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)

A million dollar question, quite literally. Ebooks that are out there now, are priced anywhere from a couple of dollars to a few thousands, the most common price point being $9.99 of the Amazon Kindle. Amazon, in its model, allows publishers to set a selling price and reconciles 30% of that amount, irrespective of the selling price being at $9.99. Having more or less taken up a loss-leader position in this for all popular titles,  their model focuses on gaining market share.  They do charge higher for the less popular and niche books. They are making sure that people get habituated to buying and reading ebooks, though their reconciliation to the publisher may be higher than the selling price of the book – at least in some cases (http://www.teleread.org/2009/05/13/amazon-losing-money-on-999-e-books/).

One other interesting case study to look at would be that of O’Reilly, probably one of the most innovative and early-adopting publisher in the market today. They offer a deeply discounted model of selling most books in DRM-free ePub and PDF versions at $4.99. They have experimented constantly and arrived at a model that covers the marginal cost of an electronic version. The fixed costs still remain in getting a book out. The marginal cost of going from print to electronic is what O’Reilly is focusing on. They are, as always, experimenting with different models and trying to figure out the expectations of the market. In fact, today they sell more ebooks than print books from their own site! (http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/02/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-24.html)

The recent boycott of books on the Kindle, priced over $9.99, provides an interesting comparison on how much the market expects an electronic edition of a book to be priced at.

• Are people right in demanding that all books be sold at the same price, irrespective of the nature of the book?
• Can a different model be explored that offers better choice than a high priced ebook?

“I’d charge fifty cents for an online rental. It would immediately hammer the rental stores (which is fine with Hollywood) and DVD replicators (also fine with Hollywood) but would instantly teach people a new habit. Then, once the new habit is set and you’ve earned permission, sure, charge more for new movies and for blockbusters. 300 million movie theatres, all selling tickets every single night–you don’t need to charge $10 a seat when you have access to everyone.

It’s important to charge something, because the act of paying fundamentally changes the dynamics of the relationship. The question is this: at the start, is your goal to maximize profit or to build a platform that scales? The fact is that the market is too small right now for the price to matter. What matters is whether you can build an audience that is in the habit of paying you, an audience that wants to hear from you, an audience that you can build a business on.

At fifty cents a rental, all desire for piracy goes out the window, replaced by convenience, ease of use and a clear conscience. More important, entire new services show up, habits are built and the studios end up with a direct relationship with consumers who want to hear from them. If they don’t get greedy at the start.”

(http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/01/how-much-for-di.html)

This was written almost 17 months ago by Seth Godin when he was pondering over on how much movie studios should be charging for digital downloads. Probably, the answers lie in Seth’s quote above. Micro-payments and micro-subscriptions, broadly put as rentals, is one model that has rarely been explored in electronic books.

• Can publishers look at a market segment that is willing to pay a small price for a limited time access to content?

“But isn’t this very similar to our real-world or electronic libraries?” - one might ask. It is, to some extent. Yet, it is not a membership-based cover fee to access multiple titles. That particular model already exists for electronic book sales to institutions.

For single users, though, one can look at a model where access is limited to a particular title of choice, for a restricted period of time and has a small attached fee. This model will also be easier to reconcile in terms of royalties, compared to electronic library models, as the payments are for specific titles. A sale can be easily broken down into the royalty percentages and reconciled with authors and content creators.

The market segment that we are talking about here, would probably not buy the print book at all. They are on the fringe. They are consumers, but not buyers, of the print book. This segment of the market is price sensitive and will not buy beyond a price point. However, they will buy in great numbers - if the price is right. There seems to be a good elasticity at lower prices for ebooks. The consumer wants access to read, if it is legal and within their expected price-point - they will go for it. Otherwise, they will look at alternatives. If the price is too high for them, they will explore an alternative Wiki text or risk pirated sources of access on torrents or YouTube-like user uploaded websites for books. We are talking about:

• Students who refrain from buying that ‘important, but non-prescribed book’ needed for their examination.
• Researchers who would rather refer at a library than buy books required to prepare a report.
• Professionals who would not buy all the books that cover a topic.
• Readers who want to check out the book by an author before making the buy decision.

If you look at it closely, everyone benefits from this ‘fringe market’ sale; from the publishers to the authors and more importantly the readers. Will this model work for all segments in publishing? Maybe not. Will it work for popular paperbacks? Again, maybe not. However some early experiments by Harper Collins and Random House indicates that giving easy access to books in the electronic format does have a positive effect on people buying the print edition. (http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf

The micro-subscription models will encourage people to explore more books and may result in driving more print sales. What it does warrant though, is experimenting. With technology and tools available now to actively experiment, it is just a question of trying.

Some more links on this topic..

• Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog
• Lance Ulanoff’s take on the PC Mag
• Glenn’s take on the BenBella Blog

Advances in Custom Publishing at Tools of Change:

The Turnkey Approach:

Another TOC participant, Impelsys, is a New York-based company with a growing reputation of helping publishers establish their online e-book business. The company’s products and platforms are supported by technical resources based in India. It has an impressive client list including Reed Elsevier, McGraw Hill, Wolters Kluwer, Thomson, Springer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and smaller publishers like Marshall Cavendish, Benchmark Education and Prufrock Press.

CEO Sameer Shariff explained their short term strategy, “We’re helping publishers over-come the current economic downturn by providing a low-cost, self-service, online solution to help publishers monetize, market, distribute and deliver content.”

The company’s iPublishCentral allows publishers to move their content online, while iPublishWidget allows publishers to generate viral marketing around titles. Shariff is optimistic that once the economy recovers somewhat, “publishers will become increasingly sophisticated in developing unique, branded portals through which they can create innovative content and media, sustain relationships… and secure a profitable online presence integrated with more traditional print offerings.” This is a company to watch over the next few years.

Read more at Advances in Custom Publishing at Tools of Change (April 16, 2009) The Seybold Report

I recently read an article on Fortune.com by Michael Copeland titled, ‘The end of paper‘ and was delighted. It just reaffirmed my thoughts in terms of the direction I predict the industry will take. The article sums up just how you may be reading your newspaper or your book on an e-paper device in the near future. A sleek, lightweight, portable e-reader is slowly becoming an attractive alternative to the hardcover tomes. The excitement, for me, is around the rapid pace at which this transformation is taking place.

Several companies, including giants like HP, Fujitsu and startups such as Polymer Vision, FirstPaper and Plastic Logic are developing new versions of e-reader addressing the limitations of the current devices available in the market. The new e-readers feature larger screen, wireless connectivity, longer battery life, and touch screen functionality for easy navigation. In short, the e-reader is all set to take…well…reading to a completely new level.

Not only does it come packed with a host of advantages, the e-Books are a cost-effective, durable way to go. What we can look forward to in the near future is flexible display technology that will allow you to fold your screen small enough to slip into your pocket. Apart from Plastic Logic, other players including HP, LG Display and Polymer Vision are working on developing their own versions.

Though e-book sales are still a small percentage of sales compared to print sales, I believe we are closer to the tipping point than ever before. The signs all indicate that we are going in the right direction. Publishers need to be aware of all these advancements and be ready when e-sales take over from print. They need to experiment and see how best to make their business models work in the electronic world.

On another equally uplifting note, we will have more trees thanks to e-books and perhaps do more than our bit for global warming.

So I’m finally back from a crazy month of conferences and meetings.  Met a lot of interesting publishing people – all facing similar challenges.

We were a gold sponsor of the TOC conference and we saw an incredible response from publishers and people from the industry in general. It just goes to prove that no matter what the market conditions are, publishers know that they must look and invest in technology and electronic offerings to stay current with market trends and how important it is to keep up with the rapidly changing industry. Maybe that’s why the Tools of Change conference was sold out whereas some other traditional meetings saw a significant decline in the number of attendees.  We also exhibited at PSP (Professional and Scholarly Publishing) where the attendance was off significantly from last year.  From what I have been reading, many meetings are struggling for attendance – but not so at TOC.  This gives you a clear indication of the focus in publishing - in this concerned market.

This year, I noticed that one of the most discussed topics at various conferences was “e-books” in its various configurations and forms.  Many of the presentations had lots of numbers and graphs depicting various upticks and trends in ebook sales. In one session on “E-Books: Business Models and Strategies”, gave the following numbers on electronics vs print… “In STM, estimates of digital revenue range from 15-30% of total book revenue; in higher education it’s up to 30%; and in reference it’s 60%.”  We can now see clearly that consumers are changing their reading habits.  Stanza, the new reader for the iPhone, boasted that since offering Stanza in Dec 2008, there have been over 1.5 million downloads of the reader and millions of more books downloaded to their iPhones.

Another hot topic at TOC was Twitter and how it has changed the way information is communicated and exchanged. There were lots of discussions on the Dos and Don’ts of Twitter and the most effective way of messaging and marketing on Twitter. Almost everybody at the TOC was online and twittering throughout the conference. ‘TOC’ was the most twittered topic for almost a week. Marketing on Twitter is a whole new deal. I too am becoming a tweeter on Twitter and I think that if you’re not at least putting your feet in the bird feeder, you’re missing out on a lot of information that could be useful to your future - no matter what area of publishing is your focus.

We were VERY pleased with all the enthusiasm and interest that we saw in iPublishCentral.  At the conference we announced that iPublishCentral registration rose above 150 publishers since launching at the Frankfurt Book Fair and from what I’m seeing – TOC is already helping that number soar.  We held a seminar at TOC: ‘Sparking a new e book revolution through a new self-serve model’ by Sameer Shariff, our CEO. We all attended some very interesting presentations too, and I thoroughly enjoyed sitting in on Tim O’Reilly’s presentation about “reasons to be excited” and Chris Brogan on ‘blogging and social media’. Nick Bilton presented on ‘the future of storytelling’ which was inspiring and Robert Stein’s focus on a publishers new responsibility “… to build and nurture vibrant communities for authors and tend to their readers” was an eye-opener for many publishers. The focus of building a community around your content is one that we have been conveying to market for a long time.

Throughout the conference, certainly there was a focus on how the market conditions are challenging, to say the least, and why it is especially important for publishers to dip their toes in the water and test out the ebook market with a low cost/low risk solution.  So when you think about it, there couldn’t have been a better time to have launched iPublishCentral since it provides low cost and time saving solutions to publishers.  Timing is everything.  Take a dip and tweet the market.

Let me know what you found most interesting at TOC.

Are you following us on Twitter?

We are constantly updating you with the latest news from iPublishCentral at http://twitter.com/ipublishcentral. Our twitter account is where we tweet about all the new publishers and their new publications. We announce the books that they have, discuss them and look forward to your feedback and reviews.

We are also a part of the #booktrade, it is a directory for those in book trade and using twitter. http://www.highspotinc.com/blog/2008/12/a-directory-of-book-trade-people-on-twitter/

iPublishCentral now supports posting to FaceBook and MySpace profile.

A Widget post on FaceBook

You can now use these additional features to post titles on your profile and share it with your friends. You start the word and encourage others to spread it. You have now got two new ways to do just that!

FaceBook and MySpace options in the Widget

Check for the FaceBook and MySpace icons under the share option (the “+” button) in your Widget and ViewInside. In case you do not find it, just login to iPublishCentral and enable them for your titles.