In January 2015, we attended the Digital Book World conference in New York City. One of our favourite conferences, Digital Book World brings together industry thought-leaders, innovators and publishers from all over the world. Below we’ve summarized what we learned at the conference and the biggest trends and opportunities for Canadian publishers.
Do you own your customer relationship?
A question repeated throughout the conference – who owns your customer relationships? If it isn’t you then it is time to start building this relationship into everything you do. Although taking on the complexities of a customer relationship can be incredibly time consuming and overwhelming, David Nussbaum, Chairman and CEO of F+W recommends starting by simply speaking to one consumer or solving one problem. Publishers can engage in the D2C philosophy even if they aren’t set up to sell direct by price testing, interpreting consumer data, and building verticals to improve the customer relationship.
Content Marketing
In one of the best talks of the day, Joe Pulizzi, Founder of the Content Marketing Institute talked about content marketing, which he described as creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers. With content marketing, the content you give away is closely related to what you sell. Content marketing is based on collecting subscribers at every step of the creation and marketing process. Joe offers a few simple steps to start engaging in content marketing:
- Check out your content competition: find out where your competition is and figure out how to make your content better. Use Google Trends to determine breakout key search terms and add them to your keyword strategy.
- Develop a content marketing to book strategy: 7 months before the book comes out write an article or release a sample chapter to start building an audience. Publish it on your own platform, turn it into a presentation and distribute it on SlideShare, turn it into a podcast, publish it on LinkedIn and reuse the same article with different titles to reposition it, you could even present a webinar on the topic.
- Give potential subscribers an incentive to sign-up: an e-newsletter, a free guide, special editions just for subscribers, whatever it may be, you have to give your audience a reason to subscribe. Joe recommends using popups and popovers to generate subscribers (but only show them once every 60 days so you aren’t spamming them!). He also highly recommends SlideShare which is currently his second best lead generator after popups/popovers.
- Need a boost? Steal an audience! Find out who are the leading influencers in your community and where your audience is hanging out (on Twitter? Reddit? A specific platform or blog?). Use tools like Little Bird, Trackur and Klout to find influencers by subject. Once you have a list of influencers, use the 4:1:1 rule on Twitter for a couple of months so that your influencers get to know you.
If you are interested in learning more about Content Marketing, check of Joe’s book, The Content Marketing Playbook.
People are paying more attention to global
A recurring trend at conferences over the last six months has been a focus on the opportunities provided by developing a global publishing strategy, rights sales and exporting. We know all about this, don’t we! Two full sessions in the afternoon of the second day were dedicated to global publishing and markets. Here are some of the highlights:
- Ingram is selling into 197 different countries, often working with local third-parties. Marcus Woodburn of Ingram said it is important for publishers to pay close attention to the distinction between language and territory rights – focus on what you have and what you want to sell.
- Google Play Books is in 65 countries and ePubDirect is in 186 countries and has expertise of getting English language content into Europe.
- Pricing is still a struggle: Gareth Cuddy from ePubDirect talked about how publishers aren’t accustomed to pricing for foreign markets and that one price with a straight conversion does not meet the local market’s needs or expectations. He suggests that publishers start by finding out the average price of their genre in the target market.
- Wondering how to get started in a market? ePubDirect recommends starting by focusing on 2-3 markets.
- The panel on Global Publishing Tactics stated that a publisher can add 20-30% in revenues if they are serious about global sales and working with the right vendors.
- The panel also recommended translating key metadata into local languages for discovery.
- Thema: we’ve talked about Thema before on the Livres Canada Books blog and it is something we are encouraging Canadian publishers to learn more about. Ingram has been using Thema for 18 months and Google and ePubDirect are also ready to ingest your Thema codes.
- As for formats, ePub is the universal format outside of the U.S., with prominence even in emerging markets; PDF is diminishing worldwide.
Experimenting with price promotions can have huge returns
During a panel on price promotions, Rachel Chou of Open Road Integrated Media outlined the difference between retail-lead price promotions and publisher-lead price promotions. Retail-lead price promotions are when the retailer comes up with a theme or idea and solicits titles for inclusion. Publisher-lead price promotions are when publishers send out price reductions to the retailers to generate excitement and sales of a title or group of titles.
BookBub has 4 million readers who get a daily email of the best price promotions (submitted by the publishers). BookBub determines the best promos by reviewing the critical acclaim of the book, determining if the promotion is a great deal, and determining if the book is a good fit for their audience. Publishers pay a fee to promote their titles to this channel.
The price promotional panel was asked which books do well as part of a price promotion. The panel responded by suggesting:
- Books in a series: promo the first book of a series to increase potential sales of the rest of the series (make sure series metadata is filled out in your ONIX so retailers know how to link titles).
- Backlist books: the promotion reinvigorates the book and the book will likely continue to sell even after it has returned to regular price. Backlist promotions also work well when an author is coming out with a new book.
On the flip side, business books which don’t seem to be as sensitive to price don’t work that well for price promotions.