when a virtual world helps you sell your products

Last week, I mentioned that Reuters had taken a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind by establishing a news bureau in the online simulation-world-site Second Life. Well, miracle of miracles, as the Guardian reports, it turns out that book publishers got there first.

The first time I meet Penguin’s digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen, I crash land at his feet. Admirably unperturbed, he shows me his house, we have a chat about Penguin’s latest digital initiative, then fly to a library before he teleports me into the future….

Businesses as diverse as car manufacturers (such as Toyota) and clothing companies (including Adidas and American Apparel) have established a presence in Second Life; the news agency Reuters recently made the news itself by announcing that it is to embed a journalist within Second Life to hunt down stories to report back to the real world.

Penguin, however, is the first major publisher to dip its toe into the virtual world and, appropriately, it has chosen Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the book with which to test the waters. With its invention of the notion of a “metaverse” (a contraction of “metaphysical universe”) it is acknowledged as the inspiration behind Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Penguin went whole-hog with this experiment, working with Rivers Run Red, a “virtual world design agency” (who knew??), to create a version of Snow Crash that would appeal to Second Life visitors:

[T]his offers readers excerpts of the text, an audio clip and a link which clicks through to a dedicated Second Life page on the Penguin website, complete with the opportunity to buy the book at a discount. They are now developing a virtual bookshelf of other Penguin titles for the Second Life resident.

Penguin isn’t the only publisher to latch on to the Second Life phenomenon. A small press has opened shop there too:

This “ground-up” approach to publishing within Second Life is interesting a publisher at the other end of the commercial spectrum. Neal Hoskins (avatar name Fernando Proctor) is the publisher-founder of Winged Chariot, a real-world small press specialising in children’s literature in translation. He is a relatively newcomer to Second Life but, when we meet for a (virtual) cuppa by a (virtual) roaring fire in a (virtual) log cabin, he is keen to talk about the opportunities for developing literature within the world rather than bringing it in from outside.

In the virtual world there are benefits to being a small publisher, says Hoskins. You can move more quickly to experiment with new ideas, and there is less competition from the “big guys”.

“I’d like to look for talent in here,” he muses, “I envisage starting small with something like a poetry or secrets wall where residents can leave notes about their Second Life experiences, and then publishing the best of them, like Paul Auster’s True Tales of American Life. The book could even be brought back into the real world. We could open a fiction imprint list in Second Life, something that’s really difficult for an independent publisher in real life.”

Whether these experiments pay off in dollars remains to be seen, but Second Life has certainly captured the imagination of a lot of people: there are 1 million subscribers so far.

You can follow Penguin UK’s discussion about virtual publishing here, on their blog.