This morning I was cruising through one of my favorite blogs and saw a great post about something I've been feeling for some time. Mike Hyatt, who is the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, talked about his company's decision to expand the number and type of formats they make available to customers who have purchased a book.

Their new program, called NelsonFree, is being experimented with on two titles. But I predict it will quickly expand to many others.

Authors and artists will probably embrace this plan, since they want as much exposure as possible. Publishers will likely resist this notion, because they may see this as giving away stuff they can (eventually) sell.

But if the music industry meltdown has taught us anything it's that the customer doesn't see formats. They see content, expressed in a multitude of formats. And they don't think they should have to pay for the format if they paid for the content.

This concept is hardly new. Record labels didn't charge customers more to have the CD booklet — a printed extension of the audio recording. We gave it to them "for free," but of course the customer knew we were paying for the cost in the price. They might pilfer  the audio without the artwork, but would feel as though they missed out on an essential part of the artistic experience if they didn't have the CD/cassette/LP artwork. The mission, then, was to create a CD book that was so unique and so powerful that the customer would want to pay to get it.

As we all know, often the packaging was better than the songs! — but that is another post!

If you are the publisher, do you really care how the money is split up? Buy the Ginsu knives and get the can opener for free. One price, multiple formats. As Solomon once said, There is nothing new under the sun!

The key for publishers, then, is to offer that content in as many formats as possible, and charge a fair price for the exchange.

We're beginning to experiment with this concept with our client, Wayne Watson. Wayne is a legend in the Christian music business, having published almost two dozen No. 1 songs. While Wayne is best known as a singer/songwriter, he has written two books — and exactly zero audio books...until now.

The first, For Such a Time As This (Howard Publishing), is a hardbound gift book that is now out of print — but Wayne has inventory that he is selling at his web site for just $9.99. It's a great deal, but he made it even better by recording an audio book and offering it free as a promotional angle to increase sales. We've seen a steady increase in sales of the book since we blasted out the audio book link in email, at SlickDeals and on Facebook.

Click on the book image to the right to go to the download page and check it out yourself.

Wayne recently released a second book called Turning Into Dad, which we have released exclusively at his web site for Father's Day. Instead of just giving away the audio book — as we did for the grad book — we decided to give it to only those who purchased the book.

Since Wayne mostly works in audio recording (he has his own ProTools studio, so the actual recording was created at no additional expense to Wayne) the audio book proved to be a natural extension of his creative vision for the book. It took Wayne about three hours to record the audio book, including all original music — and he had a blast doing it! Most importantly, the audio book gives Wayne a chance to get back into the recording studio and connect fans with his voice, hopefully enticing his fans to travel to his web store to check out all the audio products he's selling at waynewatson.com.

Have any of you seen similar ideas, and how have they worked?

Check out Mike's blog by clicking here.