See the Site, Buy the Book.
By J. Courtney Sullivan
Published on 23 January 2009.
In 2002, Random House consulted
Jefferson Rabb on the creation of a promotional site for a promising new book of historical suspense. Rabb, known to develop sites for clients from MTV, Sephora and Elie Tahar, had just built a website to book before. The final product, which contained original music, beautiful graphics, and an intricate set of questions, seemed more of a commercial video game than a story.
The book in question was "The Da Vinci Code," and that the site had something or not do with the success of the book is an earlier point: however, the name of Rabb has become synonymous with originality and sales. Today, 70% of sites that he does are for writers, including Haruki Murakami, Bret Easton Ellis and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Publishers usually expect something like a cover of Chip Kidd, or a photo by Marion Ettlinger, which could increase the attention and sales, showing that the book had a great vision. Recently, the editors had encouraged the writers to have a robust online presence, a new team of experts was emerging. Rabb and many people are now the time to appropriate sites for books and videos from books, and several authors are to sell without much capital - usually from their own pockets - for the privilege of working with them.
The question for webdesigners of site of books can be summarized as follows: "Sites of books have changes in ways that other types of sites do not." Rabb said in a telephone interview. Due to the nature of the book medium in general and hope to sell the rights to a film in particular, "where I do so specifically on the appearance of a characteristic, people start to become very nervous," he adds.
Take, Rabb is the goal of a "gestalt" of the book, as he puts it. His site also includes original material of the author, as he created for "The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, "Reif Larsen brought much of his first novel about a young and prodigiously Montana obsessive in making maps. That site - which over time would increase it from one month before the launch of the book in May, - represents a disconnected "Smithisoniana display" characteristic of the title of the work, with some of the ten different "offices", documentanto all a taxonomy of all animals on the land of the American West. This included some videos from different times of the cliffs of Montana, with an animation of the diagrams of Spive (which also appear in the margins of books), number of "calls" where people could leave messages (which, of course, appear later in the site ) and a collage of sounds based on the noise of the trains.
Continues (Part 1 of 3)