Eoin Purcell

When you get it really right
Waterstone’s have been pushing to make their online store a site worth visiting for a little while now. They only recently broke away from their amazon link up so I was pleasantly surprised when I came across this page.

Yes it is a promotional page and yes it is designed to promote only one book but it goes to show you the capabilities for really pushing a book. The book in question is The Lies of Lock Lamora by Scott Lynch. Interestingly the author page does not have a link or an embed of the video.

And it works
The odd thing about that is that I recently took the book from my TBR pile and moved it to the read next pile (this is a slight misnomer as the next pile is about four books high). Having spent time on the page I am now more than ever looking forward to reading the book and I think once I finish Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’ll be the first book I pick up.

Which brings me to my point, how great the Waterstone’s site could be if they did this for more books. Hell, as a publisher I’d be willing to finance some of the work for many of the titles we are launching in the coming year and even for some of the backlist too.

Who else can do it
Remarkably though it reinforces for me the value of LibraryThing as a potential locus for promotion. After all so long as there was a strict separation of sponsored content from user and non commercial content it could be a great place to host pages of this type.

Hub or not?
it also reminds me of the positive discussion on the web recently about hubs, from Snowbooks (Here and Here) and from Penguin (Here), two of the publishers that seem to my mind to be most on top of the web as a community tool concept.

I have been considering this at length since I read this report. I have yet to follow up all my random thoughts but when I do I’ll post some more on the idea.

Ah the luxury of writing decently long posts
Eoin