Random House Canada has redesigned its website and launched an online magazine as part of its new digital strategy.
Unveiled Thursday, Hazlitt is an online publication hosted on the Random House website that covers culture and current affairs. The new property is run by editor-in-chief Christopher Frey, former editorial director of the Toronto Standard.
Random House has also launched Hazlitt Originals, a program that will release e-books. Together, the two new ventures form the main pillars of Random House’s new ‘freemium’ business model for original online content.
“While traditionally many book publishers have been primarily using their websites for sales and marketing purposes, we want to also use ours to publish original content,” said Brad Martin, president and CEO of Random House.
The company is hoping the original content strategy of the Hazlitt projects will increase author exposure. It’s the same philosophy that guided the redesign of Random House’s new website, according to Ryan Bannon, creative director of Playground, the digital creative agency that built the new site.
Bannon said the site is based on the idea of discovery and uses content to direct readers to new books. For example, if a reader is reading an article that mentions a book on Hazlitt, it will display a link to the book on the right panel of the page.
“The way the content is organized is… to allow people to meander from one thing to another,” Bannon said. “It’s a lot more like browsing than it is searching for something.”
Eric Jensen, director of marketing at eBound Canada, the digital arm of the association of Canadian publishers, said this approach tackles one of the biggest challenges facing publishers.
“I like the idea of any tool for discoverability,” Jensen said. “Discovery, for any publisher, is a matter of getting their books noticed in an online space and that’s an increasing challenge.”
