Add Word Count to Book Meta-Data and Dust Jacket
A pack of gum costs 99 cents. I was talking to a guy that works at on online music service last night. He pulled a pack of gum out of his pocket and said “my job is to get customers to buy music on impulse the same way they buy gum at the store.”
We then plunged into a conversation about what book publishers can learn from music labels. As it turns out my biggest takeaway wasn’t a list of dos and donts, it was about attitude. This guys lived what he said.
In the Age of Persistent Media, Books Are Politely Contained
At the time, it struck me that one of the valuable things about books is they are finite. Songs are over in minutes. Blogs go on forever. Books are in between. They demand a lot of the reader, but not too much. Best of all when they are over, they are over. You don’t deal with commitment issues.
So how then, in our information overloaded times, do you make it a selling feature that a book simply ends? I can imagine the marketing poster for the “satisfaction” reading campaign. But seriously, bundling audio, print, and digital at one price would be a great start. I wonder if putting a word count on the dust jacket or meta-data would help. I already know an audio book is going to take me 18 hours to listen to. Would a similar bracket around the reader commitment in print help or hurt? No more padding a book design to make the spine width seem bigger than the length of the work demands. I bet a lot of publishers and authors would freak out, but I bet readers would love it.
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