Books on Film

When my wife’s Bibliophile book business started its YouTube video reviews some two years ago, we all questioned whether the effort would be worth the reward. Some 500 videos later, we know the answer and like its library of over 100K unique and individual book reviews, the effort was worth the reward.

Imagine being show an expensive art book by the person who bought the stock, not on ‘sale or return’, but firm and hearing them enthuse about what turned their head. The bonus is that you don’t get a head shot of a person, but get to see inside the book at the pages and the look and feel of the book itself. The real bonus comes with the price!

Many of the 3,500 books Bibliophile stocks are out of print, remaindered, or are on offer at a great price, but the information about them elsewhere is often poor, hard to find and that is probably why Bibliophile can offer them. Bibliophile unlock these gems and ensure their customers can see both inside the covers and understands their value.

So why do we still have the dry jacket and blurb from publishers? Why is the poor source of information, duly copied and offered on to consumers by many online retailers today? In some genres it may work but in many it’s just not good enough today and we have to find new ways to show off the book, describe it and sell it. It is about engagement with customers not throwing scraps over the wall and crossing one’s fingers.

Today music is being increasingly discovered, sampled and enjoyed via YouTube and in due course is becoming two dimensional. So why do we still have the same dour book promotion?

Some publishers are spending more to create promotional videos and glossy advertising of their ‘best sellers’, but surely in the age of the YouTube and the DIY video, it makes more sense to do it for all titles and create ‘more for less’ than merely pamper and spend on the few that would be hits anyway.

The Pantone Reference Library

Imagine buying some books in the store…

‘We’ll have two blue ones, a crimson and a nice soft yellow, please’

‘We only sell the crimson under the counter sir.’

‘Well can you wrap that separately.’

‘Certainly sir and could I interest you in this risque deep purple, or some iffy shades of grey’

Book spines have long offered designers an opportunity to add colour and even art to a wall. Hotels and interior designers have often bought books by the yard, not to read, but to ‘furnish’ a room, lobby and make a statement.

Whether it was the iconic Penguin paperback ‘pantone’ jackets of the Lane era, the leather bound law and medical books that gave a false rare book feel, or the uniform classics of Wordsworth, OUP, Everyman, the spines can offer more than just information, they offer decoration. We often all look at a private library shelf and find our eyes drawn to those neatly lined up collections that are not alphabetically stacked, but offer a ‘uniform’ look of colour.

Random House Canada now want to shout about the ‘beauty of books’ and are experimenting with readers classics with solid Pantone covers. Thirty titles have been selected for an exclusive Indigo offer and include Canadian stalwarts such as Margaret Atwood in purple, Michael Ondaatje in blue and Wayson Choy in orange. Random have attempted to align colours with the themes with darker shades for deep books and lighter shades for less serious tomes. They even price the pantone editions at a slight ‘collector’ premium.

Will the book attract designers, young aspiration professionals wishing to make a statement on their shelves and maybe the odd reader will be an interesting question. Unfortunately, even if the they sell well there remains the questions as to why they were bought and if they are to be read, or merely decorate yet another wall, or even to provide a literary collection?

The price variance can be some $5 with the pantone edition being some $17. But they do offer two for $24, but hardly prices to go out and buy the collection! Perhaps buyers are drawn to the potential rarity of such editions or maybe it is down to the block of colour.

So do you arrange your bookshelves by colour and would you expect to find books in a store based on the colour of the spine?

The Lost Symbol

So as we touch down in Mumbai today we wonder about the storm that is Dan Brown that we have left behind in the UK. There is certainly no getting away from the Dan Brown effect. As we walked through Heathrow Terminal 5 last night the bookstores all had the book at the front with the appropriate discount sticker. We opened the newspaper to read about the supermarket versus Amazon, price wars. We even watched ‘Angels and Demons’ whilst enjoying BA’s in flight hospitality.

So what have we collectively learnt from the Rowling experience? How to ticket high and discount high so create what some would suggest is fast becoming a non value statement. How to build up a promotional campaign to support volume sales through the supermarkets and aggregators who may use the opportunity to create ‘loss leaders’ at the expense of the independents and the trade that support everyday life. How to generate book reading interest in non traditional readers, which is certainly worth noting, but only if it creates more purchases by this group.

When we see how ‘lost sheep’ such as EMI have handled the Beatles remixes and packaged these over the last month ,we see a stark difference in approach. The one thing that is certain at the end of the day is that the Beatles albums will retain their value for all and will not end up as pulp. It may be ok for the publisher to rub their hands and pat themselves on being able to mark up a title so that whatever happens they win, but it’s a trick you can only play once or at best a few times and is one that can screw the rest.

Finally, we wouldn’t be ourselves if we didn’t ask about the ebook. Yes the embargo worked and files were released with precision, but why was the price set against the hardback and on what some would suggest as different commercial terms? This was the opportunity to do something special for ebooks but a parallel release is hardly special. Why didn’t the ebook get released two days earlier with a coupon to get the hardback at a discount once released? Why not make the ebook truly different and collectable in its own way? Perhaps soon a publisher will be brave, but we will have to wait for the next mega title.

eMartketing Thoughts: 5. Store Once, Render Many

Context is the metadata, bibliographic information, marketing materials that helps everyone find content and of course value it. A significant amount of the Context can be derived direct from the content itself and what we once thought of as content can now be used to promote, sample and validate before you buy.

Today publishers should be storing everything once and render many times. The rendering should be as much as possible dynamic and avoid holding multiple versions and formats in many digital folders and even databases. We should be creating context directly from content avoiding further duplication and effort. Publishers should ask themselves how many times they hold the same context information, which is the authoritative source and who and how it can be changed? We all saw the rise of the ‘book in hand systems’ in wholesalers who couldn’t trust the data feeds. We can now surely do it better.

Delivering emarketing marketing becomes so much simpler when the widget, the digital review copy, the digital catalogue, the online rendition are basically the same file or files seen through different viewers. Mass marketing and direct marketing materials are the same but again viewed through a different viewer by different people. Bibliographic feeds are no longer dry bits and bytes, but now are whatever is appropriate and in many cases can be cut from the content itself. Finally, we now see the emergence of the digital emarketing container which not only reshapes what we distribute but who distributes it and when.

eMarketing today is not just about creating many experiments, social sites, direct campaigns, viral marketing but all these and above all serving the existing channel and enriching their opportunity to sell more physical and of course digital works.

eMarketing Thoughts: 2 What is a widget?

Is it a book sampler, a look inside the jacket, a look before you buy? We have seen many widgets of all shapes and sizes. Some were very impressive giving you the real book experience with turning pages in duplex views and full colour, others crude scanned pages that in some cases weren’t even scanned straight! Some merely followed instructions and on displaying the first 10 pages even showed us the blank ones! Amazon gave us a ‘surprise me’ option which was often a poor surprise as it displayed a totally meaningless page and was not even a smart move. Others could only be managed by the publisher so were limited in their application to resellers. Although the reseller could with dexterity change certain fields like the buy now button resolution, each publisher did it differently!

We would suggest that the widget is just a container - nothing more and nothing less. When one starts to look at it this way one avoids the trap of it being a one-dimensional vehicle to merely sample a few pages. It is a marketing box which can offer as little or as much as appropriate, it can become the new tip sheet or advance information sheet, a door to more information, a collector of comments, requests the reps suitcase and much more.

We must remember that eMarketing isn’t about selling digital content but about selling all content; digital, physical, audio, rights and combinations of.
We must also remember that the material never leaves the repository - it is merely viewed and when viewed the information is current and real time.

The widget offers competitive advantage today which is sustainable.

We would suggest that the widget is the base entry point into the world of eMarketing. By itself it is not the answer, but part of the answer in this exciting new engagement with the market.

eMarketing Thoughts: 1. Show Me the Results

We aim to write four more articles this week to expand our views on eMarketing; the use of widgets, digital inspection copies, catalogues and the creation and management of context and content.

Marketing holds the biggest digital prize for the book industry in these changing times. Some have long argued that Context is more valuable than Content. In the late 90’s we were responsible for the highly acclaimed publishing research programme ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ and some would suggest that our most significant report that we published was ‘N to X : From Content to Context’.

Today’s task is not finding digital content but finding good or the right digital content. Its about finding the digital needle in the digital haystack. We have many sources of information, many degrees of detail, many different ways to look for and value content and content itself is no longer a single format.

We are moving away from the advertising budget being spent on full page spreads in the trade press to viral and direct marketing, from scattering seeds in the wind to running campaigns where every hit, click and resolution can be tracked and the marketing department held accountable for spend! We know can find out not only what we know but potentially what we don’t know.

In yesterday’s world we produced glossy printed catalogues and posted them to anyone standing. Yet we had no idea who read what page or even opened them. Did they themselves provide all the information needed to make a decision or merely opened the door? We distributed advance information sheets which fell somewhere between a flysheet and a genuine information sheet and often ended up being filed with the waste paper. We spent money advertising to the channel to get the book on the shelf and had little left to promote the book to the public. The trade magazines were happy to take the money for the full page colour advert but did it deliver, give demonstrable results, or merely spend the money?

As we move it the digital eMarketing world we are not obviating traditional spend but supplementing it with more auditable and accountable campaigns that can even be integrated into the whole process and help join the dots from Author to Reader.

The Fairytale Ends

Richard and Judy tried to move from primetime TV on a major channel, to an obscure new digital channel. It was soon apparent their audiences hadn’t moved with them and unless something exceptional were to happen, the curtains were coming down on their illustrious show. The question the book business had to ask itself was whether their successful Book Club could continue?

Some may say that it was little more than a brand and once the visibility waned the brand would obviously wane with it. Some may say that the backing by the industry made the Book Club and that Richard and Judy were merely the dressing. It is often easier to make a success by backing it , getting mass exposure and spending money. It is difficult to expect it with the average effort and money that is spent on most titles.

A good friend US publishing consultant and thinker James Lichtenberg once related that publishing was similar to two frogs mating. They produce thousands of spawn, which turns into hundreds of tadpoles, who eventually become tens of baby frogs swimming around avoiding their many predators. Finally, a mere handful made it to the bank and came ashore. One is kissed by Oprah and book is turned into a ‘Prince’ and a bestseller. The moral being that you needed the thousands to get to the one best seller and predicting that is often very difficult. Sometimes to get that best seller we may still need an Oprah, but Richard and Judy will no longer be Prince-makers.

We Have Our Say On 'Customer Recommends'

The news that Borders UK is offering customers 20% off their next purchase if they can recommend a book makes a lot of sense and is something many of us do today unrewarded. Word of mouth and sharing books we enjoy has always been what book reading is often about.

The news broken in the Bookseller today and refers to the campaign as “Have Your Say—customer recommends” and that it will start in stores on Saturday.

However we thought that there may be a small hole in the logic. The report claims ‘When a customer buys a book, they are given a belly band to write a short customer review of the title. Once it is handed back to the store, the customer gets 20% off their next purchase.’

So the customer hasn’t read the book only bought it, but is expected to make a recommendation based on what – the jacket, the blurb, the author the day of the week? We obviously may have got this wrong but surely they can’t recommend what they haven’t read?

Ok, they must be recommending another book and one perhaps Borders doesn’t stock. No, that can’t work either. Ok they bought it last week, have read it, want to go back to the shop and write a review and claim 20% of their next purchase. We hope they kept their receipts and did question whether they bought the book before or after the campaign started? Maybe all they are doing is saying ‘i've bought it’, in which case a simple sales chart would do the business. What happens if the recommendation is not altogether positive, can the still get their 20% off?

Perhaps we are missing the point and its just another way to discount books!

Finally, we do see the exercise as being a great way to gather lists and email addresses of book buyers and linking them to genre but if the process doesn't capture that information only the review which is just by ‘a reader’ this obvious benefit is also lost.

Anyway, the one good point is that as books need to be bought it unliokely that we shall see swathes of marketing department people filling in recommendations.