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“Book Videos”: The Next Marketing Tools for Books?



Musicians make music videos to popularize their albums, so why not authors? Well, that’s exactly what author Douglas Coupland is doing for his new novel The Gum Thief:

“The book’s structure lent itself to this approach. The narrative is basically divided into the journal entries of Roger, a 40-ish stationery store employee, the correspondence of Bethany, his 20-something co-worker, and Glove Pond, the novel-within-a-novel that Roger is writing. We wanted to do a series of short pieces focusing on the text of the novel. No attempt at a cheesy dramatization, no author interview, just the text and Doug’s deadpan narration. We also felt that each stream should feel like it had been done by the characters themselves.”

Though he’s not the first to do so, viral advertising (of anything, really) is increasingly becoming the trend of the future.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] | A more in-depth write-up at Creative Review Blog, Thanks Patrick Burgoyne!


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Posted on October 26, 2007 at 9:34 pm by Alex
Category: Advertising, Book & Lit, Video Clips



5 comments to "“Book Videos”: The Next Marketing Tools for Books?"

  • Nick Hander
    October 26th, 2007 at 9:56 pm

    Another example of this: The Alinea Cookbook. Not coming out until Fall, 2008 the book “team” cooked up this video for promotion: http://www.alinea-book.com .

  • Levi
    October 27th, 2007 at 7:01 am

    coupland is awesome. he does everything differently. ive seen that you can get audio versions of his books. has anyone heard one of these? ive been kind curious how they would do this. i know in the book J-Pod, he writes out the first 100,000 digits of pi. which comes out to 40 pages of the book. does this actually get read?? hahah there is also a list of a few thousand prime numbers and a whole lot of other craziness. i can’t imagine that this would word as an audio book. ???

  • aware
    October 27th, 2007 at 7:31 am

    also see VidLit.com, which premiered a couple years ago. entertaining videos to promote various quirky books.

    http://vidlit.com/

  • Adam Stanhope
    October 27th, 2007 at 10:08 am

    I loved so many of Coupland’s novels back in the 90s - pre and trans tech-boom. This one sounds like a downer, however.

  • Thushara
    March 17th, 2008 at 4:12 am

    What an interesting way to get people interested in reading! Book trailers are like movie trailers, but for books! You can find them all over the internet now, but here is a site that’s featuring them on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/booktrailers


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