The Innovators

I think the same analogy applies to an author. They are our clients. We can offer the service and we can offer the skill, the two things are not necessarily conflicted.

Luke Parker Bowles
EVP of Production, Open Road Integrated Media
Authors, Center Stage
Luke Parker Bowles is sick of book trailers. The EVP of production at Open Road thinks they miss the mark completely when it comes and effective marketing. "To think that in a two-minute video you can convey to me even the slightest element of the book experience, you've failed before you've even started."

In his short videos Parker Bowles isn't focused on the book that's about to launch, but rather the author's personal story. As a result, readers have the chance to get to know their favorite authors and form a relationship with that author's brand.

Although many publishers are realizing the selling power of the branded author, few are leveraging that power through video as vigorously as Parker Bowles and Open Road. Video is the foundation of Open Road's marketing strategy, and Parker Bowles expects that such a strategy will eventually proliferate throughout the industry.

What is it about Open Road's video division that is different from other publishers working with video?

I think it is the mantra that we follow. To us the author is the brand. The title is not the brand. We're not here to do book trailers. When you have this amazing author in front of you who has all of these amazing stories to tell, why not go to the author instead of the book? I never really understood it.

So when I started Open Road's video element, I was very clear that we were going to look at the authors' lives and allow our audience to connect and get to know these authors. [Typically, authors] are taken on a book tour, they get asked ridiculous questions that they aren't prepared for, and the video resulting is unusable. In this day and age, people expect a lot from video. It needs to be well produced. It needs to be interesting, and that is where—and this is going to sound a bit bold and arrogant—we are different from a lot of the stuff out there.