Amazon Takes to Advance Marketing

Amazon Vine is a new program that Amazon.com is launching to put free copies of forthcoming books into the hands of their most vocal reviewers.

As they put it:

Vine helps our vendors generate awareness for new and pre-release products by connecting them with the voice of the Amazon community: our reviewers. Vine members, called Voices, may request free copies of items enrolled in the program and have the ability to share their opinions before these products become generally available.

Aside from the fact that it’ll probably cost a fortune and only be available to the biggest of the commercial publishers, I think this is a really interesting marketing advancement. At least for books. I mean, it’s sort of like advanced screenings for movies, but in this case you can basically hand-select your audience.

(It’s worth noting that this idea has already been successfully implemented already by Random House and Library Thing.)

This idea does reinforce my general belief that publishers need to start using the internet and finding innovative ways to get information out about books to readers. I