Chronicle Brings Its Books to Life with Promotional Video: A Q&A with Children's Books Marketing Manager Pete Bohan
A quirky, cranky, hard-to-please birthday girl meets a new, furry best friend and hilarity ensues. “Rita and Whatsit,” a children's title from San Francisco-based Chronicle Books, could easily be described this way to potential customers. Or, they could get an even better feel for the book by watching the promotional video.
That's what Chronicle Books envisioned when it hired Nashville-based online video production company StudioNow in November 2008. The result, in the case of "Rita and Whatsit," is a minute-plus-long video, set to instrumental music, in which the pages of the book come to life through simple animation. It currently has been viewed more than 4,500 times on You Tube. Another video, to promote Chronicle's "Subway Art, 25th Anniversary Edition," by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant, has been viewed more than 17,000 times on You Tube. In that video, the authors discuss the origins of the project while images of subway art featured in the book are shown.
Pete Bohan, Chronicle Books' children's books marketing manager, spoke with Book Business Extra about how it the publisher is utilizing this new promotional tool and why it partnered with StudioNow.
Book Business Extra: How are customers responding to these videos?
Pete Bohan: … I think we're learning as we go along, because this is really a new promotional tool for us in a lot of ways.… So as far as how our consumers are reacting to them, it's really hard to say. … We put [the videos] on our Web site, we put them up on YouTube on the Chronicle Books Channel (www.YouTube.com/user/ChronicleBooks), our publicist will blast it out to her blogger contacts, [and] we also do advertising that drives booksellers and librarians to come view the video on our site. … We [also] provide the video to our larger customers, like BarnesandNoble.com, Borders.com, Powells.com and, when possible, we get it up on Amazon. … We know that our retail customers love using them as promotional tools … and we've gotten good feedback. ... Everybody's out there making video and watching video. … So we needed to do that, too. ...
Extra: What content is essential to these videos?
Bohan: ... We're trying to create pieces that don't necessarily tell the story of the book or the author, even, really. We want to get people interested ... [and] wondering what the book is about. ... We're not looking for a straight retelling of the book. The author is kind of secondary to us. Obviously, if it's a really big name, that has an effect. But we don't really make that a topic of the video. I know a lot of publishers … do that and for publicity purposes, author interviews can be really helpful. But for marketing purposes, I think, we want people to want to find out more about the book. ...
Extra: What's the process for creating the videos?
Bohan: The process would be, basically, when I look at my forthcoming season, just going on our title ranking system: Which of our titles are really key for us? And then I put some money into the budget if I think I might want to do a video. Once I learn more about the book and I've decided I want to do a video for the book, then I go to StudioNow ... with the idea, send them book materials, let them have some time to digest, and then we brainstorm some approaches. ... The more out-of-the-box thinking, the better. … [The video for] “Rita and Whatsit,” really, I think, turned out great. Sometimes the author does get involved. I'll go to the author for their ideas and then I hand it over to StudioNow. They do their thing [and] come back with the first draft. Then there's the whole creative team here that it needs to be run by, from the book designer, the editor, the marketing team [to the] publicist. So there's a few rounds of approvals and changes and tweaks. ...
Extra: How did Chronicle choose a video vendor?
Bohan: One of our online designers had a cousin who was a filmmaker ... [and] we used him for a while. But then we were looking for something more. ... We started doing some more research on video vendors and some of the really big names out there ... are really quite expensive. ... It was just good timing that ... StudioNow got in touch with our executive director of marketing... and offered to produce three videos, free of charge, to show what they were capable of. ... The quality was excellent, the animation and the editing, the creative use of music, … bringing the book to life without giving it away, ... especially “Rita and Whatsit.” It's the perfect example of bringing a picture-book series to life, keeping it humorous, keeping with the spirit of the books, but bringing it to life in a digital way.