Simon & Schuster have teamed up with Marvel to produce a 25 part mini series based on one of Stephen King’s short stories, “N”. Nice idea. They’ve made the episodes available as a serial online, partnered with a mobile provider to provide the content for phones and you can subscribe through iTunes (but for $3.99 for the whole lot, despite the fact that it appears the series will be free on the site).
I really wanted to love it, but the more I explored the site the more problems I found. I have to say I was surprised to read:
You can watch all of the episodes right here at www.NisHere.com as they become available. Just bookmark this site and visit each weekday.
Seriously? Ever heard of RSS? They do have a mailing list though, so I hope they’ll be emailing with notification that each episode has gone live, but as they’re asking you to come back and check I very much doubt it. I would have thought that keeping potential book buyers happy should be prioritised over page impressions. I registered to watch the first episode and on coming back to the site there’s nowhere for me to login, so I have to register again if I want to see it a second time. The widget didn’t work for me. When I tried to access the wap site I got an error message. FAIL.
Come on S&S, this is basic stuff (I’m not even going into the compete disregard for web standards). This project must have been one of their biggest campaigns, but it seems no one has put any thought into the user experience.
But it’s still good to see publishers experimenting with other ways to tell stories online, and working with media partners to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible. Hopefully it’ll prove more successful than King’s last big foray into online promotion.
Categories: digital marketing
Tagged: Marvel, online marketing, publishing, Stephen King's "N"
I spent the last year enthusing (albeit to a pretty unresponsive audience) about the opportunities that the internet and technology presents publishers. The great thing about the internet is that you don’t have to have a huge marketing budget to promote your books, but you do need to put in a bit of effort. Rather than spending £50k on a London Underground campaign for the benefit of the author and agent, why not record a video or a podcast for free and syndicate it online? Or encourage the author to blog. Or give the damn thing away for free online and hope that it will increase sales of the physical book. Oh, and what would you know, it does.
There are lots of smaller publishers who have really embraced online and are flourishing because they’re intelligent enough to realise it’s key for them. But what about the big corporates who have the money and resources and should really be way ahead of the pack? I was told that one of the board members said it was a real shame that I left my last company, but that ‘all that viral stuff’ wasn’t really suited to publishing. And I wasn’t running around trying to film the next YouTube hit (not that that’s a bad thing), I was attempting to develop a website with good content, encouraging authors to get involved and trying to produce some effective email marketing and author sites. But, apparently, it’s ‘all about the posters’. Even though, last year, more money was spent online than in Tesco. And of that money, the most popular product to buy was books. So why is online seen as a waste of time by publishers? They’re falling over themselves to get their books stocked in big chains; moving publication dates, tacking on added value products and completely redesigning great covers just to get that sought-after supermarket slot. But if online spending is overtaking that of Tesco, why aren’t publishers trying to make sure their titles are easy to find online and offering good content that isn’t available anywhere else?
Anyone?
Categories: digital marketing
Tagged: ebooks, online marketing, publishing
