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Book Club: Book Publishers Seek Out
Fresh Inroads to Online-Driven Markets |
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7 August 2006 |
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Book publishers are working hard to improve their online
marketing channels for their titles, but ironically they
receive the least help in many instances from the authors
of those books. Most book author Web sites are weak
marketing tools that are designed to do little to help
build a reading community or book sales. Compare this with
webloggers such as David Meerman Scott, who has leveraged
his personal weblog into a marketing vehicle for an e-book
- and now for a print title from Wiley. Book publishers
need to consider how to make money on marketing capable
authors as they develop their skills in an online
environment rather than limiting revenues to those
harvested for print. |
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When you look at some of the
recent
research on content habits amongst young audiences, you
have to wonder what the future of the book industry is going to
look like. Book-selling megaportal
Amazon is sinking like a stone in site rankings even as
social publishing portals become the centers of many young
people's lives. Where are tomorrow's book readers going to come
from? This is a question that's becoming far less rhetorical
for many book publishers as the rapid shift in reading and
leisure habits focuses on online services. For
HarperCollins the answers include
downloadable podcasts and adopting
a book-browsing feature for their own Web site and the Web
sites of their authors. For others such as
Random
House,
Workman Publishing and
Scholastic
it's about
developing catchy videos that can attract younger audiences
via portals such as
YouTube
and Yahoo!.
It all adds up to book publishers becoming more aggressive in
learning how to touch audiences the way that they want to be
touched.
These promising marketing techniques allow publishers to
develop niche campaigns for special interest books that would
have been cost-prohibitive in many instances via traditional
mass media outlets. Yet the promise of all of these marketing
efforts seems to fall short when you look how book companies
develop authors' presences online. While hundreds of authors
listed on HarperCollins' Web site have Web sites of their
own, only a few of those have anything but crude brochure-ware
and very few have any outlet resembling a weblog or other
outlet to communicate with potential audiences on a more
personal level. Those blogs that do exist tend to be of the
"Well, the book is coming along nicely" variety, with little to
compel someone to come back to the site with any regularity.
Where author Web sites are in fact more sophisticated they tend
to be in the hands of authors who were
savvy
about marketing themselves in the first place, with little
value-add from book publishers evident.
Compare and contrast this to a small but growing number of
authors who are willing to use Web sites as a central component
of developing their work. Many people may be familiar with
weblogs by
Robert
Scoble and
Chris
Anderson that served as platforms for their successful
books, but you may not be aware yet of David Meerman Scott's
new book under development on "The New Rules of Marketing and
PR" that is taking shape via his popular
WebInk Now
weblog. David's publishing deal with
John Wiley &
Sons, Inc. is interesting not only because of his weblog
but also because the viability of the new title under
development is building on the online success of his
e-book (PDF) on "The New Rules of PR," a title that people
have been able to download for free. Egads, from free weblogs
to free e-books to premium books? How can this be the platform
for successful book marketing?
We'll have the answer in some part when David is finished
with his book, but the evidence suggests that David's model is
going to serve as a standard template for success for many
authors in the future. Classic book marketing has been largely
a model for failure: lots of money thrown at major titles in
the hope that temporary buzz can ignite some sales, with other
titles wasting on the wayside in relative obscurity until a
search engine reveals them to small audiences. Chris Anderson's
book on
The Long Tail is charging up the bestsellers lists
certainly in large part on its own merit and through his weblog
and online channels but also through a powerful media blitz
that is classic in every manner - somewhat ironic given Chris'
focus on the marketing of content that's ignored by many major
publishers. David's model of a professional writer starts with
his own topic-oriented audience that's built into a trusting
community base strong enough to convert e-book interest into
mainstream publishing interest. This is more likely to yield a
revenue curve that can build gradually over time rather than
pushing towards a one-shot publishing event that may or may not
find a buying audience.
The key to the future of book marketing therefore revolves
around a simple concept: become experts at developing
audiences for authors, not titles. Book audiences build
over time: why wait for the book to start that process? A
decade of book authors going out on their own to promote their
writings has left book publishers with a long-term legacy of
mostly poor marketing efforts in the hands of authors not used
to managing relationships with a community effectively. Book
publishers need to get out in front of their authors and
leverage infrastructure that can help authors to build
audiences into communities consuming online book properties
that can in turn be converted into traditional and on-demand
print products. Weblogs are a simple way to go about this but
more sophisticated infrastructure from portals such as
Gather
point towards an era in which book publishers become harvesters
of online author "farm systems" that yield goof-proof major
titles.
In some instances it may pay for book publishers to own
infrastructure that can help authors progress from weblogs to
e-books to print publishing, but oftentimes it will be more
about spotting talent and opportunities early on and figuring
out how best to market them via the best technology platforms.
Ad-based efforts such as
John Battelle's FM
Publishing provide a basis for monetizing developing
authors and publishing properties that may seem foreign to book
publishers today, but they are probably closer to resembling
the profitable foothills of tomorrow's book publishing empires
than today's hoary homemade author Web sites. It's time for
book publishers to expand their marketing craft and to become
multi-tier marketers that know how to make money from authors
at many levels of their career development - not just on the
chancy and slow-developing print circuit that represents the
culmination of their current craft. Failing to do so is more
likely to lead to book publishing becoming a value-add function
for electronic publishers who have been able to build authors
on their own into bankable online properties - with or without
today's book publishers.
-
John Blossom
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