• by Shankar Gupta , January 10, 2006

News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers tapped Waterfront Media to create Web sites to promote books written by HarperCollins' self-help authors, starting with fitness guru Jillian Michaels and her book, "Winning By Losing."

Waterfront CEO Ben Wolin said that Michaels' site, www.JillianMichaels.com, will contain add-ons to the book, including extra recipes and exercises. "We have the ability to publish a lot more than a book publisher would, so the site ends up being a pretty large enterprise."

The initiative resembles America Online's "Coaches" section, launched last year to promote self-help authors. Coaches--a completely free online feature--showcases writers, including fitness guru Denise Austin and Body by Jake founder Jake Steinfeld. AOL offers book excerpts, audio/video streams of them reading from their books, interactive quizzes, and other features.

The Waterfront site, which will launch in the second quarter, will also have a section for subscribers only, at a likely cost of $20 per month. The paid section will include message boards, access to weight-loss experts, and personalized meal- and weight-trackers, Wolin said.

Waterfront also will display online ads on the HarperCollins site, although no advertisers have yet signed up. Other marketers on Waterfront properties include Kraft Foods, Equal, and Pampers.

HarperCollins Group President Brian Murray said the company is bullish on sites based on personalized content related to its properties. "We think that there's a real future in personalized online programs based on books," he said. "It seemed like a natural fit for us to develop a partnership where we could provide our authors another resource."

Waterfront has created a number of other sites based on successful self-help books, including Rodale's imprint "The South Beach Diet," Regan Books' "Zone Diet," and the enormously popular "What to Expect When You're Expecting," published by Workman Publishing Company.

The partnership with Waterfront is just one way HarperCollins is using the Internet to market its books. Last month, the company unveiled a plan to create digital copies of books, accessible to search engines' crawlers.