Technology

Some Alternate Approaches to Online Book Marketing

By Ulhas Anand

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.

Review Blogs

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.

Excerpt Blogs

Excerpts help create great discoverability for content, specifically if the excerpts are chosen well to represent a true cross-section of content areas that distinguish a book. The easiest way to do this is to create a blog with a free service provider like Blogger or WordPress. These hosted blogs come optimized for search engines, allowing them to crawl through the blog content. In addition to the excerpts, book description, expert reviews and links to review/author blogs help in providing a complete representation for the title. Link exchanges and ping backs help drive additional traffic to the blog. Each title can be a separate post, with the book title and author as the main topic of the post. The posts can be tagged with subject categorization and keywords for ease in navigation. Widgets and book previews provide additional functionality to such posts.

Email Campaigns

Email campaigns have been the tried and tested tool for targeted marketing programs. Databases of existing customers are a good place to start up/cross-selling titles of interest. Permission marketing techniques that provide something of value, like a newsletter or new title updates, can be used to gather email addresses of potential customers. Always ensure that the target of such campaigns have volunteered to receive information, in compliance with anti-spam norms, by specifically choosing to receive promotional material. Third party email marketing companies like Constant Contact provide excellent functionality in sending out emails to thousands of contacts and also provide reports to measure the efficacy of such campaigns. Along with individual campaigns, publishers can choose to do permission marketing by sending moderator-approved mails to existing communities on mailing list servers and discussion forums.

Social Bookmarks

Social bookmarks provide great SEO and should be an essential part of every online marketing strategy. These sites allow a site to be bookmarked with tags. People using these sites choose to receive website recommendations based on tags they are interested in. They can then vote a page up or down, send it to their network and write reviews about the website. Publishers can bookmark title description pages, excerpt blog posts, author videos, summary presentations, book previews and other promotional material to attract traffic. Each of these pages can contain links to the bookmarking sites that encourage readers to add or vote on the page. Bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon are popular, with millions of users visiting recommendations from these sites everyday.

Social Reading Lists

Reading lists are personal booklists maintained online by readers, and are usually classified based on books that they have read, books that they own and books that they intend to read. They provide features that allow users to maintain a personal reading list and catalog their own libraries. The books on a personal list are linked to a common instance of the title that shows who else has the same book on their reading list. Users can interact with each other by adding friends and discussing books. Comments and ratings are presented to all users. This presents opportunities where publishers can add more information on a title than what is available through the standard metadata. Publishers can create their own profile and add books that they publish to their profile. They can add additional links to author videos, reviews and information on purchases in the form of comments on a title. Most of these lists provide the facility of creating paid institutional accounts, which the publisher can subscribe to and create an account in the firm's name. Some of the popular reading lists are Shelfari, LibraryThing, GoodReads and BookTrails.

Social Network Pages and Groups

Being present on social networking sites has become an essential part of a company's CRM and support strategy. Companies are also using their social network presence to drive promotions and manage relationships. Most social networks allow companies and businesses to create an account and manage their customers as followers by providing functionalities like groups and corporate pages. If deployed well, this strategy can lead to thousands of followers on these group pages with whom relationships can be managed. FaceBook, MySpace and LinkedIn, to name a few larger social networks, provide groups where surveys, calendars, event invites, contests and promotions can be carried out. Providing rewards for followers on these groups – in terms of additional discounts, sneak previews, event invites and freebies – can extend the relationship further. Successful companies have not only generated customer goodwill, but also boosted branding and sales from these social network groups.

Twitter

Twitter is the new mantra in social presence. Hash tags, RT and @ are a few Twitter specific jargon that is now almost a part of the daily communication process for those online. Twitter allows individuals and companies to get followers, who like to keep track of what the company / individual is talking about, and receive a feed of their posts. Following back these users and listening to what they are saying establishes relationships. Each post can be tagged with a “#subject “ tag to help users find the post easily when searching. Followers generally re-tweet or RT (a form of forwarding) a message that they find interesting to their own followers. This creates a powerful word-of-mouth network of people interested or talking about the same topic. Businesses have successfully used Twitter to create brand value and also generate sales through specific Twitter promotions. It is also not uncommon for companies to carry out contests asking people to re-tweet their posts. Publishers can tweet about topics covered in their books, author events, book previews, special promotions, sneak peeks, and also RT their author's tweets to keep the community engaged.

These tools, when used along with existing book promotions and online ad campaigns, can generate considerable brand value and sales. They also contribute to building publisher-driven reader communities. These communities are vital for a publisher, particularly in the current system, where maximum contribution to sales come from one single retailer who does not share buyer behavior or profile with the publisher. These tools provide crucial means of reaching out to readers, listening to them, engaging them in a dialog, and in building a direct relationship with them.

References for statistics mentioned in this whitepaper

1. Ebook Statistics, IDPF, http://www.idpf.org
2. 2008 US Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behavior, PubTrack Annual Report, Bowker, http://www.pubtrackonline.com/
3. Online Usage Statistics: A Publisher's Guide, The Association of American Publishers, http://www.publishers.org/main/Conferences/Conf_Pub/conf_Pub_01_09.htm