I’ve just been browsing the Amazon US site for books I need that are hard to come by over here. I pretty much knew what I wanted, but I figured I’d go look in the SF&F section just in case I had forgotten anything. The first thing that comes up is a list of the current Hugo nominees.
Yay! Marketing success story.
I think I know who is responsible for this. Thank you very much indeed.
Yet there are still no links on the official Hugo website. Anticipation website seems to be ahead of them on that front.
I’ll take that. People can Google. We are #1 on the search. The important point is that Amazon a) considers the Hugo to be something that will sell books and b) talks about winning the Hugo and Newbery in the same breath.
Also if the Anticipation web site had not linked to the official Hugo site Kevin and I would have had stern words with Rene. We don’t know Jeff Bezos that well.
*glow*
(;
That’s a good end to a subpar week.
Wow, I hope the hype of the Hugos can live up to the actual ceremony.
>> People can Google.
ACK! But people shouldn’t have to. You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve been developing websites for about 16 years now and this one never fails to set me off. Ask any one of my students. 🙂
Not downplaying Amazon’s move at all. In fact, they are very savvy when it comes to that sort of thing.
Neil:
You are right, and if we were selling something from the Hugo web site then I’d be much more concerned. But we are not. The objective of Hugo Marketing is to raise public awareness of the Hugo Awards. Having us mentioned on Amazon does that. And of course if we were going to be selling anything we’d probably be selling books, so Amazon would not want to send us traffic.
While I’m pleased that the Hugo web site exists, to some extent I’m happy not to drive traffic to it. My unhappy experience is that the more people find out about the Hugos, the more they are liable to dismiss them as an irrelevant product of a small group of woefully out-of-touch aged fans.
Ideally Amazon would be directing people to the Anticipation site so that they could buy memberships and vote. But there are plenty of SMOFs who would be horrified by that idea because it would lead to “the wrong sort of fan” getting involved in Worldcon.
Neil:
Do you mean “There are no links from the Hugo Awards web site to the works for sale on Amazon or to the online versions of those works?” If so, that’s because it seemed to me — and I’m the person who posted the announcement on the Hugo Awards site — to send people on to Anticipation’s announcement, which does have those links, as a single central place, rather than having some links in one place and some in another, with the two never being in synch with each other. That’s why the lead on the Hugo site announcement includes, “The announcement on the Anticipation web site includes links….”
No, he means that there are no links from the Amazon site mentioning the Hugo winners to the Hugo Awards web site. They are not driving traffic to us. But that’s OK with me.