What an eBookstore could (and should) be: Data collection, device sharing and the customized shelf
Direct-to-consumer sales is something publishers have never done right. Most publishers’ websites provide an inferior user-experience as an eCommerce tool through either substandard platforms or not understanding how to sell books to readers. Amazon’s pricing matrix undercuts almost every publisher who sold their books online at full retail price, so what would entice a consumer to buy from us? Recently, though, publishers have been toying with the idea of direct-to-consumer sales, particularly in regards to eBooks. This is one version of what an eBookstore might look like.
Currently, publishers are at the mercy of retailers with whom we have relationships based on our print books to sell our eBooks as well. With warehousing and distribution, amongst other things, a non-issue, could we sell our own eBooks and do it in a strategic way?
Here is a simplified version of what I would like to see:
Component 1: Sales Mechanism
Most every publisher has access to an online sales mechanism these days. (Or will in the very near future.) Whether you go it alone with a tech build, play along with Google Editions, which launches later this year, or go with another vendor (such as Libre Digital’s new “Sky Shelf”), you can, and should, sell eBooks directly to your consumers. Of course, this requires vertical/niche alignment and some sort of brand awareness. Or does it? While this may be over-simplifying: couldn’t SEO, paid search, serious online marketing (based on interlinking, link backs, building pipelines, and constant monitoring of analytics), and shifting PR thrust toward the online space essentially drive traffic to your own website where these books are available?
Here’s the point: a serious eCommernce sales mechanism can be created, with or without the interference (read: revenue share) of a third party at various levels of interference.
Component 2: Device sharing
TC does not equal TP.
In certain ways, when we start looking at content as content, the hardcover v. paperback discussion becomes obsolete. While the argument is that buying a hardcover does not give you access to the paperback, there is no such distinction in the digital world. There are no hardcovers or paperbacks, and we need to stop emulating these print distinctions in our digital products today. Digital publishing has its own set of challenges and opportunities; yet, we keep struggling in vain to make a print model work online. Content should be made to share on devices just as people can share print books in the physical space. Whether this means DRM or DRM-free, that should be a policy decision per publishing house based on content types and how your audiences interact. There are ways to find the happy medium in the DRM question, but to do so, we need to get past the idea that eBooks will have the same market realities, sales patterns, and characteristics as print books.
Component 3: Data Collection
What if we just asked our customers directly what they want? There is no need to be coy about it.
The two biggest perks of direct-to-consumer are that no one takes a cut out of your profits and data collection. In the immediate, the former is a more powerful draw. However, when considering longevity of your business and what will drive future sales, data wins out every time.
So, you own your own eCommerce site, now what? Include an order form field for your customer to input a username or handle. (More on this in a bit.) Collect their email addresses for your newsletter or email campaigns. Collect all the data you can. Ask them to fill out a survey. Get to know your customer. Reward them: show them about brand loyalty by putting the next product in their hands directly. Get to know them more. Ask your customer directly what books they want to read. Ask your customer how they want to interact with you and how they want you to interact with them.
But, that’s not all. Learn the ins and outs of analytics. Study buying patterns through customer behavior on your site. What terms are they using to find your site? (These can be used to improve your paid search campaigns.) What pages are they looking at? What books are they browsing? Are they taking the time to browse through titles or do they know exactly what they want?
Then, add another layer. You can gather data from allowing sharing as well. How can you collect data on the person who is accepting the file from your customer? Maybe the file was emailed to this second person, who may now become a customer as well, if you follow up. Maybe the person accepting the file from your customer has to enter their email address in order to unlock the content. Perhaps you could offer your direct customer a free eBook or excerpt for sharing with a friend. They provide the word of (digital) mouth and you put the next product in their hands.
There are a multitude of answers for the question of data collection, and about as many layers and ways to go about doing it. The objective is to use what is already in the marketplace to glean evermore information about your customers and use this information to provide them with a better product, a superior experience in the future, as well a create brand loyalty to your products.
Component 4: Personalized Bookshelf
Remember when your customer entered their name or set up a username or handle at the time of purchase? What if this username or handle triggered a URL to be created? What if this URL was personalized to include the username as entered by your customer? What is the URL was something like ‘username.publishername.com’?
So, let’s say I buy an eBook from IndieHaus Publishing. In addition to a link provided immediately to download my eBook, let’s say I receive a notice via email with a link to bsandusky.indiehaus.com. I visit this URL and, there are links to the eBook I’ve purchased for downloads on all the different supported devices available. And, in addition to links to the eBook I’ve just bought, there are suggestions as to other books I may be interested in. And, other formats of the same book available for purchase, like the audiobook, for example. Or maybe a free video of the author. Then, when I buy another book, this book gets added to my custom URL bookshelf. From time to time, I get rewarded with new products, previews and exclusive digital content.
The possibilities are endless with digital assets.
Component 5: Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is really the glue that brings this plan all together. Not only can we learn more about our audiences through predictive analytics, but we can also heighten sales. This is where book suggestions on each customer’s personalized bookshelf are formulated. But, more importantly, this is a virtual treasure chest of information about our customers. Right now, our accounts own this data. They know what people are buying and what their likely next purchases will be. But, what if we owned that data? We could use it to shape new acquisitions. Remember the data we were collecting above with a survey? What if we included a few questions meant to provide insight which could be applied to building out a model for predictive analytics? The same holds true of the analytics and data we could glean based on simple observation of customer behavior on our web properties. If we used in the right way, the entire process would become rather cyclical: publishers provide products, observe behaviors and gather information from our customers, publishers use knowledge provided by customers to make better products and better targeted products for our customers. Repeat.
* * *
None of this is new. The difference here is ownership and control. The opportunity for publishers to exponentially expand their knowledge about our customers by merely observing and interacting with those customers we already have is huge. The opportunity to have a model, based on real world data, shape our publishing programs is larger still. Instead of us taking a risk on content that we think our customers would like, we are asking them to tell us what they want before we spend the time and money to produce it.
