The Random House Publishing Group has joined HarperCollins in working with InstaFreebie to promote pre-publication book excerpts. (Harper acquired The Midlist, a deals email newsletter run by InstaFreebie’s parent company, last October.) InstaFreebie currently reaches approximately 300,000 consumers and delivers excerpts via email, providing optional social DRM — which RHPG is using on their excerpts. As ceo Jason Freeman notes in the release, “Readers who receive advanced access will frequently buy, review, and/or recommend the book.” For RHPG, in addition to the direction promotional value, the relationship is part of their larger initiative to build up their consumer email lists by millions of […]
Web marketing/promotion
Penguin Random House Launches Unified Consumer Site
Penguin and Random House have come together on the web, launching a newly-designed site at PenguinRandomHouse.com that presents to consumers the combined catalog from across the company. Showing books to readers is the new site’s primary job: “With thousands of new books to choose from every year, it can be overwhelming trying to find a new read. We’ve made it easier than ever to surface books you’ll love through clean design, sophisticated genre pages, and suggestions based on bestsellers, your category preferences and more.” CEO Markus Dohle writes to employees this morning, “PenguinRandomHouse.com is an extension of our service to authors and […]
Amazon Rolls Out Kindle Unlimited In UK, At £7.99 A Month
On Wednesday Amazon launched their Kindle Unlimited subscription program in the UK, charging more on a relative basis, priced at £7.99 a month (or a little over $13, or 30 percent more than the US version). The offering is otherwise very similar to the US version, featuring a licensed deal for Harry Potter and a pay-by-the-book deal for Hunger Games, but no Lord of the Rings (which is controlled by Harper in the UK, rather than Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Most of the books are KDP self-published titles and Amazon Publishing books, with some titles from independent, non-agency UK publishers. We […]
Safari Books Now Fully Owned By O’Reilly Media, and More
O’Reilly Media has become sole owner of Safari Books, buying out Pearson’s 50 percent stake for an undisclosed sum (though it’s expected Pearson will announce how much it was paid in their next financial report later this year.) Safari, founded in 2001 as a joint entity between O’Reilly and Pearson, will continue to operate as an independent company, and no changes will be made to staff, product, offices, and operations. In a blog post about the change, founder and ceo of O’Reilly Media Tim O’Reilly said the company “came to believe that there are substantial opportunities for both organizations working […]
eNews: Oyster App on Android; Crown Expands Blogging for Books; and More
Subscription ebook service Oyster has launched its Android app, Oyster for Android, available on Nook HD, Kindle Fire, and all other Android devices. The Crown Publishing Group has expanded its Blogging for Books initiative, which makes available both advance and finished print and digital copies to bloggers, across all imprints in eight categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Faith, Business, Cooking & Food, Better Living, Crafts, and Entertainment. The program was founded by Waterbrook Multnomah in 2009 and grew to a network of 12,000 bloggers, and has generated over 30,000 reviews. Ingram Publishing Services and Longleaf, launched in 2006 by the University of […]
BEA Launches and Relaunches: Next Big Book (Data); Bookperk Redux; Mediander; New Strategies from Electric Lit and Coffee House Press
Music data start-up Next Big Sound has launched their second product, Next Big Book — promising to “analyze social, sales, and marketing signals to help you make smarter, braver decisions.” The “big data” service puts information from social networks as well as publicity triggers and author events together with public and private sales data into a single dashboard. The company has been working with Macmillan for the past eight months, and the NYT says the publisher will be giving both employees and authors access to the data dashboard “over the next few months.” Macmillan evp for digital publishing and strategic […]