Booksellers Blog

Are you reading Harper Studio’s blog, The 26th Story? If not, you should be. I think it’s the best publisher site out there.  The blog is not just about promoting the books they publish — they have interesting and valuable content that appeals to both the industry person and the general reader, and they manage the balance quite nicely.  They also have a great way of integrating video into the blog — booksellers should look closely at what they are doing. For instance, they recently had Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do, into their offices.  The folks at Harper Studio took the opportunity to record some of the conversation, and they share just a minute or two on their blog. But that minute or two has some extremely valuable content.

Let’s look at what the recording and post accomplishes:

• It shows that Harper Studio is connected and talking to people who are on the forefront of technological change
• It promotes a book and author (in this case from sister imprint Collins)
• The video itself provides valuable content for blog’s audience
• It is original content that is being linked to and shared around the web, which further promotes both the book and Harper Studio’s blog.
• The video is also available on YouTube for people who may be searching for more information on Jeff Jarvis, again promoting both the book, the company, and the blog.

Here’s the video – I’ll talk more about links in another post, but know that this is great stuff.

How can you integrate this idea into your store’s blog or website? If you have an author in the store, ask if you can record a brief video.  Let the author talk about his or her area of expertise, but in a way that doesn’t just promote the book but also provides a nugget of valuable information that might be shared. Secondly, if you don’t have an author, you can find someone in your community who can speak to a topic that is of interest to your community. Is one of your customers a financial planner? Record them speaking about their take on what people should do, and integrate that into a post where you write about some of the new books addressing the topic.

What do you think? Have you used video on the web in some way? Please share your thoughts in the comments… and then go read and subscribe to Harper Studio’s blog.