Quill & Quire, Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews, reports that Simon and Schuster will add QR codes to the back of every new book jacket starting later this year. If you scan the code it will lead you to an author page. There you can:
- sign up for email alerts about the author’s personal appearances and new works
- watch video interviews with the author
- find out about and order the author’s other books
Of course they’ll also list the url so you can access the pages if you don’t have a code reader or smart phone.
QR codes have been around for a while but they don’t seem to have really caught on. That’s why some of the sites that cover digital matters have been sceptical, but I don’t see the harm of trying it. S & S will roll this out for hardcover and trade paperback books first, then add it to other books if the response is good.
I know this isn't the most earth-shattering innovation, but it shows a willingness to experiment that is most welcome from publishers, and perhaps it will give you some new ideas as well if you're self-publishing.
Probably out of ten experiments like this, eight will fail--but sometimes we need to endure those failures in order to find the two successes.
(My book, "Your Writing Coach" includes two chapters on marketing your work, covering both traditional approaches and guerrilla marketing methods. You can get it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)