Dean Wesley Smith has done it again…come up with another brilliant idea for marketing ebooks. Go take a look at his latest blog post on Electronic Sales to Bookstores, it’s simply brilliant.
Briefly, Dean is suggesting using gift cards printed with your ebook cover as a medium for selling the book through a bookstore. Brightly colored hangers would allow the store to sell ebooks the way other stores sell gift cards for iTunes. Nice!
Besides getting your ebook into a brick and mortar store, the cards also answer the question of “how can I sign an ebook?” Sign the cards! Collectors will have a way to get their favorite authors’ signatures and the cards could eventually turn into trading cards. What fun!
I also appreciate Dean’s practical view of the possibility that more than one book might be downloaded per card. I like the analogy to a used book store. If a new reader finds my work, I’m happy!
It’s a new world in publishing and it’s changing like mad. Can’t wait to see where these new ideas take me next!
