Friday, February 27, 2009

Read a chunk of Chercover free: Offering lengthy book excerpts online

Read the first fifty pages of Sean Chercover's novel Trigger City free on the HarperCollins Web site.

The format is similar to those online look-inside-this-book features, but fifty pages is far more than such sites usually make available. An excerpt that size seems large enough to give readers a real feel for the book but not so large that they'll feel they won't need to buy it. I'm no businessman, but this seems like a sound marketing idea.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

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4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

M.J. Rose goes even one step further, if I'm not totally mistaken, she argued that it doesn't hurt to put the whole book for a short while online.

So yes, I assume it is a good idea.

February 27, 2009  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

Amazon was the first book retailer to offer the option, as far as I know, and HarperCollins is a big publisher. I wonder if the technolgy that enables the option is proprietary or prohibitively expensive. It would be nice if smaller publishers could use it, too, to market their books.

February 27, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

To go off on a tangent, "Trigger City" is a great read. Sean Chercover is my discovery of the year for 2008, and I think I first saw his name on this blog - so thanks a lot!

March 01, 2009  
Blogger Peter Rozovsky said...

That's no tangent. "Trigger City" is on my list to read in the next few days. Thanks.

March 01, 2009  

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