital marketing strategy for the main book but also it’s a really creative way of telling a story beyond the confines of the book, which is what I think a lot of people are exploring at the moment. We have the potential now to be outside of the physical book as we know it, but I don’t think many people are actually taking many positive steps to explore that thoroughly whereas I hope we can with this book and then, who knows, maybe then we’ll be able to make it more of a paradigm, but for the time being it feels right for this project.

The Narrative Engineer: Alexis Kennedy

Meet Alexis Kennedy, the Chief Narrative Officer at Failbetter Games. After over a decade in web development, and some time as an English teacher, he created an interactive story engine and opened Echo Bazaar as an R&D project. Its popularity as a standalone offering has propelled the company and validated its commitment to giving agency to audiences through interactivity and game mechanics while also giving them a compelling narrative experience.

In the scant two years since the company’s founding, Failbetter Games has extended beyond the web-based narrative experience, even staging a related live event at the Victoria & Albert Museum and creating a collaborative storytelling project called Sunlight/Shadows for the UK-based telecom company 02.

Soon, Failbetter will become a digital publisher in its own right, with the upcoming launch of Varytale, an open platform for creating interactive books.

How is your experience with Echo Bazaar informing your approach to The Night Circus?

A big chunk of our effort over the last two years has been dedicated to finding useful, reusable patterns for chunks of interactive story, so that we can assemble the chaos of individual choice into a narrative mosaic. Without the ten-dollar phrasing, what I mean is, there are going to be dozens and dozens of individual choices and interactions in the Night Circus project, ranging from the trivial to the fundamental. What we’ve found is a number of stable ways to keep those choices together without locking them into one fundamentally straightforward story or reducing them to incoherence. With Echo Bazaar, we had some general directions we wanted to travel, and ways we wanted to go, but it’s been like hacking paths through a jungle with a limited map. With Night Circus, we can travel some of the paths we’ve hacked out already, and ignore others that have turned out to be inappropriate for this project.

What advice or strategies do you have for publishers interested in undertaking an interactive digital marketing campaign?

Don’t ignore the lessons of social games. You don’t need to build a literary Farmville to take advantage of good, specific information about virality, recruitment, retention and rapid iteration from data. Something brilliant can make its way on word of mouth alone, but there are a great many things you can do to enhance that.

And just because it’s on the web, it doesn’t need to be about the moving image. Text is the heart of a book. The obvious and the popular thing to do with interactive text is to make it graphically rich and exciting, and that often seems to me to be missing the point. One of our associates recently dismissed the traditional graphic-rich book/app as ‘pop-up books’: that’s overstating the point, but there’s something there. There are ways to explore and navigate the text without gussying it up to look like a Flash game or treating the actual words as poor cousins.

Taking a broad view, how do you think the craft of storytelling has changed with technology?

In one sense, tech enhances storytelling by allowing us to have 3D films or a portable library of books in your pocket or fictional blue people on screen or whatever… which is a hundred thousand kinds of interesting, but the bit I’m interested in is the potential for choice.

The Roger Ebert argument is: “Art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.” Emily Short’s effective rejoinder is “There are no choices that a player ever has in a game except the ones that the designer put there…. The choices presented to the player are part (often a large part) of the expressive quality of the game.”

In a nutshell, that’s the effect of interactive tech on a story: that the authorial decision on effect can now include the kind of choices that are presented to the player. This doesn’t necessarily mean choices about consequence – I think that’s a common misapprehension. Consequence-driven choice is powerful and important, but it’s not the only game in town. Any kind of story with a feedback loop based on your actions, whether you’re choosing what angle to view events from, or choosing endings, or choosing the register, or choosing what you get to keep along the way, is choices. They’re all choices of interpretation, but it is interpretation raised a power by making the relevant story engine recognise and respond to the interpretation you’ve chosen.

So any technically enabled story has to include elements that some readers won’t see, or won’t see in the originally intended way. The naive response to this is to throw as many redundant elements as possible into the mix, because that suggests more expressive freedom, but any storyteller always, always has limited resources. And a story with more redundant elements isn’t necessarily better, any more than a film gets better the longer it is. So part of the craft of deciding which choices and how to present them is the Saint-Exupery dictum: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Finding a balance between the freedom of redundancy and the expressive elegance of limited choice is going to be the big understated craft of technologically enabled storytelling.

And Then, There’s the Audience

As mentioned at the outset, the digital marketing campaign for The Night Circus is going to be an interesting test case of how interactive and “gamey” elements generate buzz, create fans, and ultimately, as is the hope, drive sales. As the book publishing world struggles with the “what” and “how” of keeping up with technology, it’s important to remember the ultimate target: the audience.

A deeper exploration of what the audience wants beyond the generalization of “bells and whistles” seems warranted: Is it really “just” flash? Is it interaction? The thrill of discovery? Choice? Answering these questions might require some self-examination of what “moves” each of us when it comes to storytelling in this shifting and increasingly digital age.

Yvette M. Chin has worked in and out of book publishing for almost 15 years, primarily for trade nonfiction and scholarly publishers. With out-of-industry experience in academia and activism, prior to joining DBW, she had been working as a full-time freelance editor and writer, blogging about a range of topics from coworking to higher education to transmedia storytelling.

* In the interest of full disclosure, the author of this piece is an “Exceptional Friend” or VIP player at Echo Bazaar, a status possibly granted because of bug reports, making fun of Alexis’ use of the English language, and other forms of well-meaning harassment during Echo Bazaar’s early testing phases.

From the interview:

One of the questions that all authors right now are facing is: to what degree should they feel responsible for getting their books out there and promoting their books. For some authors, that seems like a lot of fun and it comes naturally to them, but for many writers, that’s not something that they naturally want to do, and they sort of feel like, “I’m a writer and that’s my job: to write my book or to write my article. I don’t feel like I have to be responsible for all these other things.”

And there’s a lot of talk about branding, and I think the word “brand” has a lot of negative connotations for people, so I always think about my voice, because to a writer thinking about your voice feels much more natural.

A joint production of Digital Book World and Astral Road Brand Media: http://www.astralroad.com/. Founded by Rich Fahle, Astral Road Media is a full-service digital media agency, providing content strategy, design, video production, and other creative forms of social outreach for authors and content creators of all types.

By Scott Walker, President, Brain Candy, LLC

In my last post, I explored the concept of value co-creation with audiences and suggested it as a way for publishers to explore new methods for reaching consumers and increasing the value of their intellectual property. This post will provide a great case study of one author’s attempt to literally co-create content with his fans.

In 2006, author and podcaster J.C. Hutchins began publishing podcasts of his 7^th Son technothriller trilogy. He had shopped the property around to different literary agents but failed to secure a publishing deal. As a result, Hutchins began offering free audio installments of his books as a way to raise awareness and establish a devoted fan base. His efforts paid off, and each podcast garnered thousands of downloads. Hutchins kept up the podcasting into 2007, when he secured a publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press for the first book in the trilogy, 7^th Son: Descent.

However, plans called for the book to be published in 2009, and Hutchins struggled to find a way to maintain his audience during the interlude. Given his other professional obligations, he knew he couldn’t single-handedly continue to publish enough content to sustain his fans until 7^th Son: Descent was available.

So, how to solve the problem of sustaining interest in the meantime?

Inspiration for the solution came from the short film anthology, The Animatrix, which was based in the world of the Matrix movie franchise. Nine different creatives were invited to tell their own original story within the Matrix world, using their unique vision and animation styles. The anthology explored both existing characters during the Matrix timeline as well as introduced new characters and storylines that exist before the Matrix timeline.

Hutchins decided to apply this approach to his own trilogy: “The Animatrix was an interesting narrative that took place in the gaps of the Matrix trilogy. I wanted to use that same philosophy of inviting professional creatives to come play in the 7^th Son world.”

Hutchins began by inviting seven other popular podcaster novelists to write and record short stories set in the 7^th Son universe. His plan was to publish them on his site through the existing 7^th Son podcasting channels. Hutchins offered each of the podcasting novelists $100 for their contribution, with the agreement that Hutchins would not commercially benefit from the contributed podcast.

In order to remove additional hurdles for the author-podcasters, Hutchins scoped the chronological boundaries for the contributed podcasts and provided the following guidelines:

• Contributed podcasts would take place during a two-week period in the 7^th Son timeline when the U.S. experienced a crippling nationwide power outage.
• None of the main characters from 7^th Son could be used by the podcasters.
• Authors could write about anyone in the U.S. who experienced the power outage.
• There was a minimum word count but no maximum (essentially a short story in length).

Hutchins also reached out to another group of podcasters he describes as “great verbal storytellers.” These podcasters were invited to contribute much shorter works, possibly as small as a five-minute audio clip).

To help encourage contributions that would dovetail into the existing trilogy, Hutchins provided these invited contributors a single page of information that would be sufficient for podcasters who had never read 7^th Son: Descent to still be able to participate. The page included key plot points from the novel, headline news and common knowledge that any character in the 7^th Son world would know.

Additionally, Hutchins aimed to have every accepted podcast maintain world continuity and be able to be viewed as canonical within the 7th Son world. While this added to the workload of reviewing and editing submissions, the result was a more official feel to the project. Acceptance carried a much greater weight for the 7^th Son: Obsidian contributors.

During the process of ramping up the podcasting collaboration, Hutchins realized he wanted to do more, and he wanted to include not just other podcasters but potentially any existing fan of the 7^th Son podcast. Hutchins named this participatory anthology of audience-crowdsourced content 7^th Son: Obsidian.

Following the same philosophy of lowering the bar for contributing, Hutchins set up a phone number for fans to call to leave in-world voicemails of fictional characters surviving the crisis of the blackout. As with the podcasters, Hutchins provided guidelines for submitting additional audio and video files.

With the infrastructure in place but the public launch date still weeks away, Hutchins “primed the pump” of contributions by directly courting selected fans and friends with a simple invitation to participate in “something very cool” connected with 7^th Son. Cryptic invitations were also sent out on various social media platforms, with the simple offer to contact Hutchins via email to participate in a cool project related to 7^th Son. He included no details about how they could participate.

For those who emailed Hutchins, he provided details about the project and began working out deadlines for the submission. In this way, Hutchins managed to aggregate a lot of contributions – some from professional podcasters, some from regular fans – well before the public launch of 7^th Son: Obsidian.

Much like with the seven podcast novelists, Hutchins constructed the invitation in a way that allowed fans to meaningfully contribute to 7^th Son: Obsidian without having to read any of the novels. He gave the same narrative boundaries to fans as he gave to the seven podcasters, plus some guidelines specific for contributing video. The same non-commercial understanding applied to all contributed content.

Hutchins launched 7^th Son: Obsidian in May of 2008 and began accepting submissions from anyone. Guidelines and rules were published on his website, giving anyone the opportunity to participate. Since Hutchins did not have a mailing list at the time, he promoted the project on his blog, in his podcasts, and by encouraging word-of-mouth promotion among his audience and friends. Part of the appeal for fans was the opportunity to actively contribute official content to a storyworld they were already excited about. Instead of just talking about the 7^th Son world, they could literally tell the next story in that world.

Hutchins set up a page on his website with the same guidelines and rules, and with the exception of the month of September, he published multiple installments each week through mid-October. Installments might be pure audio or video and may consist of a single work or be a compilation of several accepted contributions.

By the end of the project, Hutchins estimates he received well over one hundred submissions from fans, with more than half of them being audio-only submissions (and most of those came through the recordings left on the phone number Hutchins set up). The majority of submissions came after the public launch of the project.

Although Hutchins was responsible for managing the project, confirming that accepted submissions maintained world continuity, and the production of the 7^th Son: Obsidian installments, he did accept help from a fan (Shawn Bishop) to assist with reviewing some of the audio submissions.

The project was well received by Hutchins’ fans, as evidenced by both their willingness to contribute to the 7^th Son world and their interest in the resulting anthology. Downloads of the anthology installments within the first two weeks of publishing consistently fell between 8,000 and 10,000, though audio downloads were always higher than video downloads (Hutchins muses that if the project were launched today, the audio/video downloads numbers would likely be reversed).

Out of pocket expenses for Hutchins were well under $1,000. He used free software already on his Mac computer for media editing/producing (iMovie, GarageBand), and he used free services like k7.net to manage voicemail submissions and YouSendIt to receive large digital files from fans. He offered each of the podcaster novelists $100 to write and record a short story, but not every contributor decided to collect. Finally, Hutchins spent roughly $50 on stock footage he integrated into some of the video installments.

So, for less than $1,000, Hutchins was able to produce a fan-created multimedia anthology of official 7^th Son content and publish multiple weekly installments over a 6-month period. This content remains on his website, serving as additional ways for fans to enter and experience the larger 7^th Son world.

Aside from the obvious benefit of keeping his audience engaged until 7^th Son: Descent was published, there are some important takeaways about this project that apply to any participatory invitation to audiences:

1. Hutchins encouraged a higher degree of participation by creating a collaborative sandbox with only a few rules and limits on creativity. Importantly, the sandbox didn’t require contributors to be intimately familiar with the 7^th Son trilogy podcasts.
2. Hutchins recognized accepted submissions as official 7^th Son world content.
3. Hutchins made the rules of participation very clear from the beginning, and he provided parity for participation in the form of payment (to the seven podcasters) and credit (to the fans).
4. Hutchins ensured there was a critical mass of quality content of at the time he publicly launched the project and invited all fans to participate.
5. Hutchins put a hard deadline on submissions, adding to the attraction of participating before the project stopped taking contributions.

Regardless of the details of the participation, Hutchins acknowledges the value of inviting fans to contribute officially to an entertainment property. Importantly, he recognizes the value his fans brought to him: “The real heroes here are the people who created the content for 7^th Son: Obsidian. They were the ones building the stories. I was just curating and publishing.”

7^th Son: Obsidian achieved several goals. Primarily, it met a business need to maintain a connection between Hutchins and his audience between his podcasts and the release of 7^th Son: Descent. It also pushed at the boundaries of collaborative entertainment within the podcasting space by allowing audiences to extend an existing podcast world in new mediums. It was produced on a very low budget that Hutchins could fund himself. Finally, it gave Hutchins’ fans a chance to participate in a once-in-a-lifetime, unique opportunity to add their voices to the 7^th Son universe.

Hutchins acknowledges the challenge he had juggling his other projects and professional obligations while managing the 7^th Son: Obsidian project. Still, he’s excited about the prospect of another collaborative anthology:

The most important insight I learned during Obsidian was that by providing a welcoming and fun environment, my fans could create without fear. That’s the best kind of collaboration, and I look forward to revisiting the model in my upcoming creative projects.

Value co-creation with audiences can take many forms and use many practices, but at its core is a connection between the creator and an audience. Once established, that connection can produce some surprising and wonderful experiences for everyone involved.

“One of the many joys of managing the 7^th Son: Obsidian experience was watching the roles of author and audience absolutely reverse,” Hutchins said. “With the proper encouragement – not just from a project curator, but from an entire fan community – it can be relatively easy to empower everyday folks to pick up a phone or a video camera to help tell a larger story.”

Scott Walker likes to play in the collaborative sandbox of entertainment, building bridges between creatives and audiences. His most recent project is Shared Story Worlds, a site focused on participatory commercial entertainment. Scott is also a member of the StoryWorld Conference Council.

Want to learn more about inviting your audiences to create value with you or about using transmedia storytelling and cross-media strategies to extend your brand and intellectual property? Then, join us at StoryWorld, the only major gathering of industry leaders, decision makers, and transmedia specialists, to explore new business models, innovative partnerships, and fresh revenue streams.

By Fauzia Burke, Founder and President, FSB Associates

When authors come to me and say, “I want to reach book bloggers or mommy bloggers,” I often have to tell them that bloggers have very specific tastes. More specific than you probably realize. For example, when reaching out to mommy bloggers, it is really important to know the age of their kids. Pitching a YA novel to a mommy blogger with a baby won’t get you far. Pitching a Sci-Fi novel to a blogger that loves historical romance won’t work either. Sending a WWII book to a blogger that covers the Civil War will make for a cranky blogger, and sending a press release to the wrong person may actually get you black listed.

So here are some tips to help you develop better relationships with bloggers.

Know Their Beat

The best piece of advice to any publicist trying to build a relationship with bloggers is to build it through mutual respect, trust, and consistency. Make sure you know the blogger’s focus and area of interest.

Search for Blogs

If you are looking for bloggers, try Alltop, Technorati, or Google Blogsearch. Another interesting but time-consuming site is called Listorious; it helps you search for people and lists on Twitter.

At FSB, we have also set up a directory where book bloggers are listed by category. Each book blogger has registered and submitted the information themselves and others are welcome to join. The directory is available for free to everyone – bloggers and publicists alike.

Value of Bloggers

It’s good to know the traffic of blogs, but don’t dismiss bloggers with less traffic. It is important to look at the “full reach” of a blogger. Sometimes blog features from smaller blogs can generate more chatter on social networks. It’s a good idea to follow them on Twitter and “Like” them on Facebook to check out their social networks. Some bloggers post reviews on multiple sites so they can be more valuable for that reason alone. Remember also, that placements on niche sites (with less traffic) can sometimes be more effective than placements on a large general interest site.

There isn’t a consistent way to get traffic information for every type of blog. However, here are a few tips: You can always see the number of people that are subscribed to an RSS feed (usually listed on each blog website); another way is to use a web tool like Compete or Alexa, but unfortunately these tools don’t keep traffic for all blogs; and lastly you could always check out a blog’s advertising info or media kit.

Make Things Easier

Understanding the needs of bloggers will help you work with them. Make note of the type of coverage they have. Do they like to interview authors, review books, do raffles or post guest blogs? Then make sure you send them the materials they need in a timely fashion.

Because bloggers need quality content often, we have set up a website just for bloggers called FSB Media. Bloggers can request review copies plus “grab” quality content from published authors. We make sure we have permission already in place so bloggers can feature the content on their site with ease.

Approach Bloggers One at a Time

Every time I say that, people either roll their eyes in disbelief or try to sell me on the benefits of mail merge. Here’s the honest truth: you are better off reaching out to 50 bloggers one at a time than 500 via mail merge. You’ll actually get better results. Is it time consuming and labor intensive? You bet. Is it worth it? Yes!

Don’t Push

Without follow-up nothing will come of your pitching, so you need to find time to follow up and develop skills in asking without being pushy or rude. Every good publicist needs to master the delicate art of begging.

Represent Good Content

Don’t send out press releases, articles, or op-eds that are not written well. Make sure the content that leaves your hands always looks professional and does not have spelling or grammatical mistakes.

There are a few endorsements from bloggers on our site, and I read them as market research for this piece. Many of them noted that being consistent and professional is important to them.

Perfect Your Publicity Database

All of these tips are good and fine, but unless you make some changes to your contact database, these tips will be difficult to implement. At FSB, we have several fields in our custom-designed database that help us develop relationships with bloggers.  We record when the contact was added, by whom, and any notes about their likes and dislikes. We also keep track of all the books sent to every blogger and which ones featured our books. This practice allows us to learn more about the blogger with every interaction and only send them the books he/she would be inclined to cover.

I hope these tips help you develop better long-term relationships with bloggers. A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog on The Huffington Post called Book Bloggers Rock! where I thanked them for their hard work and dedication to books and authors. I stand by that idea and encourage publicists and publishers to change internal publicity systems to develop an ongoing dialogue and relationship with bloggers.

Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a publicity and website development firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors on the web. For web publicity and social media news, follow Fauzia on Twitter: @FauziaBurke.

[Ed.: Commenters have noted how hard it can be to get a handle on the current state of ebook sales from the shifting and volatile information available to us. Digital Book World is pleased to offer weekly reports from Dan Lubart’s eBook MarketView, to help us see what stories the actual data has to tell. Using a proprietary market analysis tool, Dan pairs publicly available data from multiple ebook retailer bestseller lists with analysis and visual presentation to help publishers identify and understand emerging patterns.]

Finding the perfect price for ebooks often seems more like art than science.

Publishers and authors are testing a method of promoting the first title of a series and/or dropping its price to increase sales of the subsequent books, and the results have swung between resounding success and near-total failure using the same techniques.

Barnes & Noble’s Spotlight program meets all the conditions for a great test for this activity: it is prominently featured on their Nook landing page; the first title of the series is dropped to $0.99; there seem to be at least five titles in the series, which are all (or almost all) featured in the same promotion; and the latest title appears to be a recent publication.

Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr, is a series with five current titles, but the older titles may be buried in the backlist. Alerted to its upcoming promotion a few weeks before it went live on the bn.com site, I began tracking the ranking of these titles. The first title was re-released as a promotional item with a different ISBN, which clouds the performance numbers (people still bought the original at regular price!), and the last book was a current release that was already performing well. But books 2 through 4 were all ranked below 5,000 when I began tracking them in late February.

Chart 1: Daily Ranking of Wicked Lovely

In this chart, you can clearly see the huge uplift that occurred almost immediately when the promotion went live on March 1. As expected, Title 2 got the fastest and most extreme improvement, but Title 3 and Title 4 quickly followed suit, and all three stayed very strong not only through the end of the promotion (March 31) but well after it. Two months after the promotion ended, they are still substantially better sellers than they were before it started.

Did dropping the price of Title 1 (from $8.99 to $0.99) pay for itself with increased sales, not only of Title 1, but of Titles 2 through 4 at the full retail price of $8.99? I don’t think there can be any doubt in this case that the answer is yes, considering that prices of all titles are back to $8.99 and still selling well. On March 22, Ink Exchange (the second title in the series released in March 2009), was ranked 54 on the Nook Bestsellers list after dwelling below 5,000 only a month earlier. Titles 3 and 4 peaked at 109 and 246, respectively. These titles’ rankings barely budged on Kindle lists at the same time, so we can presume this performance was almost entirely due to the retailer site promotion.

Should every author and publisher rush to try this promotion method? Maybe not: In a subsequent Spotlight promotion, we witnessed very limited improvement in the rankings of the middle titles of a series. Most of those titles moved up from ranks of 30,000 to 15,000 and similar levels, but none cracked the top 1,000; some didn’t improve at all. You could argue that the results were as bad in that case as they were good in this one.

Why did the promotion work so well for Wicked Lovely? One possible answer is that the series, appealing to a young adult/adult female audience in the romance/paranormal genre, plays right to Nook’s strengths. The next series tracked was in the science fiction genre, which probably does not. So the old real estate maxim of “location, location, location” applies in the digital space as well.

Chart 2: Most Popular Words in Kindle Romance Bestseller Titles on June 1

Another factor in its success may be the starting popularity of the series. A series may need to be above a certain sales threshold to be able to benefit from this type of promotion. Perhaps the author and/or publishers supported the promotions differently as well.

As we continue to measure the impact of ebook promotions we learn more and more about what works and what doesn’t. The difference between getting it wrong and getting it right can be enormous, and you can measure that difference with words like “Sales,” “Revenues,” “Profits” and “Bestsellers.”

Dan Lubart is the principal at Iobyte Solutions, an IT strategy firm with a specialty in publishing and entertainment media. Iobyte’s eBook MarketView tool enables publishers, authors, agents and others to study the dynamics of the ebook retail marketplace in various ways. Dan blogs at eBook MarketView.

There’s an ongoing discussion in the publishing business about the value of book trailers; the short, promotional videos often produced as part of the marketing campaign to support a book’s big release.

Even if you’re a big reader, it’s possible that you’ve never seen a book trailer before. Unlike their better-known cousins from Hollywood, there are no established forums or venues dedicated to the viewing and discussion of book trailers. No packed movie houses, no IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes or Apple trailer sites for books, no DVD releases to target a receptive viewing audience. Not in the book biz—at least not yet.

Instead, to find a book trailer today, you’ll likely have to visit an author’s website or Facebook page, which mean you’re probably already familiar with the author and their book. Perhaps you’ll notice a video on the book’s Amazon.com title detail page or one of the other online retail sites. Or, if the trailer is particularly well-done and engaging, it may even break through the noise and go viral, eventually finding its way to your inbox or social media channel of choice.

At this stage however, despite the fact that there are a lot of trailers being produced, there’s not a corresponding buzz among booklovers for them. And if we’re being honest, book trailers often lack the pass-along factor because many of these videos are, well, not very good.

But that’s not to say that there haven’t been some very successful book trailer videos, at least in terms of overall views. The video for the spoofish Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith was a big viral hit, generating more than 600,000 views and counting. An author that I’ve worked with, Kelly Corrigan, helped catapult her book, The Middle Place to The New York Times bestseller list in 2009 with her heartfelt video, Transcending, now at 4.7 million views. I still smile at the book video we created for Kelly in honor of Mother’s Day, You Never Stop Being a Mom.

In his recent Video-Commerce.org post, Grant Crowell profiled Pastor Rob Bell’s trailer for his new book, Love Wins, which has generated more than 200,000 views along with a good deal of discussion and debate. Clearly, when done well, book trailers are more than capable of earning their keep.

Yet, despite the power of the video medium and the low barriers to entry for anyone who wants to take advantage of video’s powerful reach, the debate rages on about video’s value in book marketing.

Why is it, in an era when more and more industries are embracing video as a marketing fundamental, within a publishing business that is itself rooted in media, and where many of the biggest publishers are in fact owned by large media companies themselves, should there be even the slightest reluctance to embrace video as a key marketing ingredient?

A Narrow View of Video

Cost is rightfully an important consideration for anyone entertaining the video option for the first time. Indeed, fully scripted, costumed segments with actors and elaborate sets like those used in the Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter video will definitely cost more than, for example, the simple, home camera-style shoot of Kelly Corrigan’s Transcending video, both linked above. I’ve also heard people claim that a trailer is “too long,” poorly acted or just plain boring—legitimate concerns, all.

But I believe that the bigger reason for the reluctance lies in publishing’s narrow embrace of video to date—and the over-emphasis on the “trailer” form itself.

The trailer idea is borrowed from a different industry entirely, one with it’s own target audience assumptions, value equations, and requirements relating to artistic approach. With movie trailers, we’ve come to expect a 30-60-second duration, the need to take your breath away in a short period of time, and the inclusion of a pithy, action-packed-thrill-ride-style quote from one of the critics. In short, everything encapsulated in the now infamous trailer intro, “In a world….”

But for anyone involved in maximizing the full potential of video, why limit its power and reach by inflicting another industry’s set of specific rules on your efforts? Or put another way, why borrow someone else’s video strategy when you can make a better one yourself?

When you let go of the narrow application, and think of the possibilities video brings to authors and content creators of all types, the value equation can change radically. When instead applied to the individual strengths of an author or expert and not simply to the sole act of selling a book at release time, video becomes more than just an expensive, gimmicky, 30-second commercial: It becomes an extension of the conversation—and likely far more interesting to that author’s niche audience, as well.

Understanding the Full Potential

Clearly, there are many authors and content creators who are embracing the new, more expansive canvas available to them now. Beyond just text on paper, these authors are expanding the definition of what it means to be author and providing an example to others similarly drawn to the idea of connecting with fans more immediately, where they are, and in the stream of their daily lives:

Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project, a memoir of her year she spent sampling theories, studies and pop culture lessons about how to be happier. But beyond the printed book, Gretchen also created an ongoing dialogue using her blog, Facebook and Twitter sites, and YouTube channel. She frequently sits down to talk to her hundreds of thousands of fans and share her insights with short, inexpensive video missives. The result? The conversation continues, her reach grows, and yes, just last week, the paperback edition of her book reached #1 on the The New York Times bestseller list. For Gretchen, video is another arrow in her quiver, but certainly an important part of creating a human connection that we can see and share and trust.

John Green is the author of the Printz Award-winning book Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, and other books. Together with his brother Hank, John created the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel, where the two brothers chat back and forth by video. It seems to be working: 140 million views later, the conversation rolls on, as do the popularity of the Green brothers, whose Nerdfighters.com website provides another connection point for their videos. Occasionally, fellow author Maureen Johnson, recently named one of Time Magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds, joins John and Hank and provides her own videos, much to the delight of her fans, who follow and converse with Maureen on a daily basis.

When it comes to selecting authors who use video effectively, Gary Vaynerchuk is low-hanging fruit. One of the pioneers of the online video series genre with Wine Library TV, he’s recently launched a new wine program, The Daily Grape—along with two bestselling books, Crush It! and his newest big seller, The Thank You Economy. Besides his daily programs, Gary regularly takes to his UStream channel for live, impromptu conversations with his fans, which he blends with Twitter for a more interactive experience.

None of these videos required a large production budget. Most did not include a script or costumes. All connect with viewers in a way that is different than a trailer and that provide a fan connection on a regular basis.

Don’t Leave Perfectly Great Content on the Table.

Thoughtful video has an incredible ability to evoke passion, make you laugh, tell a story, engage your senses, and get you excited—in short, all the things that books do in text format. To be sure, not all authors will see themselves in these video examples. But other video opportunities exist for each book, for each author, for each audience. Seeing these opportunities requires creating a strategy unique to your business and your audience.

As anybody with an iPad or Kindle can tell you, the digital shift is creating a massive disruption in the book industry, and new reading devices are paving the way for new opportunities for publishers. Ebooks, apps, and other digital advances are opening the door for publishers to provide broader access to their authors, beyond the printed text, whether in physical or ebook form. Transmedia presentations, combining text, audio, video, and other communication forums, are slowly making their way into the consciousness of readers and browsers. Many authors are pushing the boundaries of their craft to the point where the term “writer” might soon be an insufficient designation.

As the platform expands then, why should a publisher, that spends enormous time and resources cultivating new talent, limit their curation and distribution expertise to only the part of the project that can be typeset?

In the book world that I see crashing through the ceiling, every publisher will be required to be a full-fledged media company, complete with a robust and creative video production division—or a partner that can capably develop this important extension of the author platform.

The lessons of the publishing industry go beyond books, obviously. Video, with its incredible ability to tell a story and complement other storytelling formats, will play a critical part in the marketing and presentation of every major business in the future. For each business, the strategy will be different, and each company must avoid looking at video through the lens of how it’s been done before, by other people in other industries for somebody else’s audience.

This article was originally published at Video-Commerce.org and has been reprinted here with Mr. Fahle’s permission.

Rich Fahle is the founder of Astral Road Media, a full-service digital media agency for authors, artists and content creators of all types. He is the former Vice President of Content, Digital Outreach and Entertainment for Borders. More info at www.astralroad.com or @richfahle on Twitter.

Impelsys’ flagship offering is iPublishCentral, which provides online content delivery services for publishers. iPublishCentral recently expanded its product management, ecommerce, and infrastructure solutions in a way that encompasses both print and digital books as well as new frameworks to support the creation of enhanced ebooks for the iPad, such as the recently launched Sesame Street e-bookstore iPad app.

I caught up with Impelsys Founder and CEO Sameer Shariff to get his insights about the publishing ecosystem from the point of view of an infrastructure and delivery solutions provider:

In the short time since iPublishCentral’s launch in 2008, what do you think are the most significant changes in the publishing landscape?

The digital revolution has engulfed the publishing industry across the globe. While we observe that publishers are now more aware of the trends in digital publishing and have gained a lot more clarity on the kind of digital strategies they want to adopt, I would like to highlight two significant changes in the publishing landscape.

For me, the most significant change has been the device innovation. A few years ago, the Kindle—the pioneer portable eBook reader, triggered the revolution in how people read. The innovation bred many more eReaders coming into the market and the availability of more devices spurred the demand for further innovation. Then in 2010, Apple swung its magical wand and introduced the iconic iPad. The launch and cult of iPad really enabled books to be consumed in eFormat. All of this is just the first stage of this revolution. As we go further, more innovation will take place as the weight of these devices comes down. That will really be the tipping point where content consumption on devices will compete head-on with print.

The other substantial change I have seen over these years is the proliferation of availability of content in eFormats. Google set the trend with Google books which was then caught on by the industry and that the trend got keenly noticed and embraced by the publishing sector. Now, every publisher is creating e-formats. Availability of content is top on the must-have list for them. With various devices crawling into the market and a range of formats that accompany them, publishers are constantly adopting measures to ensure that their content is widely accessible. This has opened streams of innovation in the publishing ecosystem. Not only is content availability critical, offering rich content is soon becoming a game changer.

Enhanced eBooks are gaining popularity as they are adding valuable richness to content. If enhanced eBooks offer content plus more, readers wouldn’t mind paying extra, would they? Another aspect is that not only content availability has evolved over the years, content availability through retailers has also changed over the times. There are eBookstores across the world and with retail eFormats like the iStore, the Kindle Store, NOOK store, Kindle store, etc. that have transformed the way content is made available to as many readers across the world as possible.

iPublishCentral has integrated support for both print and digital sales. Where do you see print books going?

The answer to this question depends on which segment of the publishing market and what kind of content we are referring to.

The transition from print to digital formats of books is an accelerating growth. It is gradually being accepted by various segments of the publishing industry. Certain segments of the publishing ecosystem will respond nimbly whereas some sections will slowly wake up to this change.

However in my opinion, print books will succumb to the digital revolution and will confine itself to a very small section of the industry over the years. Though one will not preclude the other, the balance may shift over the years as print books will gradually lose its foothold to eBooks. The ultimate consumption of books that consumers will demand is to have their content in all digital devices. Books on the cloud will become a norm in the industry. Publishers will need the infrastructure to enable and support this opportunity.

We envisioned the inevitable blending of the strategies for both print and digital sales for publishers and that’s why for their convenience, iPublishCentral does have a built-in feature in the system that supports the print book trade.

In what sectors of the publishing industry do you see the largest growth potential for digital publishing?

While all segments of the publishing industry are waking up to digital exploration, some industry segments have responded early and fast.

As of today, the biggest growth potential for digital publishing lies in the STM sector. It is a very stable industry and mostly remains unaffected by economic fluctuations. Not only were the end-users of this industry the early adopters of ePublishing, they are also the ones who recognized the fact that offering valuable information through technology is a sure-shot remedy to reach out to a wider audience and increase sales. I would say this is reflective of the heavy involvement of ancillary content and the use of technology to deliver the content to enhance the teaching experience significantly.

Another segment of the market is enhanced eBooks in the Children’s publishing sector. Enhanced eBooks is a more interactive and appealing art which is making learning an enjoyable experience for children throughout the world. The children’s publishing market is expected to grow up to around US$9.66 billion in the next four years. In fact, if you look at the sheer facts, majority of the top ten book apps on the iStore are children’s books!

There is so much that you can do with the versatility of multimedia. Publishers are constantly thinking of ways to offer quality content with design investments that can be consumed by children in any form, on any devices! The growth horizon is massive, especially with the emergence (and dominance) of devices such as the iPad make this sector the most exciting and growing sector for digital publishing.

Sameer Shariff is the founder and CEO of Impelsys Inc., which provides online content delivery for the global publishing market. The flagship product of Impelsys, iPublishCentral™, helps publishers deliver content online quickly and cost effectively.