In this part, we will focus on the value that reviewers and authors can add to the book’s online marketing plan. These programs can be created easily, using free tools that are readily available. An author needs to spend only a couple of hours in a week to achieve the desired results for these programs.

• Review Blog

Reviewer relationships are essential for a publisher and review blogs are great tools for showcasing expert opinions for a title. One thing to remember is that in the social world, every reader can become a reviewer. Well-known review blogs have great fan following, with readers subscribing to RSS feeds and email updates from these blogs. These readers form an active community around the blog and comments on a review plays an important role in enhancing the reviews. The publisher can provide the reviewer useful tools like interactive cover arts in the form of widgets and book previews to add value. Reviews can be further enriched by providing the reviewer means to add author videos and title summary presentations. Reviews can also be included into the title’s metadata to create extended descriptions for the title and content. The reviewers also monetize their posts through affiliate programs by including shopping cart links to various online retailers. The publisher can also provide similar affiliate links to their own ecommerce site to get additional traffic to their site and possible direct sales. Once a favorable review has been posted, it can be broadcast on social media channels like Twitter and FaceBook.

• Author Blogs

Authors are the main evangelists for a title and they can help sales tremendously. Apart from tours and signing events, author websites and blogs help introduce them to readers as real people. Authors’ opinions on content covered in a title and other generic topics of interest help readers relate to them better. The author’s blog or a website helps in creating a brand for the author. It is easier to sell a new title from the author, if there’s already an active following for the author’s blog. Author brands can help sell, potentially, a series of titles and are very important in terms of value for a publisher. Author blogs can be enhanced with widgets, book previews, videos, presentations, reviews and other supporting material. Creating link lists and rolls help form networks of reciprocity and also help in traffic generation. The blog also acts as a platform for authors to interact with readers who, otherwise, might not have been accessible. Tools like WordPress and Blogger help in creating blogs easily and provide tools to update and maintain the blogs.

• Author Social Network Profiles

Author’s profiles on social networks are great places to get communities together. When someone “Googles” for an author, the social network profiles come up right at the top. An author’s public profile can be enabled to host the book cover art or a widget that can be used for marketing a title. Social profiles make it much easier for readers to interact with authors. An author can accept connections and form groups or create pages related to a title and manage interaction with readers. Such author-focused communities can make good catchment areas for repeat sales through targeted campaigns.

• Author Videos

Author videos can be used to connect to readers and introduce them to the face behind the name. This allows readers to get to know and understand an author’s work from his/her own perspective. Free video hosting services like YouTube can be used to achieve great results in doing this. A dedicated channel can be set up for hosting all author videos and communities can be built around a channel. The channel can further be used as an announcement board to host promotional videos on new book releases and author tours. Videos of various events like author signing events and conferences can be effective too. Readers can be invited to record and post their reviews to create more value.

To be continued..

Read Some Alternate Aprroaches To Online Book Marketing- Part I

Read Some Alternate Aprroaches To Online Book Marketing- Part III

I’ve been thinking about last month’s New York Times story, Textbook Publisher to Rent to College Students, and the subsequent NYTimes blog post, A Cheaper Way to Get Textbooks: Rent and I’m a bit confused.

I’m not surprised that companies like Cengage, Chegg or Follett need to take these steps in the hopes of preserving the dwindling revenues that the entire book business is seeing. But I’m surprised that the Times saw fit to stand behind these efforts so blindly in light of the facts.

The basis of this story is that companies are adopting textbook rentals to counter the online sales of used textbooks to outfits like Amazon.com.  They believe this approach will increase profitability because they won’t have to go for additional print runs.

Even if this were a solid deal for students - which most of the blog comments seem to indicate otherwise – the economics just don’t add up. The companies still have to manage lending centers; replace damaged, lost or destroyed books, and they are still limited to a certain geographical area or be subject to large shipping fees.

If we accept that e-books will be the norm sooner or later, this new business can hardly be seen as anything more than a last gasp for the physical textbook business.  (For those doubters still among you, I am reminded of the music industry execs that couldn’t be convinced that digital music would ever replace CDs).

When e-books become the norm:

1. Books become available to all just with an Internet connection.
2. They can sell it at a much lesser price compared to their print versions.
3. They can rent it for a period of time.
4. They can sell content in chunks.
5. They can rent content in chunks.
6. Publishers do not have to worry about the used book market.

I don’t know…maybe I’m over thinking this one.

Marketing books has changed dramatically in the Internet age. While traditional marketing and promotional methods are still effective, they alone are just not enough to bring in the sales. With people now spending about 15.5 hours per week over the Internet, the Internet has emerged as the #1 leisure activity. Here are a few facts…

• Internet is now the #1 sales channel for publishers, accounting for 23% of all books sold on an average.

• A lot of interest has been generated by new ebook devices and readers like the Kindle and Stanza, changing the ways that ebooks are now being read. Ebooks accounted for 1.5% of total revenues for a title in 2008 and has jumped up to 2.5% of total revenues for a title in Q1 2009.

• 19% of customers said that online promotions influenced their buy decision, as against 12% whose buy decision was influenced by print promotions.

This clearly shows that Internet has emerged not only as the largest sales and distribution channel – but as the major marketing channel for books as well.

How does one reach the online users?

Studies have shown that more than 59% of book buyers are also present on a social network. Of these, 44% are present on Facebook, 10% are on Twitter and increasing rapidly as Twitter takes giant strides in becoming the largest micro-blogging and news channel. Also, 90% of book buyers send and receive email. So, we have now got a decent handle on what people, who normally buy books, tend to do when they are online. Any of these channels – Email, Facebook or Twitter, or a combination of all the three is a good place to start.

What kind of tools are available for marketing online?

There are a lot of tools out there and explaining or making sense of all of them will be huge exercise in itself. We will focus only on tools that are known to be more effective than others for marketing books. Some of these tools may already be quite familiar, but they can still generate fresh ideas. These tools include (in no particular order)…

• Book Widgets

Widgets are little windows to a publisher’s website, titles and content that have the unique ability to travel and get distributed to various places. They are distributed by readers, authors and reviewers and can be embedded in places like FaceBook, MySpace and blogs. They can contain links to sample content, Table of Contents and shopping carts. The widget can be updated, allowing updates to be automatically pushed to all installed widgets. The updates can be used to announce promotions or new book/edition releases. The widgets are also effective sales agents as each of them carry links to the shopping cart for a title. These back-links to the publisher’s website enhances the SEO/SEM of the site and makes them an effective marketing, sales and announcement tool.

• Book Previews

Book previews and sample programs offer the best way to showcase content and enable conversions from interest to sales. Amazon, who pioneered the preview programs through their Search Inside, reported 9% increase across 120,000 titles in the first few weeks after implementing the Search Inside program. Today, they report that readers who choose to view a Search Inside are 2 times more likely to buy the book than those who don’t. This proves the efficacy of book previews and they are valuable tools that can be offered to ensure conversions. These tools ideally allow publishers to choose a range of pages for display, enable searching across the book, showcase the TOC of the book, enable social sharing and also add links to the shopping cart as a call to action.

• Shared Title Summary PowerPoints

Shared PowerPoint presentations are great vehicles to introduce titles. They offer community feedback and ratings, apart from options to embed videos. They can be shared across a wide range of social networks, including professional ones like LinkedIn. They are extremely suitable for titles that are aimed at STM and professional book markets. Readers can directly embed them in their profile and share it easily with friends. Slideshare.net is one of the services that can be looked at to share title summaries. They can also be used to give out teasers to ancillary materials and other value adds like embedding author videos.

• User Ratings, Comments and Recommendations

User ratings and comments are probably the most convincing tools in creating a recommendation system for titles. Amazon has been using them with great success. Readers prefer to hear what other people, who read the book, have to say about it before making a buy decision. They form the bedrock in convincing potential buyers about the value of a book and influencing buy decisions. Readers rate a title and share their views about it with the general community. Other readers, who are browsing this book, can add to these comments and convert them into interesting discussion threads. Publishers can ask known readers to write the first review to get these threads started. Community generated comments act as an add-on to reviews by known experts and can go on to augment a title’s content, and hold a lot of value for prospective buyers in the form of “customer speak”. Publishers can also get feedback on how the title / content is received and look for enhancements and ideas for new titles/editions. Comments and ratings can be added on reading list sites, book retail sites and blogs.

(to be continued..)

Read  Some Alternate Approaches to Online Book Marketing (Part II)

Read  Some Alternate Approaches to Online Book Marketing (Part III)