The Innovators

How do you make that model profitable?

I am able to do these very inexpensively. Part of it is because equipment these days, like the Canon 5D, shoots the most incredible footage. Secondly, I have about 30 producers throughout the world who work for me at a very reasonable rate because they love publishing, and they love authors. The profitability comes from the fact that we sell more books because people see these videos and click through them to buy the books.

How do these videos help discoverability?

One of the big things we work on are mashups. We have about 1000 gigs of footage of our authors. We can pull from those clips of our authors all talking about the same subject—bullying, for example. We can do this because when we go into these interviews we ask authors about their loves, their fears, but then half of the interview we will also focus on marketing milestones. We have questions in there that are about Black History Month, about Teacher Appreciation Day, about a host of things that are mapped out to days in the year. When it's, say, Bring Your Child to Work Day, and we want to put a piece together, we can do that in five minutes. We just have to choose what authors to include in the mashup.

The mashups are carefully thought through so that they feature similar authors and similar genres. That is how we promote discoverability. The people who are already reading Octavia Butler are watching a video and they suddenly see the work of Samuel Delaney.

How do you distribute your videos?

[We have] dozens of marketing leads that have relationships with the Daily Beast, who we work with a lot, Huffington Post, and we sometimes go through smaller, niche sites. Social networks are obviously important. We send out video through Facebook and Twitter. We also have videos on Youtube and Vimeo.