Henry Holt Experiments With Online Marketing: A Q&A With Marketing Director Richard Rhorer
Extra: What types of online marketing have you tried?
Rhorer: We’ve been learning as we go. As with all different kinds of media, you have to develop content and market content that works for that medium. This week, we launched something that is pretty effective. We have a graphic novel-style version of “A People’s History of American Empire.” It’s a very left-leaning political point of view of history. What we did was, we had the author, Howard Zinn, write an essay for TomDispatch.com. [Then] we edited it down, and had the editor create a short video. We had actor Viggo Mortensen narrate it. It was picked up by 40 left-leaning political blogs. A couple hundred Web sites have linked to it or mentioned the video. It helped propel the book into the Top 100 on Amazon. It was an effective promotion. We used a short essay, which is good for the Web. You don’t want long excerpts. We’ve created content that sold the book, but it wasn’t directly derived from the book. It was other content that sold the book. …We used to just post full chapter excerpts, and that was the big marketing push, to offer that to other sites. I don’t think that was the most effective thing to do. If you have a willing author to create content, create different content.