Videos Create a Stream of Promotion for Indie Stores

Video might have killed the radio star, but it's doing some great things for bookstores and authors. At Skylight Books and Vroman's Bookstore in Los Angeles staffers recently collaborated to make a trailer for Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply (Ballantine); San Francisco's Green Apple pits The Book versus The Kindle in its latest video series; and The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, created a hilarious plug for buying local. All of the videos have attracted both customer and/or media attention.

Indie bookstores' use of video is growing, since it has good viral marketing potential and works well on store blogs and websites. Vroman's and Skylight staff and customers created and star in the trailer for Chaon's thriller Await Your Reply, and both stores include it on their blogs. [See skylightbooks.blogspot.com and blog.vromans.com.]

The semi-complicated web of southern California bookseller involvement in the video's production was described to BTW by Kerrie Kvashay-Boyle, a Skylight staffer and narrator of the trailer: "Skylight's Edan Lepucki has worked with Dan Chaon, and he hired her husband, Patrick Brown (who has worked for Skylight in the past, and now heads Vroman's online department), to do online marketing for the new novel. Edan knew that Skylight's [Kvashay-Boyle] and her boyfriend, filmmaker Jamieson Fry, were both big Dan Chaon fans. So it was a perfect match. When we were looking for an original score, it just so happened that Skylight part-timer Hannis Brown works full time composing gorgeous scores, so we were lucky to have him. To keep with the spirit of Skylight, Jamieson Fry used all local neighborhood customers as actors."

Patrick Brown of Vroman's (which also recently launched its "Meet the Bookseller" video series on its website) said that one of his goals was to "make a simple trailer that blogs and websites could embed and link to and that people could Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr about." Creating media that people wanted to pass along is "the name of the game with online promotion," he explained, adding that as someone who blogs every day, book trailers are appreciated since they provide instant content. The response has been very positive, he said. Chaon loves it and the video has gotten more than 750 views in its first week, has been widely featured on book blogs, and will be shown at certain movie theaters before movie trailers. It's also featured on IndieBound.org's Await Your Reply book info page.

How to move forward with video is something that Skylight is still evaluating, said Emily Pullen, the store's ordering manager/book groups liaison. "We've been trying to do more in terms of video, but at this point we haven't really commissioned anything or had any big productions. In terms of book trailers, we're still trying to figure out how best to utilize them.... We're considering posting some on our website and perhaps having an event in the store to show some of the better ones we've encountered and to discuss with our customers what they think of them."

Skylight has been using other forms of social media, and the results have been positive, Pullen said, although hard to measure tangibly. "Sure, I could tell you about a few sales that have been directly generated by Twitter and our blog, but most of the time we have no way of knowing whether someone bought a book because they heard about it from us or someone else. The real benefits are in terms of establishing our unique identity and in reaching people who are looking to connect with us online."

Another benefit, said Kvashay-Boyle, is that the creative project embodies Skylight's mission. "It's all about Skylight being a vibrant extension of the neighborhood, and being staffed with people who are artists themselves, people who love contemporary fiction, and people who are into the community. We also always look to support our sister indies, like Vroman's and Book Soup, and to share ideas and talent -- and often even staff members."

Green Apple Books in San Francisco has consistently created fantastic, quirky, and hilarious videos for its website, greenapplebooks.com. The latest is a series of an ESPN-style showdown between the Book and The Kindle. And so far the book is winning. In one episode called "Storytime," the Book and the Kindle go head to head in front of some toddlers. As a bookseller reads The Napping House (Audrey Wood and Don Wood, Harcourt Big Books) to the kids they're pretty happy. Then he tries to use the Kindle's audio feature to read The Napping House, but the book is not available and neither are half a dozen other choices. What is available is William Goldbloom Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel (Oxford University Press), which doesn't go over too well with the audience, especially since it's read in the Kindle's monotone robo-voice.

Green Apple also promotes titles through "Book of the Month" videos. "The response to our videos has been rewarding," said store co-owner Pete Mulvihill. "The books we promote with 'Book of the Month' videos sell very well. Publishers seem excited by the program, as do the authors we've heard from who have been featured. Customers get a kick out of them, too. And the staff has fun with the whole process."

The bookstore started using videos "as an attempt to better catch the limited attention of our customers by zooming in on [its] featured Book of the Month," he added. "The videos, at their best, really help convey our love of each title and something about the essence of the book and, at worst, they entertain."

In July, Tom Campbell and friends of The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina, created a campy 1940s newsreel-style video with a serious message: Shopping local is green. The video, "Just Around the Corner," uses a mix of archival films and new video to show how books shipped from Internet retailers rather than bought at a local bookstore increases the carbon load dramatically. "How much fuel is required to make up the difference?" asks the video narrator. "Too much, chum!"

Campbell, who is a co-owner of Regulator Bookshop, got the idea for the video after he compared typical Amazon shipments of one or two books per package with the store's own shipments, which averaged 24 books. Campbell shared his idea for the video with Regulator customer who teaches drama at Duke University. The customer rounded up more than a dozen volunteers, and they were able to shoot the video in an hour and a half. Since its launch, the video has been picked up and circulated via blogs and e-mail across the country.

As far as how easy it is to create content, "doing staff recommendations and documenting store events is something that ... any store could do," said Skylight's Pullen. "The challenge is finding the time/staffing to edit them and make them good, and then making sure that people find out about them." -Karen Schechner