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Parents wringing their hands over their teens' incessant cellphone use should chill -- they might be interacting with authors. Publishers are plugging into the technology whose ringtones and vibrations attract teenagers' undivided attention.
HarperCollins is testing the first program with Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries series, All American Girl, Teen Idol, the just-released Ready or Not and the upcoming Avalon High. The teen girl audience was chosen to test the program because cellphones are considered their main source of communication. Ads promoting the mobile club are running on teen sites such as thewb.com and begin this week at seventeen.com, cosmogirl.com and ellegirl.com.
Teens who sign up at megcabot .com receive recorded cellphone messages from Cabot and up to two text messages a week. The venture is part of a growing use of mobile technology in the entertainment industry.
Viewers of TV's American Idol were able to vote for their favorite performers through text messaging. Radio stations are texting to let listeners know when their favorite songs will air, and production companies have been promoting blockbuster films including X-Men, Kill Bill and The Matrix.
"My readers are just that age where they are all into what's new," says Cabot, who says she has been commissioned to write short stories that will be sent to mobile club subscribers' cellphones.
"The minute the text-messaging icon went up on my website, teens were talking about it on my message boards," says Cabot. "Anything that gets kids excited about books is great. This is just reading in a totally different way."
Key to the program is its interactivity. Teens will get to register for prizes, participate in polls and message friends. If it's deemed successful, we can expect more.
"We believe that the mobile club will increase the exposure of the various series across Meg Cabot's entire fan base and promote upcoming titles," says HarperCollins' Jim McKenzie.
Success will be measured, says McKenzie, by the number of people who sign up and participate in the interactive segments.
McKenzie said the text-messaging innovation was a hit 18 months ago when it was introduced in Britain. The ongoing program there is believed to have played a role in helping The Princess Diaries reach No. 1 on the British Bookseller best-seller chart, knocking Harry Potter from the top spot for the first time in more than 2 1/2 years.
Random House might have been the first publisher to use cellphone marketing earlier this year while promoting Girls in Pants, the third book in Ann Brashares' The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series.
Linda Leonard of Random House says 8,000 fans signed up for the mobile campaign. She says monthly traffic to sisterhoodcentral.com is up 700% so far in 2005 compared with 2004, and she estimates that the site had about 80,000 hits a month around the time The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie came out in June, though she admits the film likely played a part.
Pamir Gelenbe of Flytxt, mobile marketing services provider for the Cabot campaign, says teens' familiarity with text messaging makes them perfect targets for mobile marketing and that Flytxt is in talks with other publishers.
In the USA, he says texting is seen as one component of a book marketing campaign, but abroad, cellphones are used to deliver content. Gelenbe says a book targeted to teen girls and only available via cellphone "went ballistic" in Japan beginning in 2000. Within three years, the website through which the text-messaged book was available had gotten 20 million hits.
More and more, says Gelenbe, teens and adults will be using cellphones to "browse and consume content. I have no doubt e-books are going to come to cellphones."
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