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[FreakinWeasel]

The Future of Media: It’s Not Piracy, It’s Marketing
Source:GigaOM

The book-publishing business has been in a bit of a tizzy recently over the explosive rise of a children’s book up the e-book bestsellers’ list at Amazon. But this isn’t just any children’s book. For one thing, it has an unusual title — it’s called “Go The F**k To Sleep.” But even more interesting is that the book hit No. 1 on the Amazon list, and it hasn’t even been published yet. How it managed to do that reinforces a lesson for content publishers of all kinds, and that lesson is: Sometimes “piracy” can not only be your friend, it can be a crucial tool in building awareness of your content.

The book in question, written by Adam Mansbach, started as a joke — a humorous comment made by the author on Facebook when his young daughter wouldn’t go to sleep. But the response to the joke was so overwhelming that Mansbach, a poet and visiting professor at Rutgers University, decided to turn it into a real book with elegant illustrations by Ricardo Cortes. The book was promoted as a “pre-sale” by Amazon, and was expected to be available in the fall (the publication date has since been moved up to June).

What happened next was fairly predictable. Some of those who had PDF copies of the e-book, whether advance proofs sent to the publisher or review copies, uploaded them to the Internet, just as review versions of movies often find their way onto file-sharing sites within days of a movie’s release. That the book began as a viral joke on Facebook no doubt helped build the buzz about it on social networks, and gradually, pirated copies started to emerge and circulate to fill that demand.

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