Waterstones: Kissing Their Customers Goodbye

Today we read the opinions of many in the trade and business press on the surprise move by James Daunt to let Amazon in to Waterstones through the front door. It is interesting to note that many state the obvious and then pull back to cover the bases just in case it’s a move that may win. Many talk about the so called capitulation over digital and hand over of that business to Amazon. Many cover the usual hypocrisy of some statements made about Amazon before Daunt’s cathartic moment, when the lights came on and he became a believer.

Irrespective of all the noise, the one fact that one can’t get away from, is that Waterstones is not just handing over their digital futures in terms of sales but more importantly the very thing that drives them - their customers. It’s no surprise to be told that book readers like a mix of physical and digital and that they are often eclectic in their reading taste, but to build a strategy on retaining the physical business at the expense of the digital is at best questionable at worst naive. However, the real issue is about customers, today, tomorrow and for ever. 


Waterstones couldn’t tell you today who walked in their store, what they browsed, what the dithered on, what they bought and even if they had been in the store previously or bought at all in the past. Yes apart from their online business they are relatively clueless unless the customer has a loyalty card and uses it. Amazon will log,  what was bought, what wasn’t bought, what was bought with what, what was browsed, what pages were browsed and literally every aspect of the sale and every related salel. Reusing this information proactively is what the future is about and is what Waterstones is effectively handed over. They have consigned their business to mass marketing with a little direct marketing on the fringe – hardly a wise move or something any retailer should be even considering today. They may know who bought a Kindle and their first purchase but after then they may be kissing them goodbye. Is that giving the customer what they want or just naïve retailing strategy?

So the reality is that the deal is not just about digital, and online it about really knowing what your customers want and not what you think they want.

2012 Digital Perspectives: The Author

It is easy to predict that 2012 will see us celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, see the US presidential elections and enjoy the London Olympics, but it is not so easy to predict the winners and the losers of each and every Olympic event. When it comes to complex issues such as; the stability of the Euro, Syria, Russia, North Korean we often recognise that they are influenced by many forces that are even more difficult to predict.

In digital publishing we can obviously see trends and understand the direction in which issues are heading, but identifying individual milestones, their relevance and timelines is often impossible. The other issue is that we all may look at the same issue, but see it from a different perspective. That doesn’t mean that we are right or wrong, we just see it differently. It’s like looking into the same house through what are often different windows – it’s the same house but we all see different rooms and perspectives.

We have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives?’ which we shall publish this week. These will look at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain. Today we look at the creators – The Author.

2011 often demonstrated that Authors were starting to ‘do digital for themselves’.

Many authors continue to be tied to relatively new digitally inclusive contracts, but many of those who had retained their digital rights or reverted their back list rights, started to realise that it is easy to do it themselves and potentially earn more as a result. Some choose Amazon, Pubit or Smashwords whilst others took a more conventional route with the likes of Open Road. Some separated their back and front list and realised that they do not need the ‘digital serfdom’ of perpetual licences with fixed royalties and where the vast majority of earnings go elsewhere. The challenge authors and their agents now face, is how to avoid those digital handcuffs. It like taking on a business lease, you want break clauses, rent reviews and a fixed term deal and not life plus 70 years in a marketplace that is still in its infancy and unpredictable.

We envisage that more published authors will ensure old physical rights are reverted and that their digital rights are treated separately to the physical ones. Many may still choose to be tied to their print publisher and many will treat their digital rights separately, but all will be doing so with increasing digital market awareness.

We believe that at least one trade publisher will wake up and see the benefit of offering a significantly better digital royalty deal on back list and potential digital orphans in line with the likes of Open Road. We envisage that this will be tied to a fresh approach to proactively promote back lists and not just place them on virtual shelves. As publishers become more aware of the need to be seen as a trusted business partner, we seen ‘Author care’ becoming the ‘flavour of the month’ and offering greater transparency of information to authors and maybe even speedier digital royalty payments.

Promotion and marketing authors within a growing social direct marketing network will remain a significant challenge. This isn’t just about engaging with current fans but finding new ones and growing the base. It is also about publishing collaborations to create genre groupings which cross publishing houses and channels.

The key driver for change is digital awareness and we see increased media coverage on digital author options being a major catalyst.

We are not only in a digital age but also and importantly we are now entering a golden age for writing. Accommodating this creative explosion of new as well as old material is the real challenge. Managing authors expectations and ensuring that they are fairly rewarded and recognised is now the goal for all.

How to Grow a Digital Repository

Some do it openly scan and ask questions later, others walk the streets and cut the commercial deals to acquire files, some go after print on demand files and now Amazon appears to have found another trick to grow a digital repository by stealth.

The announcement this last week that Amazon is looking for all new titles to be placed in their 'Search Inside The Book' (SITB) program some weeks before publication would on the surface appear sensible and one to pursue. After all it would let the consumer see and sample the book ahead of publication and also increase the probability that the correct sample is there on the day of release. So why would it raise our eyebrows?

Well to Search inside the Book would be asking all publishers to upload the PDF of the title. Not part of the book but the book and probably a full text searchable PDF which they should have at that stage. That is principle is a heartbeat away from an ebook in many flavours and why not let Amazon convert it to a full ebook for free as part of the deal. Obviously the rendition of the digital ebook would be effectively exclusive to Amazon and other swould have to pay to convert it again but Amazon could kill two birds with one stone and get ebooks available on the release date and also get marketing usage of them in advance of publication.

Now we may well be jumping the gun and making two and two equal 5 but it certainly makes a lot of sense to us.

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.

eMartketing Thoughts: 4. How Green is Your Catalogue?

We have ebooks, we have environmental friendly books, but we still have huge amounts of book miles and waste. However we often ignore that many still promote their books with ‘unfriendly’ catalogues that are scattered like seeds, far and wide. These often eye-catching glossies contain some books form whom the catalogue is often their only real chance to be seen over the parapet and to attract attention. The question is whether digital technology can help; spread the word better, reduce the waste and increase sales?

Last month Ingram Marketing Group performed a survey which attracted some 2,000 responses from buyers in; public libraries, independent stores, chains, school libraries and higher education. It found that over 49% of respondents were open to using an ecatalogue instead of print one and some 60% had already reviewed books via an ecatalogue. Interestingly 81% of chains said it was a good experience and the majority all said that an ecatalogue was a useful supplement to the physical one. Again the two greatest benefits respondents felt ecatalogues gave were in; improving the environment 28% and reducing clutter 23%.

So it appears that the market is responsive to making catalogues digital.

Do we merely replicate the physical catalogue and send it as a ‘flat’ PDF via email, or do we open it up with embedded widgets, weblinks and extra information that space doesn’t permit within the printed version? The question is about whether we maintain the constraints of the physical page, or break out of them and the structure it imposes?

There is the obvious timing issue. There are catalogues of forthcoming titles whose materials may still be in flux and there are catalogues which reflect the full list on offer and often have both depth of material and are accurate. Unlike the physical world, the digital world can offer real time accuracy and authority. The digital catalogue should always be current and if you changed the jacket today, it will be instantly rendered to all.

A digital catalogue is virtual and can be dynamically rendered many ways from the same source. It’s like looking into a house through different windows, same house different views.

Finally, the digital catalogue offers that one extra it can automatically capture, feedback, queries and of course the order of the physical books which can even reflect individual terms and be posted directly into the publisher's back office system, cutting out even more waste.

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.

eMarketing Books

The world of digital marketing of books is currently a world of experimentation and lots of dots but not many joined up. We have seen; widgets in all shapes and sizes, colours; compendium web sites offering that extra content and context; the digital galley and review copy; digital inspection copies in education and academia; the digital catalogue and the emergence of the US BookDROP standards. The question is whether the dots are to be joined, or are merely scattered like corn in the wind?

Last week we read that the Bookseller has launched a new book video site, Bookbox. It is to provide a repository for publishers to present their author and book videos to a trade-wide audience and for the trade to pull these down for reuse. The business model isn’t clear but we would question why the Bookseller and why video? Why not VNU/Neilson and tied to the bibliographic and marketing feeds? In these days when the Bookseller’s content is getting somewhat lighter it is questionable whether spending on Bookbox is wise.com.

Yesterday the trade spent more marketing money promoting to the trade than it spent promoting to the reader. Full page spreads in the trade magazines may look nice, may have raised retail awareness but today that is changing and creating consumer demand is seen by some as more important that creating retail demand.

So we look towards those who have lead the bibliographic way – the wholesalers. Marketing materials are exploding but who gets it into the channel and to consumer and are the two requirements exclusive? Videos, widgets, podcasts, first chapters, web links are all now part of the extended marketing family but finding them, rendering them consistently and valuing their contribution appears a little challenge. Viral marketing is growing and becoming easier for all and it is different to direct marketing but is the technology to achieve both the same or different?

So the big questions are what is emarketing and how do we as an industry exploit the wealth of materials available in an audited and consistent manner to promote both digital and physical books. The one thing we are fairy confident about is that there isn’t a standard’s or solution silver bullet. Today and tomorrow we will have to deal with multiple format options, look and feel and navigation options. This may be acceptable at the basic level, but it will be a shame to loose the opportunity, where there is a real waste saving and also where process benefits clearly exist.

A Different Marketing Appeal

We thought we had heard nearly every marketing angle, but obviously we were wrong. The following promotion was put out by Fictionwise last week.

LAST CHANCE TO HELP US IMPRESS OUR NEW BOSSES SALE!

As you may have heard, Barnes & Noble acquired Fictionwise last week. Thank you all for your support over the years and for all of the "congratulations" emails and posts we've been receiving. It is very appreciated! And now it is time for our first special promotion since the acquisition. We're calling it: "Help us Impress Our New Bosses" Sale! Use the coupon below for a 10% discount on every title in our store! But hurry, the coupon is only valid through Sunday, March 15th. Thank you! Coupon Code: BN2009

Perhaps we should have a competition for the worst marketing angles; ' Help Us Impress Our Bank Manager'. 'Help Us Increase our Profit', 'Quick Grab a Bargain before We Go Bust', or perhaps we leave bad marketing to experts such as Gerald Ratner.

Supply Chain Thoughts Part 2

How many books are given away as review, gratis, or inspection copies? In the academic world, inspection copies can often account for a double digit percentage volume of the initial print run. Someone said to us recently that the practice of passing around review copies like confetti had long stopped. We merely asked them to swivel round in their chair and describe what was on their shelves – free books. Of course you can’t sell anything if you don’t promote it and show a sample of it, but all too often, the giving is still easier than the monitoring.

Then we have the catalogues, flyers and advance information sheets. Digital marketing has certainly cut down the realms of glossy paper circulated in hope. However, given today’s technology and tightening credit squeeze, which comes first the physical flyer and catalogue or the digital one?

Digital marketing ensures that the control of the asset remains at the source, that the latest material and its consistency is guaranteed and interestingly you know what was read, when, in the case of direct marketing by whom and importantly what wasn’t read or even opened.

The ability to drive both bibliographic and marketing from digital content today is very real. There is no reason why the digital widget should be restricted to today’s ‘look inside’ only functionality. Widgets should be containers that are capable of distributing the richest information on demand; related tiles, web links, podcasts, videos, authors notes, reviews , advanced metadata, whatever. The question of then embedding widgets within widgets and creating digital catalogues is just a natural step.

We suggest that this perspective of digital marketing and metadata distribution changes not only what is distributed and working practices, but how it is created and aligned to digital content.