Social media - the big hot buzz word that everyone is either proclaiming as the greatest thing in the world or whining about how it is destroying everything from newspapers to music. Just about every business relating to information and entertainment are having to find new ways of doing business in our growing digital world.
Anything that can be created and distributed digitally is finding its way into our lives via the Internet. The Internet is becoming the global distribution channel that is based on having to need only one good copy of a product rather than potentially millions.
One of the businesses being affected by the digital transformation of goods is book publishing. There will always be the need for printed versions of the books we want to read even with the growth of electronic book readers. The problem facing publishers is how best to keep their tangible products revelant and something that people will want.
With social media becoming the next big marketing frontier that typically brick and mortar businesses are having to come to terms with and how best use it there are some interesting experiments being done.
One such experiment being conducted in the book publishing world is the one by Thomas Nelson Publishing which I found out about from a post by Alfred Thompson on his blog Cyberspace People Watcher.
According to Michael S. Hyatt the President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers the company first experimented as few months ago by offering a free book who agreed to post a 200 word review about. It didn’t and still doesn’t matter is the review is a positive or a negative one with the idea being that just getting the word out about the book was the important objective. In the initial trial run they had almost 200 people request the book (The Faith of Barack Obama) with almost 70% of the people posting reviews about it.
Still a part of the experiment they next pffered up Through the Storm by Lynne Spears but this time they added the qualification that the reviewers also posted the review to the Amazon page for the book. While this saw a drop in the number of people requesting review copies the company was still pleased with the results.
Pleased enough that they have announced the formation of the Thomas Nelson Book Review Bloggers (BRB) website. It is here that bloggers can sign up to become book reviewers for the complete line up of books published by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
As of about three hours ago they have signed up 174 bloggers in the program; which Hyat announced on his Twitter feed. the program provides signed up bloggers with free copies of the book as well as emailing them two sample chapters in PDF format to get them started while they wait for the actual book to arrive.
As well they are providing free resources for reviews which include thingss like cover art, video or audio clips and external links to related items. Finally in the commodity of the web they will provide a link back to your actual review from their site.
For me this is an almost perfect arrangement for bloggers especially if their blogs area falls within the spectrum of the publisher’s line up. Unfortunately they don’t carry technology related books but it is definitely a program that I would suggest checking out just in case their is something in their line up that does interest you.
Well done Mr. Hyatt.
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