This month, the CBC Book Club is exploring the future of reading. Here’s an interesting interview with Benjamin Rivers - an independent game developer, comic artist and web designer - that looks at the interactive and cross-media opportunities that are now available with books. In his words, if you’re a publisher today “you should be thinking small and thinking light.”
This montage of AT&T ads came from a 1993 Newsweek CD-ROM, when Newsweek thought that one day, magazines would be sent to you in CD-ROM form, sponsored with ads. It’s an interesting view of the future.
What is your business promising?
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
The iPad launched in Canada two weeks ago now and we’re waiting to see what impact it will have on book sales and the publishing industry as a whole. While it’s still too early to get concrete data (in Canada few books have even been licensed to the iBookstore) some early stats are exciting. Wired magazine released the numbers for their iPad app, stating that they sold 24,000 copies of the app within the first 24 hours it was available. At $5 per app, this means that Wired earned $120,000 for their app in just one day.
On the book front, according to Stephen Windwalker, ebooks represented 30% of all first week sales for Steig Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest. He states:
By comparison, published reports of the total ebook sell-through for Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol last year put it at less than 10 percent of the title’s overall sales, despite the fact that ebook sales outperformed hardcover sales on the Amazon.com website for several weeks.
While it’s very possible that these numbers simply represent early excitement over a new technology, they do show the initial impact that the iPad is having on industry sales. While it’s still too early to tell what realistic sales numbers will look like, statistics show that reading and book buying behaviours have been changing for the last few years.
Here are some of the changes over the last 5 years to how the internet has affected book discovery and sales.
In 2005, Canadian interest in online book purchases was increasing. 1 in 5 (21%) buyers said they were interested in making an online book purchase in the near future versus 14% in 2002.
During this time, Chapters.ca was growing. Chapters.ca represented 5% of total revenue in 2002 to 15% in 2007. While the report states that Amazon does not report its Canadian sales publicly, they did say that Amazon.ca sales doubled from 2002 to 2007.
67% see reviews online vs. in traditional print media
54.8% see online ads to find books
24.8% use retailer emails (i.e. subscription newsletters from Amazon)
15.7% see ads in newspapers and magazines
Out of purchases based on online awareness, online book reviews were the main source of information at 29%
Ebook sales grew 125% overall in 2008
While some of these numbers are a little out of date and we’re not comparing apples to apples here, generally we can take a few things from them:
It’s clear that book buying habits are moving more and more online. From 2002 to 2008 there’s been a substantial shift in where people buy books. The growth of Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca confirms this.
Online reviews are important. Publishers should be focusing their marketing efforts on getting online attention for their books.
Online ads are also important. Publishers should be using their ad budgets for online ads rather than print.
Retailer emails help to sell books. This is because they make things easy with direct links to book reviews and product pages to buy the books. Publishers should be following their lead and replicating these best practice in their own emails.
Does your own experience coincide with these numbers? Does anyone have any recent numbers that they can share? Or a report that shows different statistics?
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Leadership doesn’t always come from the top. You can show leadership no matter what chair you sit in for the organization. Below are some tips.
If you’re the lone evangelist in your organization, the person who wants to experiment with social media, or wishes for a website redesign to increase usability, or needs tips for talking to the boss about why online marketing is important, you are not alone.
There are lots of lone evangelists out there who can clearly see what needs to be done and should be done to positively affect the organization. Your job is not the description you have for your performance review, your job is to work as if you have the title you want and the position you want. You can lead from anywhere.
Here are my tips.
Know what the top cares about.
Regardless of what’s painfully obvious to you, regardless of what you think the C-suite should care about, you need to show how your idea meets their business needs.
Don’t be defensive.
Take all criticism as passionate interest in what you have to offer. Use that criticism to refine your arguments. Try again.
Build momentum.
Make sure you’re talking to the right people, in the right order. You have an idea, have you talked to the people who would directly benefit? For example, if you have an idea that would make the website better for visitors, have you talked to those visitors? Do a survey. Call them on the phone. Talk to your customers, pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.
Once you’ve got user buy-in, build your requirements list. What technically needs to happen for this to succeed? Who in the organization would need to be involved? Pitch the idea to IT, finance, purchasing, whoever would be involved from a technical, or logistics, stand-point. Pitch them the idea, get feedback, learn and improve.
Now you have the business case (user buy-in), you have the technical requirements (tech/logistical buy-in), you’re ready to pitch the idea to management. These are the big picture folks in the organization, and the folks who hold the purse strings.
Getting economic buy-in is always easier when you have buy in, contribution, and commitment from other links along the chain.
Tell stories.
Facts and figures are great, but don’t lead with those. The townsfolk followed the Pied Piper because he was playing music, not waving a laser pointer at a flip chart. (Don’t go any further with that metaphor! You’re not luring people off to meet their demise, but you do want their attention. You do want your story passed on through the organization.)
Stories help us understand the world. What’s the story behind your great idea? How did you come to this understanding?
Know what you need.
Once you have their attention, know what you need and how to ask for it in the most simple, direct manner.
I believe that (business case)
should be able to (objectives that have a positive impact for customers/for the organization)
by (measurement, key performance indicators)
through the ability to (actions required)
as a result of (differentiations that will be created)
for ($).
Example: We believe that we can improve the user experience on our site by adding clearer calls to action, which should increase our sales and optimize the user experience, which we can measure by monitoring cart abandonment, time on site (and common paths) and sales. The ability to design and add these buttons requires some design and development time from Marketing, IT and our outside vendors that’s beyond the scope of what they do today. Based on industry standards and our internal testing, we anticipate a 50% drop in cart abandonment, time on site to decrease since users are no longer lost in the process, and sales to increase by 20%. The cost is $3,000, which we anticipate recovering in the first month after implementation. What questions can I help answer?
Be brief. Be brilliant. Be gone.
State your general position. Identify the specific segment or target market that will be affected. Propose the value proposition. Provide proof. Start a dialogue.
Don’t have specifics?
If your business case lacks the logical justification that comes from facts and figures, then you need to appeal to emotion.
Go for forfeiture vs. aspiration (what are they missing out on, giving up or losing vs. what could be gained):
saving time
immediacy, convenience
making easy money
comfort
scarcity
belonging
reputation
fun
Be ready to fail.
Set many small goals early. Break big tasks into smaller pieces. Start with small experiments, filter out failure, expand upon success. Report often. Keep people in the loop.
Have a sense of humour.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates
Seeing the humour in any situation allows you to also see the lesson.
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
How do digital sales affect how books are published and promoted?
My day job here at Boxcar Marketing is about helping companies understand what they can do on the web to promote themselves, to build their customer base and to interact with their customers effectively.
A lot of that work has to do with words. Writing and editing content for webpages, press releases, email newsletters, blog posts, tweets, surveys, downloadable PDFs, search ads, banner ads, and Facebook event invitations, to name a few.
When I worked in the book publishing industry (1996 to 2006), these items (if they existed) were part of the later phases of the publishing cycle. The author wrote the book, the agent sold the book to a publisher, the editor and author worked on refining the book, it went to production, sales and marketing started talking about the book, the book went to the printer, the sales reps sold the book to stores, the publicists pitched the book to reviewers, printers shipped the books to stores, the reviews came out in newspapers and magazines, the book appeared on book shelves, marketing and promotion kicked in, sales occurred, publicity continued for 3 months, more sales were made and/or unsold copies were returned to the publisher. Wash and repeat.
Digital sales changed the publishing world, not just in how we write online content, but how we sell online.
In the industry, we talk about the impact of Amazon discounts, we talk about price points for physical vs. ebook, we fret over making those ebooks,and we talk about DRM. But few people talk about how digital sales has affected every facet of the publishing process.
As an online marketing strategist, this is what I see.
Editorial Phase
Knowledge acquisition and audience interest.
What happens at the editorial stage positions the book through the entire sales process. The keyword choices made for the book title, subtitle, description and author bio determine whether readers will be able to easily find that book when searching Amazon, and search engines such as Google.
Acquiring search engine marketing skills has served many publishers well.
Production Phase
Branding, layout and design.
Digital sales brings a whole new set of requirements to the production phase. Just the cover design alone presents new challenges. For physical books, there’s the font size, colour choices, imagery, and how to make all the required elements look good for books face out on the shelf, spine out, placed on a table, seen close up or recognizable from afar.
Digital sales brings us thumbnail versions of the book for display on Amazon and other websites, plus icons for Facebook and Twitter, and black and white versions for ebook readers.
Have a look at Amazon (find the book section). What covers are distinct? Which stand out? Why?
Compare this set of designs:
To this set of designs:
You’ll see that high contrast and large fonts work best, so that, when reduced, the cover is still recognizable and legible.
Sales Phase
Awareness and availability to buy.
Traditionally publishers saw themselves in a B2B role. Business to Business.
Publishers worked with teachers, librarians, media and booksellers. The marketing model was built around educating that group of people so that they could go out and recommend or sell the books to readers.
Digital sales put publishers in a B2C role. Business to Consumer.
Publisher websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds all contribute to the online conversation about books and authors. This conversation between publishers and book readers is really important, even for publishers who are not selling books directly from their website.
By fostering conversation early and showing interest in a new book, the sales folks are in a better position to negotiate with their B2B partners.
Booksellers such as Amazon stock almost everything, but they decide through advertising dollars, partnerships and mathematical algorithms what books will appear in their newsletters, on the homepage or browse pages, and even what appears in the search results and the order in which titles are displayed in those results.
Amazon is looking for titles that can break away from the pack. These are the ones they are interested in promoting because the audience size and interest is clear. (You can bet that they’re reviewing sales history, search history, keyword research, and PPC conversions.)
Sales & Returns: Inventory
A subset of sales is inventory management, which is completely changed by digital sales. Forget about the challenges of digital downloads, let’s just look at physical inventory sold digitally.
Bibliographic data (all the info you see about a book online) is fed to retailers through xml feeds that contain this data. Someone needs to manage all of that in an incredibly precise way. Information on title, author, publication date, and inventory stock levels affects what people see online. The data is traded daily, even hourly, to ensure that what you see online is the best reflection of availability and shipping time.
Making a mistake here could mean that your book appears on Amazon with a delivery time of 3-5 weeks. Imagine how that affects the impulse buy!
Marketing & Publicity Phase
Awareness, outreach, and engagement.
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling a product or service. This traditional definition is true. But what does promoting and selling mean in a digital world? A clearer definition might be:
Marketing is any way that you engage with people to generate exposure, opportunity and sales.
In the case of marketing and publicity, this includes writing content that is remarkable, unique and newsworthy. And it likely means you’re publishing that material in the form of blogs, press releases, newsletters, tweets, and ads.
Back to keyword research, right?
If people are buying digitally, it means they are also discovering digitally. This changes what keywords publishers choose to use in blog headings, press releases, newsletter articles, tweets, twitter hashtags and on-page optimization elements (filenames, page titles, headings, text).
Behind the scenes, this also affects the sales materials publishers create, such as catalogues. Print catalogues were (and still are) produced each season to profile upcoming books. The book descriptions used in the catalogue are typically the same description that appears on Amazon and the publisher’s website.
But is the B2B copy the best copy for a B2C audience?
Traditionally sales copy is written for the bookseller whereas jacket copy is written for the book reader. Both are meant to entice, but the intended audience is different.
Even publishers who upload jacket copy should consider whether copy intended for a print audience translates well to an online reading experience. Large blocks of prose don’t work well online whereas shorter sentences, bulleted lists, highlight colors and bolded text help online readers scan and understand information quickly.
Digital sales should have completely altered this copywriting process, but publishers are still in transition.
This transition period means that in addition to needing good writing, editing, production, promotion and sales skills, digital sales are forcing publishers to acquire email marketing, search marketing, content creation and asset management skills that are reminiscent of traditional approaches yet have a whole new set of considerations.
What changes have you seen to copywriting, book design or promotion as a result of digital sales?
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Clay Shirky fascinates me because he thinks about the world within the context of thinking that has gone before him. In his recent post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models he references Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book called The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Shirky is able to take Tainter’s work, on how several societies (such as the Romans and Mayans) arrived at a remarkable level of sophistication only to suddenly collapse, and apply those lessons to media’s plight today. The media industry being the complex, sophisticated system on the verge of collapse that is under his examination.
Tainter’s argument, as introduced by Shirky, follows that, as a direct result of complexity and sophistication, we see systems fall because the elite at the top are unable to see a different path. Shirky points to how this plays out in the business models of mass media, where the elite cannot foresee a scenario where users don’t pay for what they consumer. Spelled out, Shirky says big media’s argument for who pays for what would sound something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
The ecosystem of our planet is perhaps trapped in the same dire circumstances, where the burden of change drives our collapse. But in the less frightening scenario of what happens to old media, Shirky champions ingenuity by saying:
“But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
On December 30, my article “Use Clay to Shape the Future of Publishing” was posted on the BookNet Canada blog. The original is missing the proper links and some blockquotes so I’m going to post it again here.
Use Clay to Shape the Future of Publishing
As I reflect on 2009, there is one author who continually comes to mind as a thought leader for the publishing industry, and that is Clay Shirky.
In March, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW) in Austin, TX. SXSW is an uber-geek fest where the best of the best come to geek it up and muse on the state of the internet, culture, and technology. Us plebs listen intently, take notes and then report back to the unwashed masses via our blogs, Facebook and twitter streams.
Ok, it’s not as stuck up as that, but it is an expensive conference to attend and, as an attendee, one expects a certain, exalted level of thinking.
The panel that disappointed me the most, and which let to a firestorm amongst the online book geeks, was New Thinking for Old Publishers.
This panel was nicknamed “No Thinking for Old Publishers.” As much as Clay Shirky was the heavy weight on the panel, he was not the main attraction. The audience was full of bloggers and book lovers intent on spreading the word about exciting developments in the publishing industry, intent on hearing directly from the editors, publicists and publishers who they so rarely have access to.
But to say that it was a disappointment is an understatement. It was a disaster.
What resulted from the disaster of that panel was a grassroots movement to create a better dialogue on the future of publishing. I experienced that better dialogue at BookCamp Vancouver, a self-organizing conference on books and technology.
Here’s a little about how BookCamp Vancouver originated.
In my post-SXSW rant, I vowed to organize a panel in Vancouver. That panel quickly became a full conference. With generous sponsorship from SFU and BookNet Canada, the organizers were able to offer free registration to 300 people. (Organizers included me, John Maxwell from SFU Master of Publishing program, Morgan Cowie from BNC, Sean Cranbury from Books on the Radio and Nick Bouton from Protagonize.)
We wanted a different conversation than what we usually heard at book conferences. As an internet marketing consultant, the last couple of years have no longer been about convincing publishers that digital is here. It made no sense to have any rah-rah “ebook” conversations or to bring in big headline speakers. What made sense was to bring together the book geeks and the tech geeks to talk directly about the problems.
The sessions at BookCamp Vancouver included such topics as “Using Open Source Models in Publishing”, “The Optimal Use of Social Media for Authors and Publishers”, “The State of the Electronic Book,” and “Making Content King.”
It was my first book conference that was attended by people in the book industry as well as those in the technology industry. And I was thrilled.
But back to Clay Shirky.
The problem with the SXSW panel was that there was too little Shirky. This was also the case with the former BEC conference: there were too few people involved outside of the publishing industry to offer insights into where the industry could go in terms of technology.
As publishers scramble to catch up, to figure out ebooks, to work with ONIX, others have been steaming ahead—readers, in particular.
In January 2005 while working at Raincoast, I attended the Blogging for Business Summit in Seattle. At that time, I felt that the publishing industry was behind.
In April of 2005, I started SoMisguided.com to talk about books, online marketing and technology. It took me until November 2005 to launch the Raincoast blog and podcast program. Desperately trying to ride at least the tail of the online crest, in retrospect we were ahead, Raincoast became 1 of 3 publishers internationally who were podcasting and blogging.
We all have our Cassandra moments.
Since 1997 when I got my first hotmail account, and then signed up my friends, I have been watching the culture of reading change. I was, and continue to be, obsessed with reading culture and the information revolution. Such is the case with Clay Shirky, and it is particularly evident in his March 13 blog post called “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” It was Shirky’s post that led me to buy his book Here Comes Everyone and to attend that SXSW panel.
In “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Shirky manages to take 20 years of conversation about the digital nature of our culture and distill it into something that people in the newspaper industry are willing to hear and understand. Book publishing folks, please read this article.
Why? Because book publishers, like newspapers, are content producers and we have taken similar approaches to digital copies and electronic sharing of content.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ‘90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
There is no general model for newspapers, or books to follow. The internet has broken the model and there is no one-size-fits-all fix.
Print and the web are alternate modes of distributing information. We have internalized that this is happening, but what’s missing is for each house to create an individual, cohesive plan. Publishers need to go back to their business models and create new plans and new models for new realities.
A few folks in the publishing crowd are sentinels. They have been saying for years, “Hey look what’s going on, people are sharing, participating, writing and publishing their own books.”
“These people are crazy, are you seeing this?”
“Don’t they know how much work is involved in writing and editing and producing a book, and then distributing it to stores.”
This type of response to those observations is part of the problem.
Industrial production destroyed the viability of scribes. Such is the case with digital, it has destroyed the old economics that worked for how books are produced, distributed, sold and read. We need new models because the core problem publishing solves—“the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem” (Shirky).
Instead of investigating how to drastically change and adapt, we’ve stuck to our old business models, which has left us arguing about what Google can and cannot index, what the price of ebooks should or should not be, and whether we should or should not have someone on staff dedicated to Facebook and Twitter.
Yes, old systems are going to break before new systems are in place. Such is the case with revolutions. We are publishing in a time of experimentation where nothing will work, but anything might.
Whether it’s keeping our nose to the grindstone, burying our heads or navel gazing, we have forgotten to look up.
Look up now, to that to top left corner of ceiling and think about all the “yes, buts ...” you’ve said over this conversation. Where are the “yes, ands ...” How can we work this year on creative planning and reinventing our businesses?
Jay Rosen recently interviewed Clay Shirky and one of the discussion topics was of research done in the 70s and 80s by social scientists who studied how newspapers, such as Time, Newsweek, CBS, NBC, made decisions.
Their common observation was that the sociology of the newsroom was based, not on the best way or the journalistic way to do something but rather, on what the production process demanded.
They discovered that as newsrooms internalized the production routine, their decisions accommodated that routine. They eventually believed that they were doing things that were required or necessary rather than recognizing that they were making decisions on what the production routine demanded.
In publishing we have reps selling in the books from tip sheets and advances, we produce catalogues seasons in advance, we store and ship products between warehouses, the number of pages in a book is divisible by 4 to accommodate printing presses.
What happens when the production routine changes?
If the entire business is shifting and the nature of how the public informs itself and acquires reading material is changing, then why are we not changing at the same speed?
What if you had to start from scratch? How would you make more money than you spend (yes, on every book)?
This is a new year. A time for new beginnings. We can’t reverse the flow of time. Micropayments, subscriptions are not the answer. Set aside ebooks.
Stare at that top left corner of the ceiling more often this year.
Innovate. Read some Clay Shirky. Create your own future.
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
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