HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE BOOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY AT MARKETING?

The following article from Media Post Publications:

Ghost in the Machine
by Liz Tascio, February 2008 issue

To hawk Douglas Coupland’s lastest novel, his publisher goes online
That’s the last area of media that comes to mind when you think new technology? It used to be newspapers. But they’ve caught on, chasing ad dollars and readers onto the Web. Even radio tends to stream.
No, the last significant media holdout seems to be the book publishing industry. Oh yeah, you say. They of the slow-moving book tour and the print ad and the author interview on C-SPAN2. Despite the proliferation of online book clubs, online publishing, major online writing contests (like Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award — the winner to be announced in April), and the introduction of e-readers like Kindle, most book promotions still aren’t what anyone would call cutting-edge.

“Marketing has never been a strength of the book publishing industry,” says Barry Parr, an analyst in the media group of JupiterResearch. The multitude of books that come out each year necessitate tight marketing budgets built around author appearances and press events.
However, as in any worthwhile yarn, this story line seems to be at a moment in the narrative arc where all events lead suddenly to a point of brilliant suspense. The protagonist — the publishing industry — has gathered its wits to execute something truly daring. And it’s something that just might save the day, or at least hurtle all the players into a thrilling thickening of the plot.
Among the most arresting of these changes are nine compelling videos from Random House of Canada — short, linked works on YouTube and elsewhere that promote Douglas Coupland’s latest novel, The Gum Thief.

Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, injected that label into the zeitgeist. The author, also a visual artist, has been prolific in chronicling the culture in books like Microserfs and jPodas it’s been changed by new technology. So it’s only fitting that, finally, the campaign for his latest novel be intimately linked with new media.
The story of this campaign begins, as many good stories do, with a crisis. Coupland, who’s been putting out a new book about every 18 months, didn’t want to go on another tour. He had just finished touring for jPod, released in 2006, when it came time to plan promotions for Thief.
“He called me up and said one word,” says Sharon Klein, a publicist for Random House Canada. “YouTube.” (That might actually be two words.)

Luckily for Coupland, Random House liked the sound of that. It hired Crush Inc., a Toronto-based graphics and post-production studio, telling the firm it wanted to try something new, but it didn’t know what.
“Coupland’s audience is pretty savvy; he’s got a rabid following,” says Gary Thomas, Crush’s founder and the creative director of the videos. Plus, the book’s episodic structure — it’s presented as journal entries by two people — lent itself to something nontraditional, he says.
“We didn’t want to do dramatizations, hire actors and make a cheesy little movie,” Thomas says. “Imagine if these people were doing their own YouTube entries: How would they be seeing their lives?”
The rest of the story........