Thinking about building video content to support your digital book? Listen to this interview first. Yesterday on the Morning Media Menu, we interviewed two leaders at the digital publishing company, Open Road Integrated Media.
We spoke with executive VP of production Luke Parker Bowles and chief marketing officer Rachel Chou about the company’s new release–digital reprints of work by the late novelist, William Styron. They explained how the company built video, photo, and text-based support materials to help market the backlist of this novelist.
Press play below to listen.
Bowles had these thoughts: “The days of the generic author video and author interview are gone–audiences expect more. Our mandate here at Open Road is really to go back and plum the depths of these authors…we sat down with the Styron family, we’ve been to the archives at Duke, we’ve interviewed his daughters…we’re doing extensive interviews with various people involved in Styron’s life–to really give more depth to the experience. That’s what people expect these days.”
Chou added: “The angle for us, is although you’ll find all the videos aggregated on the Open Road site, it’s all about syndication. It’s about finding the right places to meet the readers so they don’t have to come looking for it.”
Bowles had this advice for authors designing supplementary materials: “I think it’s really about looking at everything outside of their writing process. Their passions, their hobbies, all of that. You can hit so many smaller micro-communities with that. it’s not just about the big writing [community]. It’s about mining down and finding those smaller communities where you have potential audiences who have the same interests that you do.”