MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
November 1-15, 2005 Edition
Snicket, Potter Publishers
Find New Ways to Reach
Children Online
NEW YORK, NY/10/18/05Several publishers have recently mounted innovative online marketing campaigns to help capture the childrens market, according to an article by Kimberly Maul in The Book Standard.
HarperCollins has created a web marketing campaign to promote the 12th and as yet publicly unnamed, book in the popular Lemony Snicket childrens series, The Penultimate Peril. The publisher gave fans the opportunity to guess the title of the book at the event website, TheNamelessNovel.com, based on clues from 11 other Lemony Snicket books. Kids helped to solve a puzzle that ultimately revealed the title of the book.
Likewise, Scholastic, Harry Potters U.S. publisher, has moved some of its print advertising dollars to Internet advertising. Scholastics web site lets kids read bonus material, learn about authors and join reader clubs.
The Snicket promotion, which ran from July to October, has attracted 116,000 registered visitors. The site will remain live though the promotion has concluded, and HarperCollins expects to use the site for other promotions. More than 35,000 kids have signed up for the HarperCollins e-newsletter, and some 45,000 have opted to receive author-tracker updates about Lemony Snicket.
Another part of the companys intention with the site: getting readers of all ages interested in Lemony Snicket. About 78 percent of the visitors are over the age of 13, according to the publisher, indicating that older teens are getting involved in the site, too.
Scholastic marketers say theyre just trying to tap into that online kids community.
No doubt the Internet, which is more tightly targeted to specific audiences, will change the way books are marketed and promoted.
Read the article on The Book Standard.
