Monday, June 16, 2008

Book Video Distribution

The technology side of book video includes several factors. Formatting, SEO and distribution are major concerns and hot topics for COS Productions' R&D team. Our research and development team is made up of internal employees as well as contracted specialists.

Last year our major concentration was in book video distribution. We worked on establishing relationships with booksellers and specialty sites, we submit our videos to over 300 booksellers and 5000 libraries. We submit to specialty sites such as Watch the Book, Preview the Book, DigiGirls Library, TerrorFeed, Dark Scribe Magazine, Romance Novel TV, and so on. Most recently we're working with BooksiRead and GoodReads. We're delving into more niche communities while continuing to reach out to additional booksellers and book clubs.

We have a definite plan for distribution in 2009 and we continue to grow in that direction. We've mastered the RSS feed and are able to do more with less time invested. We can even use RSS to get our blogs out to several areas and then monitor comments using Friend Feed.

Our big focus in R&D right now is video SEO. Now that technology has caught up with SEO opportunities for video we plan on taking full advantage of that. Our team is currently working on a tutorial video and guide for our network partners that will help our videos have greater SEO.

We have reached out to publishers who are now embracing social media and we're sharing our experience and resources with them. This also helps us get greater distribution since we can deliver client video to publishers in those areas online.

We are always asked about our list of distribution sites. And, since we have a list of over 400 sites that we can distribute to online we feel confident that we're on top of the book video distribution game for social media. We've showed the list to publishers who ask to see it, but we do not make it available to the public because it is proprietary.

But, I will share a list of sites that shows our most basic distribution. We have other distribution packages that are much larger than this one, but this is the least amount of distribution that a video, produced by COS, will get.

1) 5min (when applicable)

2) Addicting Clips

3) AOL

4) AtomUploads

5) Backflip

6) Blinklist

7) Blinx

8) Blip TV

9) Bluedot

10) Break

11) ClipBlast

12) Crackle

13) DailyMotion

14) Del.icio.us

15) Digg

16) Diigo

17) Flickr

18) Flurl

19) Folkd

20) Furl

21) GoFish

22) Google Video

23) Internet Archieve

24) iTunes

25) Lycos

26) Magnolia

27) Meebo

28) MeeVee

29) Mefeedia

30) Mixx

31) Myjeeves

32) MySPace

33) Pando

34) Photobucket

35) Propeller

36) PureVideo

37) Putfile

38) REAL

39) REC TV

40) REC TV Blog

41) Reddit

42) SearchforVideo

43) Sevenload

44) Spash Cast

45) Spurl

46) StumbleUpon

47) Sumo

48) Technoratti

49) TotalVid

50) Twitter

51) Veoh

52) Viddler

53) VidPow

54) Vimeo

55) VSocial

56) Yahoo Video

57) YouTube

58) Borders

59) BN.com

60) Powells.com

61) Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association- all bookstores

62) Watch the Book

63) Preview the Book

64) DigiGirls

65) Dark Scribe Magazine

66) TerrorFeed (Horror only)

67) Romance Novel TV (Romance only)

68) GoodReads

69) BooksiRead

70) Ebookisle

71) Night Owl Romance

72) Romance Designs Theater

73) COS Productions website and newsletter

74) Find Me an Author

75) Kim's Wonderful World of Books

76) OverDrive (sends to 5000 libraries)


As you can see there are some sites that are very specific to genre and we do try to match genres up to the best possible audience. So, if you have an Inspirational we won't send that to TerrorFeed, and so on.

To me that is an impressive list of distribution for a very low price. Our Cover Story videos ($250) and our Level 1 Mini Teasers ($750) get that distribution as part of the package when they purchase their video from us.

We have additional distribution such as Transit TV which is extremely inexpensive and gets your video 11 million impressions in one week. We can format for TV, movie theater and other out-of-home ads.

We now guarantee at least 50,000 impressions for our top distribution packages. That's new. This is a guarantee for impressions not views, I like to be clear on that. We now place ads on MySpace, Facebook and Bebo with our top distribution packages. The ads show the author and book name and sends people to see the video.

Recently I had one of our publisher clients look at our list of 400 sites. I told her to choose any 10 on the list. I told her that I would show her where COS has a presence on any of the 10 she chose. I've shared a generic list, one without our specific book sites on it, with the tech world and will discuss it with Robert Scoble in July on his show. Our next step is creating a software program that we input the 400 sites into. We then input specific details about each site. The final product will give us a software program that we input details about a video to and it will then tell us what the top sites are for that book and it will even tell us WHY those sites are good for the book. That will go live in 2009.

It's exciting to see book video on the same playing field as video game trailers and movie trailers. 2009 promises to be an exciting year for book video!



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