January 2nd, 2009

Filed under:
Books, PR and Marketing

More Marketing Ideas From Elsewhere

We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.

Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.

The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):

Pre-Selected and Wrapped Books For Easy Gift Giving

I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:

Packaging the Book and DVD Together

Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.

This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.

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Comments: One Response so far

The movie release always provides a second life (sorry, couldn’t resist social media pun) for books. I’ve never liked the way so many books are reissued with new movie stills covers though.

I think the book bundling idea is a brilliant one – and I bet if the bundling is done by humans rather than by algorithms (as it’s done on amazon) that it’s far more accurate a predictor of ‘if you liked this, you’ll also like [other two books].’

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