Book Marketing DeMystified

Canada’s book industry is in dire straits — as are the book industries in other countries. It is my hope that this moment of desperation will also be a time of inspiration and wise leadership by the CEOs of the largest retailers and publishing companies.

The new website www.bookindustrybailout.ca outlines how to save hundreds of millions of dollars while also greatly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Please go to that website to read about the solution.

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

Back in 1995, when I launched Trafford Publishing as a service to publish books and business documents for government agencies, businesses and individual authors, nearly everyone in the book industry scoffed at the idea of print-on-demand [POD] publishing. The concept was looked upon as either not feasible, or improper, or both. Funny how life moves on, eh? Today, some 14 years later, Bowker (who keep the Books-in-Print database and assign ISBNs in the US) announced a major milestone: for 2008, new POD titles surpassed new non-POD titles. Below is their media release — and note that Bowker still hasn’t got its own head around the new reality, and are separating new titles into “books” and “On Demand and short-run books”, as if the former term wasn’t inclusive of the latter term. Those elitist sentiments take a long time to die out (maybe it will take another 14 years?).

NEW PROVIDENCE, NJ — (Marketwire) — 05/19/09 — Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information management solutions, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2008, compiled from its Books In Print® database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2%, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.

Despite this decline in traditional book publishing, there was another extraordinary year of growth in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books produced in 2008. Bowker projects that 285,394 On Demand books were produced last year, a staggering 132% increase over last year’s final total of 123,276 titles. This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in the On Demand segment, which in 2008 was 462% above levels seen as recently as 2006.

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

Today a new entrant into the eBook reader game: Interead announced the Cool-er, which is a direct competitor to the Kindle 2 and will sell for about $250. CEO Neil Jones is an English entrepreneur who seems to have done his homework:

• there are more titles available available at his own eBook store (www.coolerbooks.com) than at Amazon’s Kindle store — 260,000 versus 250,000
• this eReader supports PDF and many other formats
• it isn’t tied into Amazon itself; rather it is plug-and-play with any PC or Mac
• it looks, well … cooler! with many colours and iPod-like styling.

Competition could quickly kill the Kindle. Here’s why…
In the USA, and likely many other countries, it is illegal for a manufacturer to provide its goods to one retailer (or group of retailers) at a lower price than to similar retailers. So a publisher who provides its eBook content for $3.00 or $3.50 to Amazon — presuming a retail price of $10 — must provide that same title at the same wholesale price to Interead’s www.coolerbooks.com store, and to www.smashwords.com, etc. Amazon is betting heavily that it can keep its 65% to 70% margin. It wants to offer discounts on that $10 to attract customers and build repeat customers — hoping to dominate the marketplace. So the $10 eBook might be “on sale” for perhaps $7.50, with the publisher still getting the pre-agreed $3.00. What Amazon is doing is getting publishers to subsidize its discounts, by not paying publishers a fair wholesale price in the first place. This strategy worked very well for Amazon with printed books — Amazon has grown to be the biggest retailer for printed books now. Amazon extracted lower wholesale prices from publishers for years, claiming it was a different type of retailer than bricks-and-mortar stores, so it could legally get a different wholesale price. But the strategy won’t work for eBooks, I predict.

Interead and Smashwords, and other entrants, don’t have to presume to take 65% or 70% of the selling price — smashwords only takes 15%! They can get the eBook content from publishers at the same price as Amazon does, since they are clearly the same type of merchant. So on that supposedly $10 retail priced eBook in the above example, smashwords would pay to the publisher the same $3.00, and could offer the book at $3.53 as its “regular price”! How long will Kindle and Sony customers pay more for their device, and more for their content, when there are convenient alternatives?

Some folks thought we had to wait for Apple to enter this market niche for Amazon and Sony to be given a serious shake-up. Seems the pressure is already building.

Keep tuned …

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

Hey, here is a link to nine slide shows presented by consultants and executives on May 7th at the Book Industry Study Group [BISG] event called Making Information Pay 2009. Lots of statistics and an overall gloomy outlook. I note that only one consultant cited ending returnability as an important strategic move for publishers.

http://www.slideshare.net/event/making-information-pay-2009/slideshows

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

Jeff Bezos from Amazon has revealed the next version of the Kindle, called the Kindle DX. I’ll take a moment to got down my initial thoughts about the device and Amazon’s greedy plans …

On the plus side, this model will have a bigger screen that appears to be about 5.75″ by 7.75″. The new design and the graphics at the presentation are so much better than the previous work that it appears Bezos finally decided to hire a real industrial designer and ad agency (the previous work must have been done by a relative or neighbor’s kid, or Bezos himself).

Another plus will be Kindle DX’s ability to show PDFs.

On the minus side: no color and no video. No cell phone or PDA. Not a notebook PC. High price tag for a proprietary product.

The biggest minus — and this will be the knock-out punch to Jeff’s world-domination ambitions — is the financial model being used. Amazon is simply being way tooooo greedy. Here’s why, examining the three main areas: trade books, newspapers and textbooks …

Consider that Bezos has no content of his own. No stories, no news, no lessons. He needs others to provide it. He is bullying book publishers to provide their content and receive only 35% of the list price. Amazon gets 65%! Amazon already has its development and manufacturing costs paid by the user who will pay a hefty $489 US for the Kindle DX. Amazon getting between 20% and 25% would be more reasonable for eBooks. [Within the book trade, a bricks-and-mortar retailer typically gets between 40% to 45% of the retail price, and has to handle and display the physical books, pay rent, have sales staff, heat the building, etc., etc. Selling eBooks is comparatively expense-free.]

Bezos has extended his overly greedy plans into two new areas: newspaper subscriptions and textbooks. For newspaper subscriptions, he is keeping 70% of the annual subscription revenues! The newspaper would only get 30%! Ouch! A few newspapers are desperate for any revenue, and have agreed to trying this, although only “outside their normal print circulation area.” The agreements are apparently non-exclusive, so the newspapers can make better deals with other device makers to come.

For textbooks, Bezos is grandly announcing the participation of three large publishers and some name universities. Yet the size of the trials will be very small (50 students at one university), and the titles offered will be few. One must remember that, even though textbook publishers feel threatened by the fledgling free textbooks movement, this is one segment of the publishing industry that still makes billions selling books the old way — in print, through college bookstores. College bookstores only get 15% to 20% of the retail price. Yes, the publisher gets 80% to 85% of the $125.00 to $150.00 a student pays for those required texts, for printed copies sold through college bookstores! How keen will those publishers be to get only 30% or 35% from Kindle sales of their prime titles? Not very, I expect. And a recently completed study in the UK revealed that the students participating in a year-long trial hated using DRM-protected e-textbooks. Students also hated having to pay essentially the same amount for an e-textbook as the printed version — which is what Bezos is planning to charge. Hate is a strong word to use in a research study, yet that was how the students’ reactions were recorded. Why the universities are participating at all is puzzling to me, since Amazon would dearly love to gobble up all the universities’ own bookstores’ sales for the printed versions of textbooks as well.

The reality is that content producers are united about very little, except in their opposition to and fear of any one retailer controlling the revenue split — especially when Amazon is going so far beyond historical business margins. Amazon can only dictate the terms if, and as long as, it CONTROLS the eBook distribution channel, as Apple did for a while with iPods and the Apple Store. The problem for Amazon is that it won’t control eBook distribution. Competing devices will also be available this summer — that’s why Bezos made his early announcement, trying to get a publicity jump on potential competitors. Sony, Plastic Logic, and likely Apple, will have large-screen tablet/readers — likely with many features missing from the Kindle DX — and the manufacturers will certainly negotiate a more content-provider-friendly margin with all the trade publishers, newspapers and textbook publishers.

One company to watch is Smashwords.com. Mark Coker’s start-up eBook store is setting aside a magnificent 85%(!) of the retail price for the content producer. And he is committed to having versions of the content available in multiple formats, so you can read it on a Kindle, PC screen, cell phone… any of the existing and coming devices. Mark’s business model is the complete opposite to Bezos’ screw-the-content-provider approach. As long as entrepreneurs like Mark are willing to offer an alternative to the monopolize-the-distribution-channel-and-screw-the-content-providers model, Amazon’s domination plans, and its Kindle DX, are doomed to fail.

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

A British report based on research conducted by HarperCollins, the Trade Publishers Council and the National Year of Reading (NYR) says the book trade is out-of-touch [”too intimidating”] towards the C2DE socio-economic group, characterized as lower income, non-professional families. Many families in this group [comprising about 20 million people in the UK] felt books are “alien and unattractive.” In still very class-conscious England, to many in this “lower class” group, reading is apparently considered “an anti-social activity for people who don’t know how to live.”

One wonders if some publisher will rush out to install video-gambling-dart-karaoke-eBook machines in pubs to reach these people where they “know how to live.” Or maybe add coupons for chips and Guiness in each book?

National Reading Year’s Honor Wilson-Fletcher is quoted as saying: “These are good solid families who don’t have literacy problems but who just don’t read. They are one step away from book-buying - they do consume lots of leisure products and may have 2-300 DVDs in the house. But intentionally or otherwise, a lot of people involved in the book world are conveying the impression that reading is associated with a particular area of society and lifestyle.”

Here’s a link to a story about this report at BOOKSELLER.com:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/81021-trade-excludes-20m-readers.html

thanks, cheers,

Bruce

Thanks for appreciating the oddness in book publishing. Clearly the announcements get less logical by the day as publishers desperately try to hash together the latest trends to market their traditional content.

Perhaps I can shoulder a fraction of the blame — years ago I was telling publishers to think expansively and create multiple editions to be “products” for all the emerging “long tails” of retail distribution [pdf eBooks, POD, hardcovers, paperback, Kindles, Sony, audio books, etc.]. Even if you only make a trickle of revenue from each stream, I suggested, if your cost to participate is very low then that combined revenue might be enough to save your asses jobs as the landscape evolves.

What I didn’t anticipate was someone believing that you could profitably take a manuscript written for reading in a printed book format, and chop it into 140-word [think of one third of a page] episodes — then email some episodes as “tweets” [Twitter text messages] to subscribers’ cell phones. THEN, the publisher GIVES AWAY the book free, and hopes readers will discuss the book in their tweets among themselves. Note that there is no plan yet for anyone to PAY for reading these books…

Here’s the news clip about Picador’s experiment:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/bookselling/picador_launches_140character_book_club_112203.asp

I wonder how even Charles Dickens — perhaps the most successful serialist of all time — would have fared with such short episodes? Try taking your favourite manuscript and chopping it into 140-word excerpts. Books simply aren’t written for this format. And the concept of encouraging critiques and book-club-like discussions online has been tried — without success — with forums, listserves, websites, blogs, MySpace, FaceBook, etc., so why would Twitter be any more productive?

Well, one has to give the innovator at Picador some credit for at least experimenting!

thanks, cheers,
Bruce

An article in Publishers Lunch e-newsletter tells of what might pose a serious threat to the largest publishing houses. Here’s part of their news item, under the title of NelsonFree Bundles Audio and eBook with Print Purchase:

Thomas Nelson will provide buyers of selected hardcover books with access to an MP3 audiobook version and several types of ebook files (including ePub, MobiPocket and PDF) at no extra charge under their NelsonFree program. “After readers purchase a book with the NelsonFree logo, they will be directed to a website where they must register and answer a simple security question.” Once approved, they are able to download the files.
CEO Michael Hyatt says in the announcement, “I believe that the industry is shifting and we, as publishers, need to explore new methods of getting our content into the hands of customers. NelsonFree will give readers a new level of value and flexibility. It will enhance their literary experience and allow greater employment of the content without breaking the bank.”

My prediction — made over two years ago at a presentation to the Association of Canadian Publishers — was that multiple editions would each be bringing in additional revenues (what I referred to as “multiple long tails”). This move by Nelson, if followed in time by other publishers, instead gives away free the other editions to shore up sales of the main (hardcover, in this case) edition.

Might this bundling of editions introduce some of those hardcover readers to the experience of eBooks and audio books? If so, doesn’t it also present the unfortunate perception that the “cost” of audio and eBook editions is “free” (and the “value” is “nil”)? Seems a bit of a muddle, and no guarantee of not “breaking the bank”. Once a value precedent is lodged firmly in customers’ minds, it can be hard to change.

I’m reminded of how some publishers tested “returnable” books to their bookstore clients back in the panicky initial period of the first Great Depression — and began the financial disaster of “returnable books” that is still with us today — and is costing the industry billions each year.

Is this test an act of desperation from the executives of a gigantic billion dollar corporation in danger of becoming an anachronism? Are the buyers of the hardcover edition very likely to buy eBooks or audio books? My friend, author Major General Val Pattee, says, “Seems to me that Nelson is mixing apples and oranges. And why would a single reader want the same book in several versions? I think that the readers of different versions are different people. My 13-year-old granddaughter is using all three mediums, conventional print, electronic, and audio, but not for the same book.”

Certainly we won’t have to wait too long to find out if the NelsonFree test sets a financially-crippling precedent, or is merely a desperate muddle — or, proves to be sheer marketing genius! We won’t need to wait long because the rate of business change is accelerating as we move ever further into the speed-of-light digital age and begin experiencing the near-collapse of conventional capitalism. If that seems too scary, don’t forget to go outside often, and to hug your loved ones. Remember: the most important things in life won’t change.

Hi Bruce –

You probably get these types of emails all the time, but I just wanted to take the time to say thank you so much for your book “Book Marketing Demystified”.  I am publishing my first book, The Momnificent! Life, and it has been my bible for putting together my marketing plan.  There are so many great tips in this book, especially for someone that doesn’t have a clue how to market a book.  I love the stories from all the authors you interviewed; they are encouraging and informative.  I like all the questions too at the end of the book - it reminds me of all the coaching questions I ask my clients.  Thanks again for this valuable book!

Lori Radun, CEC, AELC
The Mom Coach, True to You Life Coaching, LLC, (630) 236-7142
 www.true2youlifecoaching.com

Authors ask me what will work to generate awareness of their books or cause. I tell them that the Internet is constantly evolving — what is hot today might be practically useless within a year. Before this digital age, marketing techniques barely changed over a decade or two. For example, direct mail methodologies of the 1950s were almost identical to those of the early 1990s. Now marketing is a blur of change, with each new development seemingly not having a chance to really mature and flourish into a useful tool for many.

And this is a real shame, since there is such desperation in the publishing world to find viable ways to promote great books.

With over a billion people connected to the Internet, it is understandable that some will have different ideas about what is ethical. If someone is living in a situation of great poverty and limited potential, he or she may look to the Internet as a great opportunity. Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are quite inventive about acting as pirates to con the gullible. We’ve all heard about email scams that ask you to accept a few hundred thousand dollars in exchange for depositing money from a cousin of a deposed African dictator (or similar story). Who would fall for such a false hope scam? Well, last weekend met the husband (former husband actually) of a woman who did just that — she accepted a $10,000 money order (it was forged but skillfully) and cashed it at her bank. The arrangement was that she would immediately transfer $8,000 to a foreign bank account, keeping $2,000 for her services.

According to her ex-husband, the woman spent $2,000 “on jewelry, clothes and shit” but was so happy about spending that she didn’t get around to sending the $8,000. Within days, the bank’s security folks called and threatened to charge her with bank fraud and forgery. She had to pay back the $2,000, and the $10,000 deposit was reversed from her account.

On that occasion, the foreign scammers didn’t get any money. But they are conning lots of people.

Back to the topic of promoting your book:

What you are reading is a BLOG. A few years ago, blogs were big. Some sites were huge. Now I get so much spam in my blog’s comments fields (and never any real comments since those folks emailed me directly instead) that I’ve disabled comments altogether. A shame but that’s the evolution of the Internet, I guess.
Traffic to any particular blog is being diverted by scammers (also called Hackers) who want people to go to websites where there is Google AdWords advertising. If someone clicks on one of the text ads, the website owner (one of the scammers) will receive advertising commissions from Google. To grab traffic at search engines, the scammers are setting up what I call para-sites (pun intended). These are blog sites composed entirely of copied posts (from my blog and others) with a few words in each entry replaced with a keyword that is a link to some sales website. The keyword (”planes”, “discount plumbing”, whatever) is hopelessly out of context — just substituted into the text more or less at random by rogue software. I presume this random placement of links will fool Google and other search engines into thinking that the destination website (where the ads are) is well linked from other popular websites.

An example is http://savinglifesofkids.org/ which is a para-site, with no original content and each blog planted with the keyword links.
Because I use Google Alerts, I am shown a different para-site every few days that is pirating my blogs. There must be tens of thousands of these para-sites. If someone is searching for information about book marketing, there is now a good chance they will be drawn to one of the para-sites showing my content, rather than coming to my blog’s address. I see this as the writing-on-the-wall, an indicator/trend that the utility (usefulness, effectiveness) of blogs is being diluted severly.

So… is there anything anyone can do about this decline in the effectiveness of blogs? Likely not. I’ll keep using this blog, simply because it allows me to “dump” my thoughts. Some of our authors are having some success using FaceBook and other social networking, but the biggest sales are coming from plain old newspaper and magazine publicity (feature articles, not reviews which are becoming quite scarce) and radio interviews. Old technology. Pre-Internet techniques. Pre-scammer/hackers.

thanks, cheers,
Bruce