Back in August I wrote about some interesting changes in the way ebooks will be sold and marketed in the coming year or two. (You can find that post here.) At the end of the post I asked what you were doing as a writer to take advantage of some of those new opportunities coming down the pipe. I thought I would take this week’s column to share with you my answer to that question.
World’s First English Language Thriller Series Written Exclusively for Mobile Phone Market to Launch at Frankfurt Book Fair
Vienna: Blackbetty MobileMedia GmbH, a small screen publisher (SSP) specializing in mobile marketing and distribution, and Vodafone Group Plc, the world’s leading telecommunications company, have partnered with internationally bestselling authors Joe Nassise and Jon F. Merz to produce the first English language thriller series written exclusively for the mobile phone market.
That’s a short excerpt from the press release that will be going out over the next few weeks discussing the HELLstalkers project. We will be announcing more details about the series at a press conference during the Frankfurt Book Fair and will be rolling out a marketing/promotional campaign right up until the actual launch on Dec. 1st.
You see, reading books on mobile phones is actually a major industry in other parts of the world, particularly in Europe and Asia. In Japan, it is a multi-billion dollar industry. Heck, in the US alone there have been over a million downloads of the Stanza application that lets you read books on the iPhone and it is still in its infancy here. When the opportunity arose for me to jump into that ocean with a couple of major players (if you aren’t familiar with Vodafone, they are the company that owns Verizon – yeah, they’re that big) I decided to do so with both feet.
There are several elements to the project that really made me sit up and take notice.
- We will be launching the series at a major international book convention by giving away the first several chapters digitally via Bluetooth and QR code downloads to anyone stopping by the booth at the fair.
- The book will be released in December in seven different territories simultaneously – Germany, Finland, the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia, India, and South Africa.
- We will be releasing it as a serial in six parts.
- You won’t need a special reader or specific type of phone to take advantage of the novel – it is all self-contained in the download.
- In many territories, the cost of the book can simply be added to your cell phone bill, making credit card payments unnecessary.
- We will be supporting the launch and the series itself with an extensive promotional campaign using cutting edge technology such as the aforementioned QR Codes and mobile tagging.
Now I can guess what you’re next question is – what the heck is a QR code?
Here’s one:
It’s correct name is a Quick Response Code but most folks just call them QR codes for short. In essence, it is a way of delivering content via a mobile network. You see, most new generation smartphones come with a built-in QR Reader. By taking a picture of the image through your cellphone’s camera when the reader is running, you can have that content automatically delivered to your phone at the touch of a button. It can link you to a new website. It can send you a special text message. It can deliver an image or an mp3 file or…the possibilities are endless.
We’ll be using a lot of QR codes on the HELLstalker website and in the promotional campaigns for the series. Maybe they will be in posts like this one here. Or maybe they will be embedded in an illustration. Or on a banner. Or a widget. Or in a twitter message…you never know when one of these will pop up. Each time they do, however, you can bet that there is something really cool for our readers on the other end.
Sometimes we’ll be using them to deliver a special message directly to our fans, like information on appearances or special discounts on HELLstalker merchandise. Other times they’ll contain exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else – maybe background information on one of the characters or organizations that appear in the books, clues to what lies ahead in the story itself, or even audio and video files sent in from HELLstalker units around the world.
The possibilities are truly endless.
If you don’t have a QR Reader on your phone, you can get one for the iPhone at http://www.apptism.com/apps/quickmark-lite. QR Code readers for other types of phones can be found at http://www.mobile-barcodes.com/qr-code-software/
(If you are looking to test it out, the QR code above will take you to the HELLstalker website. For now, at least…)
So there you have it, my answer to how I’m taking advantage of the current synergy between technology and publishing. I’d love to hear from other folks what they think of the idea and what they might be doing themselves to marry technology and book marketing/promotion.
