I met several really cool people this weekend at Portus 2008 who are involved in various Harry Potter fan sites. Here’s a few you might like:
Azkatraz, Harry Potter conference next year in San Francisco. July 18-21, 2008. There will be a Wizard Rock show at Alcatraz.
Infinitus 2010 is the next Harry Potter conference AND it’s in Orlando, Florida, which will be the home of the “World of Harry Potter” theme park. I am incredibly excited about this conference.
My loot bag photo includes the links to lots of fun stuff that I discovered at Portus. Click on the photo to view it in Flickr and mouse over areas to see the info.
Saturday I gave my keynote at the luncheon and that evening was the masquerade ball. A little wrock (wizard rock for you muggles) and lots of costumes.
Amidst all of the discussion about the iPhone 3G that hits stores tomorrow, another industry changing gadget is getting overlooked. According to Time Magazine:
“On a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles…. At a technology trade conference in May, CEO Jeff Bezos said that Kindle sales accounted for 6% of book titles sold for the Kindle and in print. So Amazon appears to be selling more e-books.”
Those are big numbers. 12% of sales for books that are available in print AND on the Kindle are purchased for the Kindle
The Long Tail theory, as explained by its creator, Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, holds that society is “increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of ‘hits’ (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.”
Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard’s business school, argues that the hits are still holding true online. See the full article here. The most popular YouTube items tend to concentrate on a few. The hits and blockbusters are still how we operate as a society.
This may be true but one of the things Anderson argues in the Long Tail, which business are definitely seeing, is that the hits are becoming smaller because the audiences are more fragmented. So although the hits are still working, the question for me is “for how long?”
The other part of the Long Tail is that businesses need to stop thinking about marketing only in the mindset of the hits. For example, the tv ad, the Grand Central print ad placement, the NYTimes ad. Less and less effective.
I’m glad these discussions are still going on. To me it shows that there’s something great opportunity to fix the way marketing works today.
Zoomii bookstore shelves are pulled from Amazon data and you can zoom in, scan the shelves and click for book details. This is a cool idea: browse 22,060 books, search 156,580 books.
The Amazon ranking for your title gives you an idea of how popular your book is in the past hour. A rank of 1 = the best, hottest selling book. The challenge with tracking your rank is that it changes over the day and doesn’t really tell you overall how you’re doing, just how you’re doing that hour.
Admittedly you can make assumptions about how well your book is doing by looking at different ranges, 1-1000 being damn good.
Quillpill is a micro-blogging site, which is currently in private beta. The service lets users write and read content on mobile devices. Yes, it’s another version of Twitter, but Techcrunch had an interesting article about how Quillpill takes a totally different approach by wanting to know what stories you would like to tell. The site is primarily aimed at aspiring authors and readers of fiction.
E-books still unnerving publishers. “Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, spent much of a packed session on Friday evangelizing about the Kindle, which he said already accounts for 6 percent of his company’s unit sales of books that are available in both paper and electronic formats.”
Carolyn K. Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said “electronic book sales last year totaled about $1 million, a sliver of its annual sales of roughly $1 billion.”
And here’s something ironic. Despite the fears of e-books, “Electronic readers have nevertheless gained many fans in the publishing industry. Random House and Penguin, among others, have equipped their entire sales force with electronic-book readers, allowing them to avoid having to lug around as many preview editions of books. Editors at many of the larger publishing houses also use the devices to read manuscripts submitted by agents and authors.”
I was speaking to Nicola Furlong the other day about her new mystery novel which is newly published as a Quillr. A Quillr is a multimedia version of a book that uses actors to portray certain scenes, audio effects, text and images.
This book is a study in what what world would look like without humans. The book is one of James’ favorites. It stimulates a lot of thoughts and questions about the world. The website is a multimedia experience that extends your ability to explore the ideas in the book. There are podcasts, interactive google maps (which are pretty cool--and my favourite part of the site), flash-based book trailer, an interactive slideshow, and audio clips.
Zio calls his work an iNovel. The physical book references the website and you can move back and forth between the two to listen to the music referenced in the book or other elements.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, produced by DNA Media
This is the closest I’ve seen to what Nicola is doing and unfortunately DNA has gone bankrupt and you can no longer access the site. There was a website, DVD and book. The website moved you through the novel in a fascinating way, it was all done in Flash I believe and it was a really integrated story experience. You were able to “choose your own adventure” which was part of reading and understanding the work. I loved the music in it and am very sad that it’s lost.
Now about Nicola ...
Here Ends the Beginning by Nicola Furlong HereEndsTheBeginning.com
Nicola’s latest novel, a supernatural thriller entitled Here Ends the Beginning, is available online in a multi-media storytelling format that she calls a Quillr.
Nicola says:
Much more than a conventional e-book, a Quillr is an innovative and interactive fusion of book, movie and soundtrack. The text of Here Ends the Beginning is punctuated throughout with video clips and photographs of actors recreating the characters and scenes. Music and sound effects further enhance this novel experience ...
Here Ends the Beginning is a dramatic, compelling story about the devastating consequences of manipulating science and desecrating the laws of God and nature.
The first five sensory-enhanced chapters are offered for free online at http://www.hereendsthebeginning.com, with the full 43-chapter entertainment package available for $12.95 Canadian.
What do you think of the site? Feedback for Nicola?
