Simon & Schuster have teamed up with Marvel to produce a 25 part mini series based on one of Stephen King’s short stories, “N”. Nice idea. They’ve made the episodes available as a serial online, partnered with a mobile provider to provide the content for phones and you can subscribe through iTunes (but for $3.99 for the whole lot, despite the fact that it appears the series will be free on the site).
I really wanted to love it, but the more I explored the site the more problems I found. I have to say I was surprised to read:
You can watch all of the episodes right here at www.NisHere.com as they become available. Just bookmark this site and visit each weekday.
Seriously? Ever heard of RSS? They do have a mailing list though, so I hope they’ll be emailing with notification that each episode has gone live, but as they’re asking you to come back and check I very much doubt it. I would have thought that keeping potential book buyers happy should be prioritised over page impressions. I registered to watch the first episode and on coming back to the site there’s nowhere for me to login, so I have to register again if I want to see it a second time. The widget didn’t work for me. When I tried to access the wap site I got an error message. FAIL.
Come on S&S, this is basic stuff (I’m not even going into the compete disregard for web standards). This project must have been one of their biggest campaigns, but it seems no one has put any thought into the user experience.
But it’s still good to see publishers experimenting with other ways to tell stories online, and working with media partners to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible. Hopefully it’ll prove more successful than King’s last big foray into online promotion.
