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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Baen was truly ahead of its time... well, ahead of other publishers, anyway! The bit about cross-promoting other books in the series, plus similar books, is a natural way to advertise other material and generate more buzz and sales for your books.
So my next question is: Who knew about this? I know it's the first I've heard about it! How successful was it for Baen? And whose job was it to get the word out to everyone else? (Okay, three questions.)
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Steve:
As for promoting and who knew...
The books-with-CDs were (and are, and will be) prominently promoted inside the book-selling trade (a publisher's true customers). Each such book was clearly labelled with a "CD included" label on the cover. Lots of Baen fans (the "Barflies" of Baen's Bar) worked on getting the word out to other fans.
For "how successful"...
Several of these books were NYT best-sellers. Weber's "War of Honor" comes immediately to mind. The first 100K copies had the CD bound in. Otherwise, the best evidence I have of success is that they're still doing it. The next book with a CD will be... uh... Actually, I can't remember right now. But there IS another one coming up.
They're not doing it with every book, because adding the CD does increase production costs significantly. But it seems to have been successful enough to continue.
Dean