The Blueprint for Promoting Jay-Z's Memoir is Complicated

Go for a dip in the pool -- and read some Jay-Z!

Jay-Z has dominated the music industry for years -- now he's trying to teach the book biz a thing or two.

In promoting Jay-Z's memoir, "Decoded," out next month, the Spiegel & Grau imprint of Random House is teaming with Microsoft's search engine Bing to make every single page available prior to publication. But you are going to have to work for them.

Some pages will appear as billboards in places like Times Square or at the bottom of a hotel swimming pool; others can be seen online in Bing's version of Google's Street View feature. Fans and readers can win prizes by accumulating the pages with the grand prize (anyone who texts in codes embedded on the pages is eligible) being a trip to Sin City for a New Year's Eve show of Jay-Z and Coldplay.

Clues to where the pages are hidden can be found on Bing and Jay-Z's Facebook and Twitter accounts.

"We want to drive users into this experience,” Eric Hadley, general manager of marketing for Bing, told the New York Times.

If the searchers are able to do that, they will make in-roads in their ongoing struggle against Google and Yahoo. As of now Bing is third among search engines, netting 11.2 percent of searches, compared with 16.7 percent for Yahoo and 66.1 for Google.

For its part, Spiegel & Grau may have lit on a plan for saving the publishing business -- they have Bing paying for the ad campaign.

Selected Reading: The New York Times, Mashable.com, Bing.com.

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