I See You on the Streets of Australia
You’ve got to hand it to some publishers who are going out of their way to come up with bold new marketing techniques to put their new releases in the hands of readers.
On September 3 Hachette Livre unleashed I See You by Gregg Hurwitz (titled The Crime Writer in the US) on Australia using Bookcrossing.com to “spread the word” of the new release. Hachette have issued an announcement saying that they would spread 200 copies of the book which have been registered with their own unique identification number and left in Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and Hobart.
The concept of Bookcrossing.com is to provide a means of sharing the enjoyment of reading through its members by leaving books for others to find. The books are adorned with bright Post-It notes urging people to pick them up and instructions that invite the finder to make a journal entry at http://www.bookcrossing.com/. It’s then possible to track how far the book has travelled as well as what the readers thought of it.
Will the concept be successful? Is there any way to measure success?
Checking out the bookcrossing site, I found that only 73 releases for I See You have been logged by LittleBrown (out of the advertised 200) and 5 of those have had finders report back. I suppose one argument is that there are 5 people who may not have otherwise picked up the book but after 2 weeks it seems that the response has been a little quiet.
Be on the lookout for I See You by Gregg Hurwitz.
2 comments:
I'm enjoying going through your site. The bookcrossing thing seems like a nice theory, but a bit utopian (and therefore doomed?-maybe not). I tend to be impatient about getting my hands on certain books and prefer to send them around to friends when I'm finished over hunting for them in an airport or cafe' or mountain-top. But that's just me. It is a cool concept, but who has the time these days? I'm half-Australian and living in the US, spending some time blogging on fiction. Cheers! Jim
http://nearlynothingbutnovels.blogspot.com/
G'day Jim
I'm rather impatient about getting my hands on books too, going through stages where I simply MUST have that book RIGHT NOW. It's a disease, I think.
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