Innovative Review Options for Publishers
Part of the service a book printer may offer a publisher is offering a variety of methods to promote and market a book. The best way to promote a book is through book review. There are two new book review media that may be valuable to your customers. They are vidlit.com and blogcritics.org.
Vidlit.com uses short Flash video clips to summarize and promote books. It is a unique way to promote books to internet-savvy readers. Liz Dubelman created the site. It appears to be successful. One million people viewed the film for Ellie Weiner and Barbara Bavilman’s 2004 book, “Yiddish with Dick and Jane” (Little, Brown) in two weeks.
Blogcritics.org has a large group of readers who look for reviews and opinions of all different kinds of media. Book reviews are a large part of the site’s content. In recognition of the number of self-published books, Blogcritics.org is adding a section to highlight five books per month. Blogcritics offers a great opportunity for independent authors to get publicity for their books. Blogcritics gets upward of 10,000 visitors per day and these visitors are the kinds of people who buy the media that they read about on the site.
Slots on the page will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis and will cost $300 for the placement in the featured book box as well as the five honest reviews from our various critics.
If you have any questions about the offer, or ideas as to how to make the better for independent publishers please contact Craig Lyndall; 440-666-1087; Email: clyndall@filteringcraig.com.
Successful book printing is about knowing how to make oneself indispensable to the target audience. Guide authors/publishers to sites such as these to promote their books makes any printer more indispensable than one who doesn’t.
posted by Bill Frank @ 10:10 AM
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Follow-up aticle by Rachel Deahl
Joining the ranks of TV-adman-turned-bestseller James Patterson, who now runs steamy TV trailers to boost sales of titles like 4th of July, and companies like VidLit—the publishing industry’s marketing strategy du jour, which produces irreverent flash animation send-ups of novels and emails them to consumers—graphic-novel publisher Steve Stern has launched the debut title from his new house with an online movie-style trailer. Bestsellers Illustrated, Stern’s new venture, recently released its first book, War of the Worlds, an update on the H.G. Wells classic, with a 90-second trailer that can be viewed online.
Stern says the black-and-white spot—which uses images from the book, along with narration and music—represents the ideal way to promote titles in this genre, since comics and graphic novels rely so heavily on visual elements. Hoping to profit from the excitement and press around Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated summer movie, War of the Worlds—with which Stern’s graphic novel is entirely unaffiliated—the trailer debuted at www.WaroftheWorldsfilm.com, a fan site dedicated to the film. (It can now be viewed at the publisher’s homepage, www.bestsellersillustrated.com.)
Stern has two more book series in the pipeline: One is called Shy Girl, which, like War of the Worlds, he also wrote; the other, titled Amityville High, he characterizes as a Buffy the Vampire Slayer–esque series about high-schoolers investigating paranormal events in their hometown. Stern, who plans on promoting all his titles on the Internet with trailers, says he thinks this form of advertising is “the promotional wave of the future for graphic novels.”
John Dokes, director of marketing at Marvel Comics, says the publisher is looking at “more advanced” visual ways of promoting their titles. Although unfamiliar with Stern’s trailer, he added that Marvel is invested in using promotional tools that employ visual media, but would not release specifics.
Stern’s trailer, produced for approximately $15,000 by a company called Sandpail Productions, has earned him, he says, “a lot of positive responses.” Now he’s considering buying airtime for it on cable networks like MTV and ESPN. The decision to make the trailer, he adds, was sparked after he saw Frank Miller’s Sin City, the box office success that also drove sales of graphic novels higher than previous Hollywood comic book adaptations.
“With Sin City, you had this box-office success that got a lot of exposure because it was adapted quite literally from the graphic novels, so the linkage between film and book was heavily promoted,” he says. “Therefore, it just seemed like a logical extension to me that, if a movie could be made so literally [from a graphic novel], why couldn’t a movie trailer be done in the same way?”
Stern says he will be surprised if other graphic-novel and comic-book publishers don’t follow his lead. If his version of War of the Worlds is a success, it’s a good bet you can look for more book trailers playing on a (computer) screen near you.
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