Book trailers hit the scene earlier this year as a creative way for publishers to promote and market their new titles.  Many have been straight forward, and others have been rather dramatic – more like a movie trailer than a book and that’s the point after all. But I really like what Capstone have done with this tongue in cheek approach to the viral.  The style of the video is true to the Capstone brand, and creates the desired buzz while having a lot of fun with the subject.  It also engages the viewer, and converts them from a passive consumer of media into an active participant.

As we publishers figure out how media like video fit into more traditional approaches to marketing, it is good to see Wiley colleagues like the Capstone team breaking out of the old media mold.

If you want to play along, watch the video below, and visit http://dearcelebrity.co.uk for your chance to win an iPod Touch (subject, of course to contest rules and deadlines.)

A couple of days ago, Chris posted Straight Talk on the Price of Free Content, a discussion post on the role of free content in publishing.  The problem with such discussion points is that much of the discussion around Free Content tends to get muddied by traditional business thinking.

If you have grown up prior to, well, now, or have and MBA, you expect a direct relationship between what you do and your income.  There is probably a formula for it, which is every bit as iconic as e=mc2, a formula like: W=$ (work=money). You do some work, you get a tangible result, commensurate payment.

With Free Content, that relationship is broken. If I post some Free Content, doesn’t matter what kind it is, the immediate payment is:

• The opportunity to display my mastery of a subject and a chance to increase my standing in the community I address.
• A chance to draw attention to or generate traffic for my blog/business/consulting/design gig.

Both of these are intangible payments. It is revenue of a sort, but if you plug that into the common understanding of what happens when we work, we do not expect to be repaid in website traffic, or acknowledgment.

It’s very hard to put food on the table with what amount to personal accolades.

The problem is that consulting types, VCs, and people looking to make a living off the web is that they are looking for revenue in the wrong place: free content is about generating indirect revenue.

For example:

• I post to a Blog for a year, and get a publishing deal from it.
• I run a Blog and post a detailed Presentation, and that leads to speaking offers.
• I post a Podcast, and that generates the traffic that drives my advertising revenue.
• I post a Webcomic, and that leads to marketing gig.
• I code some Open Source Software, and sell support for it.

Notice that in all of those examples the initial transaction is free. The author is giving up their time to entertain and educate the reader, listener, or viewer, without asking for direct payment.

There are many people that want to make a claim that this is a brand new world we live in, a new economics…um, no, it isn’t. Sorry. The Free Content business model is nothing new: it is the same model that broadcast television has been using for 50 years.

For a television broadcast, the viewer pays nothing, other than the opportunity cost of watching another show. The cost of the production of that broadcast is shifted, to advertisers, syndication outlets, or purchasers of the inevitable DVD collection.

With Free Content, the consumer of the information pays nothing to the producer; instead income comes from speaking engagements, book sales, or consulting contracts. The payment for the content is decoupled from the consumption of the content, but theoretically the model does not change, just the degree of separation from content to revenue source.

That is why things like Matt Maroon’s Bubble 2.0 post seem off the mark.
In a sense, he is right: you need to ask where the revenue is coming from, and a revenue model that is based on generating revenues directly from Free Content is not sustainable in the long term. Once the money dries up, that’s the end of the show.

I think there is still question that needs to be asked before we automatically write off one of these “Bubble 2.0” companies: how far removed from what we want our audience to do is the revenue stream?

If there is revenue tied indirectly to the content produced, then there is a repeatable, sustainable, revenue model. It may be hard to quantify, and it may be less than if you were getting paid directly, but forecasting revenues from that content is possible. All you need to do is keep producing Free Content.

Where does that leave the venture capitalists, private investors, and fortune seekers that are backing “Bubble 2.0” endeavors?

They need to ask if the Free Content they are producing generates repeatable indirect revenues, and if not, what they can do to align their Free Content with a business model that does.

Preferably, before the seed funding runs out.

If you have ever seen Guy interview someone, or read an online interview conducted by him, you know his questions are generally straight to the point, a little dangerous, and usually a little over the top – which of course is why I like Guy Kawasaki’s interviews.

Darren gets to answer some great questions about blogging, but his response to Guy’s question about the lack of comments on marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog was very insightful.

However another stroke of genius (I’m not sure if it’s intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it – ’sneezing’ his post further than his current readership.

Check out the number of blogs that link to his posts in Technorati. Most of them are just writing things that you’d normally expect to see being left as comments on a blog. It’s no wonder that he’s currently the 13th most linked to blog in the blogosphere (according to the Top 100 list)!

Sure, it seems really obvious now, doesn’t it?  Of course not everyone can pull that off, can they?

What about you?  Think turning off comments on your blog can help make it a bit more viral by forcing readers to comment outside of your blog?

(via Chris Brogan)

I am a Vayniac.

Seriously, Wine TV is great, but trust me – the real gold is on Gary Vaynerchuk’s blog. If you don’t already read it, start. I have found that Gary’s approach to business and social media in particular is applicable to whatever field in which you happen to be.

For example, with more than 200,000 400,000 books published each year, word of mouth marketing can make or break you. Below is Gary on how he cuts through all the noise of the social web, and why word of mouth is critical. Sure, he is speaking from his own experiences with Wine TV, but it absolutely applies to book authors as well.

So, how does Alltop select sites for inclusion?

We use a patent-pending, semantic computational algorithm derived from the post-doctoral work of Guy at Stanford. Just kidding. We rely on several sources: results of Google searches, review of the sites’ and blogs’ content, researchers, and our “gut” plus the recommendations of the Twitter community, owners of the sites and blogs, and people who care enough to write to us. Let us declare something: The Twitter community has been the single biggest factor in the quality of Alltop. Without this group of mavens and connectors, Alltop would not be what it is today.

Alltop covers a variety of subjects, and lists some of the best resources on the web. Check them out.

Here, as was the case with Scrabulous, was an excellent opportunity for a company to really shine.  Instead, they reacted like many companies with heavy investment in Intellectual Property and went straight to the dual guns of infringement and takedown.

By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods.  When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own.  If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.

Often, we in the IP business fall back on old ways of doing business – ways that may not allow us to be as successful in the new economy as we were in the old.  IANAL, and I am not saying Creative was not within their rights in doing what they did.  But that’s not really the point at all.  There are several lessons in this, and here are a few of my thoughts as to how Creative might have handled this differently:

1. Public discussion forums are probably not the best place to post C&D notices.  Contacting daniel_k directly would have been my first choice.
2. Chalking up not giving customers what they are asking for to a business decision is well, a bad business decision.  Are customers always right?  No, but in this case it seems like there was an overwhelming outcry to this incident.
3. Beating up your biggest fans is not going to win you new fans.  daniel_k is obviously a huge supporter of Creative products.  He must own them, and to put in his own time and effort to contribute to the Creative community takes the kind of effort that only the most hardcore of fans would be willing to put forth.
4. Why not contact daniel_k directly (see item #1) and collaborate with him to make his driver releases at least unofficial and unsupported?  Creative looks like a hero for finally getting Vista drivers to market, and scores points for “getting it.”  If it was just a matter of the little (optional) donation button daniel_k had on his site, that seems like an easy thing to solve in a phone call or an email.

The rules are different now.  If not, we must at least acknowledge that they are changing.  I think Consumerist summed it up nicely:

Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it’s buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don’t infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.

At first glance it seems that they are looking to take on sites like Wikipedia, and Squidoo, which they likely are but I wonder if there isnt an opportunity here for authors to leverage knol as an instant part of their author platform. Google says they want to use Knol to highlight the author as an authority on the subject.

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content.

“But I already have a blog,” you say. Yes, I hope so, but knol may be another part of your author platform, and more importantly perhaps knol content will be featured on Google searches in the same way YouTube results, News results and other Google properties are featured. Google has not said this – it is pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely to me.

Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

So, perhaps this is a new addition to your platform and a chance for you as an author to increase your recognition as an authority on your subject. It’s still very early, so a lot remains to be seen as to how knol will work and how it will be received by the public, but I’d say knol is a tool you must review when it’s available.

There also seems to be a general consensus that publishers want to shut authors out of the marketing process, and I could not disagree more with this perspective. While the publisher certainly controls the budget and ultimately the marketing plan, I absolutely want the author involved in the marketing process, and I certainly want their input of the types of things we can do to promote the book to readers.

One way we get authors involved in the process is through the use of a questionnaire, and I thought I would share a few of the questions we ask, so you can consider them for your own books or perhaps other products. The Author’s Questionnaire helps you help us sell your book. It is used by Sales and Marketing to position the book in the marketplace and to create the book’s promotions. While we are marketing professionals, we probably don’t have the knowledge that you as the expert in this subject area bring to the table. What you write in the questionnaire is very important and definitely influences how we market and sell your book.

This is not the complete list, but these hit some of the highlights. If your publisher does not involve you in this part of the process ask them why.

• What are the top 10 Blogs we need to tell about your book? Be sure to include a contact and an email address or phone number where possible, and a brief description of who the Blog author is and why it’s important for your book. Don’t forget the blogs of the software development team, or product managers where applicable. (If you come up with more than 10 strong candidates list them all, but try to rank them for priority.)
• What search terms would readers use at Amazon.com to find your book? We may be able to include these keywords when Amazon.com indexes your book. Please be specific and separate terms by commas.
• If you could advertise your book on 10 websites, blogs, or podcasts/video podcasts which ones would they be (ranked in order of importance?) Try to stay focused on the highest impact sites for potential readers – the answer is probably not Yahoo!, The New York Times, or Oprah Winfrey.
• We are always interested in new and interesting ways to market and promote our books. In this section, we would love to hear your thoughts and ideas for sites like Facebook, and You Tube, contests or other unique angles to promote your book.
• “It would be great if so-and-so reviewed the book and talked about it.” Here’s your chance to get your book into the hands of other influencers not listed above. These can be journalists, professors, company executives or anyone else who you feel can have a direct impact on your book’s sales by influencing others to buy it.

Again, this is far from the whole list, but I hope it gives you a feel for the kind of input we want from our authors. What other ways can you help your publisher promote your book?

(Image Credit: drachmann)

There’s a sweet spot for getting on Oprah and for being on NPR as well. You rarely hear about romance novels on All Things Considered.

My point isn’t that you shouldn’t try to get these middlemen to broaden their horizons or to give up on something you’re passionate about. It’s just that it might be easier to build a new sweet spot than it is to persuade an established middleman to change his rules for you.

You’d be surprised how many authors suggest that Oprah, billboards, and an ad in the New York Times would be good marketing platforms for their books. Of course they would – just not for tech books.

I will disagree a little with Seth and say that I believe there are plenty of “established middlemen” that are appropriate and willing to be a part of a buzz machine for your book. The key is not over-stretching, and ultimately I think that is Seth’s point.

Photo Credit: Maddie Digital

Jeff Gomez

Anderson discusses several ways he and his publisher are considering making aspects of his upcoming book free, but stops short of simply releasing a free e-book:

“free book is the marketing for the non-book thing.” In his case, what he’s really selling is himself. He also acknowledged that, for his publisher, this is a difficult and different proposition. But Anderson believes that “you give away what you can give away, and you charge what you can charge for,” and that all of the iterations of the eBook or the printed book with ads — that any way you offer the “free” version — will be inferior to the real book.

Many of the “free things” Chris discusses as part of his book project are things we have discussed at my company such as advertising in books, and free sample chapters online – so there’s nothing really revolutionary about what they are considering. However if they execute on ideas like in-book advertising, they would be the first to actually do so to my knowledge.

You should head over to Jeff’s blog to read his coverage, but one item that was especially interesting was their social media focused approach to marketing his first book, The Long Tail:

Give away books to “influentials.” (This worked incredibly well for The Long Tail, where Anderson convinced his publisher to print 1,000 ARCs — many more than publishers usually print — and they ended up getting about 800 copies into the hands of interested bloggers. From this, more than 600 online reviews appeared, which then linked to Amazon. Anderson said that his Amazon sales outweighed his bookstore sales, leading him and his publishes to believe that all of that online-linking led to more Internet/Amazon sales.)

1000 review copies is generally unheard of, but look at the return on their investment – 600 highly influential reviews driving sales to Amazon.com where the book has had a permanent home on their Computers and Internet Best Seller List since its release.

Chris Anderson is also blogging about “Free” at his Long Tail blog.