Publishr

Richard Nash weighs in on publishing’s identity, Part 2 of 2

OK, so it wasn’t in fact tomorrow when I supplied my discussion of what a two-sided marketplace entails. As we all know, executing plans takes priority over talking about them, so some plans had to be executed, sorry for the hold-up!

It in fact proved to be a useful little gap, in that during the intervening time, two very interesting items appeared on the Internets. The first exemplifies the problem of obsessing over the superficial digital vs. print issue, this nonsense (and this) in The Atlantic. I won’t belabor this except to note that the App Store does not magically suspend the laws of supply and demand. What we see in the App Store is a brief period when something new arrives and there are temporary barriers to entry because of high initial costs and learning curves. Supply takes a little while to catch up with demand.  The reality however is all the folks who figured out Quark, and all the folks who figured out Dreamweaver and all the folks who figured out Wordpress will figure this out too, and everyone with a website have an app, assuming folks haven’t already moved onto the next thing, and Walter Isaacson will move onto the next nebulous notion permitting him to this the status quo ante will be restored. IN other words, there isn’t a digital solution to your problem, because your problem isn’t just digital.

The second item, however, “The Spectrum Of Change When Media Shifts From Scarcity to Surplus”is describing at far greater length than I can why the paradigm I described in Part One of this is, well, true. The supply of information and entertainment is asymptotic; the demand is not. But the demand remains big enough for there to be a marketplace, simply one is which the supplier, rather than being one hundred publishers or record labels, is them, plus a whole lot more. And while digital did enable this, digital can’t disable it. Once we discovered nuclear fission, we couldn’t undiscover it.  We simply learned new ways to manage a world in which we knew what it could do.

And that world, to depart my apocalyptic metaphor, is a two-sided marketplace. That link is to the Wikipedia entry, this is to the summary of a Harvard Business Review article on “Strategies for Two-Sided Marketplaces.” Yes, I said, Harvard Business Review. What radical leftie countercultural indie publisher is quoting Harvard Business Review articles? Answer: the one that’s trying to pull his head out of the sand. By any means necessary.

Now, I’m not about to list all the damn “strategies for two-sided marketplaces” I can think of. For one, I need some to try out myself, with Cursor. For another, no really innovative idea ever came from listening to some guy yakking—it comes from within, from within you. But I’ll offer a couple thought experiments to help prod the creative process.  The first is to forget what you think you know of the marketplace, whatever number of sides it might be. We have thought of ourselves as being in the marketplace for books. That’s done. Or rather, it’s not done, but it’s only a facet of the marketplace, like the marketplace for hammers is a facet of the home improvement business. Think about the needs and desires you satisfy and think about the marketplaces they represent.  The second is, Don’t do lots of little experiments. I know that’s the wisdom these days, right? Try out lots of little things, see what works? Wrong. We’re doing that already, it’s failed. The business that succeed are going to do things in a profoundly contrarian fashion.  In Bizarroworld fashion. Think of everything you think you know about video games. You sit down, stationary. Yet with the Wii, you stand up, and move. When you hire someone, you offer a bonus to stay. But with Zappos, they pay you a bonus to leave after four months. These aren’t little experiments; these are things that get you told you’re crazy. That get you fired. But look around you. Can you be sure this company will even exist to fire you?

To address Brett’s formulation then.  The crisis is not digital. The crisis is that we’re not thinking the unthinkable.

Is this a crisis of identity or an identity crisis? (Part I)

 
The three most significant conversations that I had during and/or leading up to BEA this year were:

• First, about strategy. And, more specifically, about the gaming industry and how they’ve moved (or are in the process of shifting) from charging everyone for software to giving out software for free, then using their now wired consoles to glean data about usage. As people try out a new game, many will trail off and not continue to play. But, those who do, those identified as “super users” will, when they reach a certain point in the game, be prompted to purchase a serial number to unlock the rest of the game. This system is based on building up engaged users of digital content and then asking them to pay for something they’ve in which they’ve already made a significant time investment. Also, it promotes discovering new games by users who would normally have been deterred by the cost of entry.


• Second, about content. And, more specifically, about paying for content. The comment I heard was this: “No one wants to pay for content. No one has ever wanted to pay for content. People will pay for access to content. Not for the content itself.”


• Third, about value. And, more specifically, about how to create and add value with regards to content. Brian O’Leary was kind enough to relate to me his thoughts on content value as it pertains to blogging. 

All of these conversations made me think: How is publishing creating a content strategy that brings added value to the customer? Currently, with regards to digital offerings, I would argue that we are not. In fact, I would argue that as we shift into a digital universe we have yet to discover our value proposition. With retailers publishing (Amazon), eBook self-pub systems in place, authors going it alone, and piracy, I wonder how we fit into the equation.

Many arguments are made daily about how to rectify this. From publishers tightening their grip on content, to editors becoming brands, to publishers taking steps toward becoming content curators, to strategies about how and when to withhold digital formats to ‘stick it to the man,’ many ‘solutions’ have been offered, but none touch on the real problem at hand: What is the value proposition of a publishing house in a digital world?

With social media, access to online marketing tools, and low cost of entry into sales channels, what does the publishing house bring to the equation? Are we merely a pusher that moves a pile of papers from one space to another? Are we actually effective in what we say we are effective in doing? And, perhaps most importantly, do we serve our readers as best we can with the current state of affairs?

In the end, we need to take a hard look at ourselves and ask what we are bringing to the table. There are many new models to explore, and many new ways to provide content to readers. Perhaps we would be best served by letting go of our print mindset and heritage and allowing exploration to happen naturally.

Mountains of Data by P. Bradley Robb

Touch a word and gain real-time, global context - that’s the promise of the connected, next-generation eBook. That promise highlights major difference between print and digital books. The advance isn’t in the file format, but rather the level of access, the malleability of a story, the interconnectedness of everything. And the means to achieve that future isn’t through transmedia, or the iPad, or even a radically new file format. No, the key to that future is metadata. Mountains of metadata. 

Metadata, data about data, was a mainstay of publishing long before the term was invented. In a purely theoretical sense, the first story ever composed created the first metadata. Since then, humanity’s been amassing a web of connected stories and a means to sort and classify the. Things like title, author, and publication date are perfect examples of current metadata - these disparate pieces of information don’t necessarily add anything to the story, but they help identify where a book belongs in the greater context of storytelling.

As publishing evolved into a proper industry, the metadata associated with a book likewise evolved into a standardized and efficient system. By the twentieth century, sales catalogs had created a largely standardized system of metadata broken down into a half-dozen or so broad categories. The twentieth century system of metadata is perfect for classifying books in groups, but rather lacking for comparing and expanding on specific books. 

The real hangup of twentieth century metadata is that it operates in a polarized fashion. Certain metadata, like title, author, or ISBN, is really specific and grants little insight into a piece of writing. Other pieces of metadata, like publisher or BISAC Subject Headings, are broad but often gloss over the uniqueness of a particular work. 

The future of metadata, the connected and exceptionally granular variety, holds the hope of finding broad connections through specific fields. The method to that madness involves metadata derived from the inside of a story – the minutia that can be easily overlooked as pieces of a whole. When those pieces are extracted and connected, the Law of Truly Large Numbers (or as we’ve taken to calling it in marketing circles Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”) takes over. 

Moving from theory into potential, imagine reading a young adult book where the protagonist is a twelve year-old girl. Under the current system of metadata, finding another book where the lead character is another twelve year-old girl involves a great deal of digging – you can narrow the field with the BISAC, but finding a characters specific age is going to require some elbow grease and a great deal of digging. However, with interior, specific metadata, a few taps can bring up an assortment of similar books. 

Interior, specific metadata also allows for comparison and contrast reading. Imagine, if you would, a modern book on the Spanish-American War. Using our future metadata system, finding a book on the same subject written during the war is an easy task. Fully leveraging the system could combine the two books – side-by-side – showing the differences. 

Like the James Arnold Ross character in Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and want to find other books about oil prospectors, or prospectors in general? If the characters occupation is included in the metadata, you’re just a tap away.

And interior, specific metadata can expand beyond the realm of storytelling, and into the greater information sphere. Imagine a self-guided tour of Europe, following in the footsteps of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Or tracing Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Or fact checking a former politician’s memoir. 

Interior, specific metadata opens a book up in ways that books have never before experienced. Whether a book is made more topical through interconnectedness or merely exposes a reader to immensely scalable cross-sales, the upshot of specific connected metadata is clear: metadata makes the contents of books more important. Metadata increases the value of eBooks by making them more than books. Metadata can turn an eBook into a discovery portal, a cornerstone for information tangents.

The adoption of interior, specific metadata hinges on one very large step – getting metadata right. As pointed out by a slew of forward-thinkers (Mike Cane, Kassia Krozser, Laura Dawson) though the current state of eBook metadata has been standardized in ONIX, the actual quality of that data has been somewhat lacking. The shift towards interior, specific metadata is an exponential increase over not only the current state of metadata, but also the size of an eBook.

Let me be blunt – in the future, books will be more metadata than content. 
Twitter’s recently launched Annotations program allows 512 bytes of data to be attached to a tweet (a 140 byte packet of information) and will expand to 2048 (2 kB) in the near future. This relationship – a roughly 14:1 metadata-data ratio – might sound a bit extreme where eBooks are considered, but a 3:1 or greater ratio is not out of the question.

Crafting that metadata is going to be the great challenge, the question then becomes, who will do the work?

As the engines that turn manuscripts into published books, publishers have a powerful opportunity to turn metadata generation into another value add. Tacking interior, specific  metadata onto editing and career fostering can help traditional publishers remain as the purveyors of legitimate story. It won’t be glamorous, nor will it be easy, but moving an arguably analog manuscript toward its digital destiny is a herculean task that begs for an established bureaucratic system. 

The other path is to crowdsource internal, specific metadata generation. Leaning on the long tail, a book with even limited appeal made available to those with interest is going to garner support from those willing to bash out proper metadata markup. This system of fan supported creation has been widely leveraged by things from fan subtitling of Japanese animation to the creation and upkeep of Wikipedia. The system is neither perfect, nor certain, but it is cheap. 

As we move further into the future of publishing, the generation of internal, specific metadata will become more important. As evident in the iPad, eBooks as a medium are not competing with other eBooks, but instead with other mediums – audio, interactive, and video – for the attention of the audience. Of the five major sources for infotainment – news, film, music, print and video games – the print storytelling media is primed to move into the first truly digital realm. Unlike film, music, and video games, print storytelling properties are easily compared between each other thanks to a standardized method of delivery – words. And unlike the news media, print storytelling isn’t focused on the immediate, but rather on the lasting. 

All we need to do is get metadata right. It won’t be easy, but metadata-enabled eBooks will be the true shift from analog to digital, and represent the greatest change in publishing since Gutenberg.  

P. Bradley Robb is a writer who currently blogs at Fiction Matters. 

The Proverbial Sex Reassignment Surgery: what this transition is really about

Forget the words “print” and “digital” even exist. Now, what is the transition in publishing really about?

Publishing is, and has been for many years, a B-to-B business. In fact, the walls of the publishing house have traditionally been closed off to anyone without an in. On one end, we have agents who work as buffers to the outside world, so we are not required to interact with anyone who does not have any official business. On the other end, book buyers shield us from having to interact with readers.

Almost everything about our industry is set up in a way that lessens contact with the outside world. The whole mystique of this industry is based on its inaccessibility to the outsider.

Some examples, to name a few:

Agents: Most publishers do not accepts direct submissions. This, in itself, limits front-end interactions with both published and aspiring authors. In fact, agents serve an important purpose, they act as buffers to the world-at-large, to all the people who think they can write a book. They are the first line of defense, as it were, to prevent contact from the (unsavory) outside world. For scouting works, for performing triage, for acting as a buffer, agents are compensated in percentages based on performance of those things they bring in from the outside.

Review pubs: Industry review publications seem to go beyond just buffering publishers from the outside world, by performing the task of marketing our products to ourselves. This is something that works perfectly in a B-to-B system; different houses vying for space in industry publications to look better than others, our books over your books, our authors have more name recognition than yours, angling for buyers’ attention always with the thought that they will order more copies. Are these publications relevant to the average person on the street who is going to visit a retail location or eCommerce site to purchase a book? No. Not at all.

Industry Conferences: Like review publications, many if not all of our industry conferences consist of self-referential presentations with little to no interest given to the outside world. While this is the case throughout many industries, we seem make a heightened effort to market and promote our latest titles at these conferences. Think about the amount of money spent on galleys, booths, travel, and accommodations for BEA. Take note of the amount, and remember it. It’s going to come back to haunt you.

Booksellers & Book Buyers: Programs are in place which allow publishers to interact with independent booksellers, giving both sides a voice in the equation. But, again, the bookseller is, like with the case of the agent, a buffer to the outside world. They are the ones who are depended upon to talk to the actual consumer. And, many publishers rely on feedback from booksellers to tap into the pulse of their consumers and to gather intelligence on consumer moods and opinions.

In the case of book buyers, they, too, are expected to provide intelligence as to consumer behavior in their retail locations. They act as gate keepers, taste makers, and trend setters. Book buyers can make a publisher change pub dates, change print quantities, change covers, cancel publications, etc. In fact, they play a powerful role in our business. They also interact with customers on our behalf, which earns them the right to wield such power.

Author Events/Tours: After publication, in the traditional system, the author is expected to go on tour, talk to readers, perform in front of them and sell books. While the publicity department arranges these tours, they are not the ones talking to the outside world. The PR director is not the person giving talks and answering questions.

It’s as if we are an industry of ninjas, or a group of faceless factory workers buying, creating, selling, and promoting products without one genuine interaction with the people for whom we are making these products. This, of course, makes sense because we are a business of taking someone else’s work and selling it to a third party. Had we been involved in content creation, perhaps we would better understand what it means to understand someone else.

* * *

In the end, no amount of  market research, anecdotal evidence, kaffee klatsches, or cocktail parties can ever replace actual and real interaction with our customers. Recently, I attended a conference where a panelist kept repeating throughout her presentation, “The reader is the consumer who is your customer.” I openly admit that, at the time, I begrudged this panelist for stating the obvious. Of course the reader is our customer. 

It wasn’t until much later that I realized what she was really saying: in an age of digital books, in an age where many of this industry’s institutions are, one by one, going away or becoming irrelevant, we are no longer the industry we thought we were. And, the reality is this: we can no longer afford to act as a B-to-B business. The future, if we have one, depends on our ability to reconfigure as a B-to-C business and start interacting with readers directly free of buffers and intermediaries. From product development, to consumer feedback, to buyer-less sell-in for digital products, to direct to consumer sales, to verticality, to providing readers with what they want, a new wave of customer interaction needs to guide us along our paths to the future.

Now, do you remember that money which we took from marketing budgets slated for BEA? What if we funneled that money into establishing direct consumer contact? Think of the awesome changes we could make in place of printing thousands upon thousands of galleys that end up in the hands of someone who could get the book for free regardless. 

I can only repeat these wise words, something I didn’t fully understand just a few months ago, “The reader is the consumer who is your customer.”

XML as business model: What if we simply stopped playing by the (archaic) rules?

This past week, publishers across the board essentially told their accounts that current contracts would not be honored. Publishers leveraged Apple’s contract for the new iBookstore to strong arm other accounts to fall in line with a new model. Thus begins the Agency Model experiment. Accounts, after panicking, played along, and now everyone is (seemingly) happy. But, what exactly did publishers gain by rewriting the rules of engagement in two days?

Many have voiced the opinion that the consequences of such hasty settlement are going to be felt sharply and for a long time. I tend to agree. In fact, I think the biggest mistake made by publishers quick to push new contracts through was the mistake of near-sightedness. Rapidity beat out thoughtfulness, a little foresight, and strategic planning.

Here’s why: The terms of these contracts were adapted from terms written for print products, with adjusted syntax to accommodate the realities of digital products.

also

Control over pricing is not the only issue to consider.

This makes no sense whatsoever. If publishers want to move beyond putting out sub-par digital products only for the sake of being represented in the marketplace, we are going to have to start running our digital business like a business. We need to build business models that make sense for digital products. This includes new contracts and terms, not offshoots of print contracts and print terms; rather, we need a digital starting point when making the rules that will govern digital products.
Let’s take a step back for a minute. Let’s say print didn’t exist. Let’s say we only had digital publishing as a reference. Then, what would the contracts look like? What would we think of the royalty system versus revenue shares? What would we demand of our accounts? How would we deal with pricing? How would we build a dynamic business?

So much of what our print business is predicated upon simply does not apply to digital products: returns, reprints, sell-in, shelving, warehousing, reorders, section buyers. So, what if we just threw all the rules out the window and started anew?

* * *

A year ago, publishers finally got the message that XML was the way of the future in terms of content. Right now, most publishing houses have reorganized their workflow to reflect this change; although publishers are in various stages of implementation, there has been an industry-wide acceptance to incorporate XML into the language of publishing as a primary factor in how we relate to content we acquire.

Now is the time to start the conversation for a change in digital business model. In a year from now, our digital businesses will look nothing like they do today. The things about XML that make it appropriate for content are also the things that make its principles appropriate for a digital business model: XML is modular, nimble, strategic, and data-rich.

Modular: Sometimes called ‘chunkable’ content, the modularity of XML content is one of its most important features. The ability to move content pieces around effortlessly is one of cornerstones of the argument to adopt XML conversion. The same should be true of a digital business plan. We need to come up with different modules that work together and separately, that let us define the most appropriate set of terms and circumstances under which to operate reflective of the product offering. For example, we could create an ‘eBook’ module, an ‘app’ module, a ‘print book’ module, and a ‘chapter excerpt’ module. Then, when we acquire content, we could say: this will become and eBook, a print book and an app, but we will not be selling a chapter excerpt. Done: three modules are combined and we have a plan to work with. Rev shares, royalties, terms, partners and more would be defined in the separate modules thus providing a roadmap for each iteration conceivable for content.

Nimble: The digital game is inherently nimble. Embracing the quick-paced shifts that take place across the internet can only be done by adopting a business model that has provisions for these changes. This is the exact opposite of what we have now with our physical book products sitting in bricks and mortar retail stores. Yesterday, eBooks didn’t exist, so they were ignored in business models. Today, they are being hastily written in. But, what about tomorrow? What will exist tomorrow that we didn’t write in today?
Again, a modular business model as described above would be, by nature, nimble. Instead of having to rewrite entire contracts and revise entire businesses, we could simply add a module that defines the rules bearing on a new product of which we previously had no conception. New products could be integrated into the larger mix with little or no disruption for publishers or accounts.

Strategic: Right now, business models in this industry are reflective only of that which we are able to see today. This is the earlier mentioned problem of near-sightedness. If we want to be able to adapt to future innovations in our industry, strategy needs to be considered now! Take a look at the cell phone industry. The first cell phone was a clunky grey box that was bigger than a person’s head. Less than 20 years later, we all carry around mini computers with integrated cameras which we call phones because they make calls, too. The grey box phone is where we are at with eBook technology; we’ve only just begun. If you cannot foresee the future, and how quickly it is going to move, you’re already dead.

Data-rich: One of the best aspects about XML is its ability to store useful data along with content that has absolutely nothing to do with face value usage. This metadata is secreted away in tags which, essentially, aggregate themselves through use of content management systems (a pivotal milestone in any successful XML workflow). As each file gets used by those who touch it along its path to publication, tags gather and help make the content searchable and more exploitable in the future. This is equally possible with our business models. We need to start storing data in the modules themselves as to how each one can be applied, when it is appropriate to use, the types of products to which it applies. Terms for each module that not only defines it, but defines how it interacts with the other modules can be carried in each module separately. Pricing matrices, for example, could be stored in each module.

* * *

One thing upon which we can, perhaps, agree: A year from today, the digital landscape will be unrecognizable. We need to address this today, not in a year as we just did with our digital contracts. Scrambling for impossible deadlines, not taking the time to think things through, and making significant changes in our business within less than a week are not ways to move forward in a smart way.

Publishd

• Content Strategy is, in fact, the next big thing
• Only Branding Can Save the eBook Industry by Jay Garmon at The New Sleekness
• Countdown to Agency (and Party like it’s $9.99) by Michael Tamblyn
• Point @ Publishing Perspectives: [INSERT PUBLISHER HERE]: Why Branding to Readers Should Matter to Publishers & Counterpoint @ The New Sleekness: Why Publishers Shouldn’t Brand the Brand
• The ePub eBooks Metadata Mess

Expanding the Marketing Reach: Establishing new touch points in digital product development

New products demand new ways of thinking. Right now, most publishing houses are creating “straight conversions” of their content in order to make it available on eReader devices. Others have begun to think about functionality and how they can improve the user experience of reading eBooks. But, what about marketing having a say in product development?

The current print cycle goes something like this: editorial acquires a “title”, receives a manuscript which they then edit (with everything that entails), then sends said manuscript to production who oversees copyediting and typesetting. Production subsequently shuttles the manuscript to manufacturing. In the meantime, the design group is designing a cover which ends up in at manufacturing at the same time as the manuscript does. Some time around the production and manufacturing phases (often depending on the title) marketing and publicity start a campaign to raise awareness and promote the title. Many times, sales result for the marketing department’s ability to get the book into the right hands (read: in the hands of reviewers) and for the requisite buzz to be created in the market place. Sadly, the same seems to be the process with eBook production.

What if we started using the functionality offered to us by eBooks and eReaders in a strategic way? In fact, even minor changes made to metadata for eBooks and small considerations from the marketing department before the development phase of an eBook can boost sales.

Some things to consider

• SEO: How can you heighten searchability of eBook titles through data, content and metadata? With a digital product, you have to consider that the only distribution will be online, which is governed by rules of search. Consumers are not going to find your book just because it’s there; like any other web property, you must drive traffic to your eBooks in order for them to sell. Whether we are selling direct to consumer on your website or through Amazon, Sony, BN.com or Apple, it is imperative that we as publishers lead our consumers to our products. Upon quick glance: titles should be adapted for search optimization, metadata should be vetted by marketing for SEO opportunities and tweaking, content itself should be optimized for search. Ideally, the entirety of eBooks content would be written with SEO principles in mind. While this is not always possible, many times new introductions, epilogues, postscripts, conclusions and connective matter are created for eBooks that are different from their print counterparts. These items can be exploited. It is also possible to hide keywords in the proverbial front- and back-matter, regardless of where they appear in an eBook.

• BISAC: If you are considering SEO and product development, BISAC just became your best friend. For a publisher’s print business, BISAC is important to ensure that your book is shelved in the right place in a bricks and mortar retail store. But, when there are no shelves, BISAC categories are literally extra bits of information that defines you book, yet rarely will show up on an online retailer’s product page. Every eBook should have three (as) diverse (as possible) yet pertinent BISAC categories, to cover the gamut of possible demographic groups.

• Marketing as content: Can strategic marketing be inserted in between chapters? Is the (incredibly) soft sell an option? How about ‘back ads’? Every eBook, just like it’s print counterpart, has a natural progression with breaks in the text. How can marketing exploit these digital nooks and crannies to gently remind customers of other products in which they might be interested? This strategy is delicate to execute, but could pay off nicely: if the consumer is oblivious to you marketing to them in this way, you’re doing it right.

• Customization: While it seems that no one has been able to collect substantial user data yet, data is coming and it’s coming quickly. Publishers are beginning to crack the nut of what could be a proverbial treasure trove of user data. As new data and user analytics roll in, product development should be consistently (and nimbly) adapting to integrate trends and stay ahead of future developments. Data analysis and market research leads to better understanding our customer; this is our opportunity to deliver a truly customized product. Also, what about custom bundling of products with other products or other formats? The technology needed to offer dynamic bundling is possible now.

• Bridging the gap: The eBook market is a virtual playground for experimentation and innovation within our business. While editorial may be experimenting with new contracts and royalty structures, marketing should be experimenting with new ways of reaching audiences, growing audiences and maintaining audiences. New opportunities present themselves every day, new technology makes things possible that was not possible just one week before. One area that has huge potential is the offline-online campaign; combining components and both offline and online elements to create a truly interactive campaign. This is something that has yet to be done in a successful way, and is an area of almost infinite opportunity with regards to digital products.

• Incentives and loyalty: eBooks are a great way of creating brand loyalty: the cost of entry is low and the the delivery method simple and cost-free (for all intents and purposes). In regards to their customers, more then ever, publishers should consider putting the next product in their hand. Why not offer two for one? Or offer a survey which leads to data gathering and better demographic information? Because of the costs involved, we can not only afford to give away free copies of our eBooks, but we are teaching our customers to come back to us for digital products when they are ready for more.

In terms of digital books, the rules have yet to be defined. While the marketing department may not have had such breadth of reach into product development in the past, it’s time to start breaking the conventional rules of print publishing and experiment beyond anything that we ever dreamed possible with print matter. The ideas laid out above are merely the tip of the iceberg of what can and should be possible within our new digital business plans. It seems that the greatest barrier to entry to becoming strategic digital publishers is getting past the “that’s the way it’s always been done” sentiment. However, the major flaw in that argument is this: when it comes to eBooks there is no “way it’s always been done.” It’s the wild wild West, now go and find some gold.

Publishd

New at Publishr! Publishd features five articles, news items, essays, blog posts, and other such writing per week. Check back on Friday each week for five thought-provoking links.

• Don Linn takes on the issue of financing innovation at Bait ‘n’ Beer: Risk and Return in the Time of Cholera
• Unbridled Books launches subscription model
• Jaron Lanier in the NYT: “Online culture is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups”
• NYT on Text without Context, David Shields’ “Reality Hunger”
• Digital Book World gets the ball rolling on a very important discussion: Analytics

Publishing + BDSM: Finding a safeword

Publishing houses were quick to recognize the need for a digital marketing force, and have subsequently been lethargic in implementing impactful changes. The one thing I hear over and over again from digital marketers in publishing is a variant of the same argument, “our hands are tied.”

 “We have the ideas, but we can’t get the go-ahead to execute.”

 “There’s no money in our budget to invest in the web.”

 And, yet, I keep hearing that everyone in publishing must be working in some digital capacity lest we cease to exist.

I am going to come out and say it: face value on the internet alone is strictly not going to sell books. I have seen no examples of social media channels moving the needle in terms of point of sale (POS) numbers for any recent titles that have been written by non-celebrity authors. Period. (I have asked, repeatedly, for any evidence of this and have been met with silence.)

Having a Twitter feed, setting up a Facebook fan page, creating small pockets of engagement on social media platforms, reaching out to bloggers (the new book reviewers) – these things are merely the cost of entry into the game of digital marketing; they are not an ultimate objective.

The ultimate objective is to sell books. And, to sell books online, we need conversion. We need people to click on buy buttons and to enter credit card numbers. We need people to receive shipments of books in corrugated boxes.

How do we go about this? Digital marketing. (Read: by investing time and energy and money into the internet.)

The publishing industry has never had to do direct to consumer marketing in the past. We let the bookstores, independent booksellers, and the newspapers do that for us. We just had to convince a book buyer to take enough copies of the rest was taken care of. This is, fortunately, no longer the case, at a time when the greatest tools for direct to consumer outreach are readily available.

A few points to consider:

• Those who are going to “win big” for simply being online have already done so; at least until the next big thing comes around, and then there will be a whole new group of big winners.
• Being on Twitter, maintaining a blog, and having a Facebook fan page are examples of face-value or passive marketing tactics that do not drive substantial sales.
• ‘Playing the game’ by being involved on a face-value level, all the while using these sites as strategic tools to push sales is one example of active marketing.
• SEO is of the utmost importance to marketing campaigns
• The power and possibilities of the RSS feed is of the utmost importance to marketing campaigns
• Building pipelines and creating the necessary drivers of traffic are of the utmost importance to marketing campaigns
• Finding a logical way to determine ROI of our online campaigns is of the utmost importance
• We *must* bring the idea of conversion (back) into the conversation. Conversion is the necessary follow up to building a vibrant community.

I truly believe that there will be a major shift in focus amongst digital marketing teams in publishing. Those still working primarily in the social media sphere will have to learn about driving traffic through custom built pipelines from all corners of the virtual world to one or multiple special destinations which are constructed for conversion to take place. This is how eCommerce functions outside of publishing, why are we so late to the game? (Sidebar: This is perhaps why we are so vulnerable to Amazon’s every whim and desire – they understand eCommerce infinitely better than we do.)

We must also discontinue our collective ignorance of analytics, numbers, sales analysis, digital P&Ls, and ROI. It’s time for the marketing team to integrate numbers into our creative campaigns. We have to watch these things like hawks and take advantage of the nimble nature of online campaigning to make the user-experience as simple and streamlined as possible at all times.

There is, however, another element to consider: the publishing house. As of yet, publishing houses, as a whole, have been awful at taking the necessary steps needed to move this industry forward.

We know that traditional marketing does not work.

We know that the answer is online.

Yet, somehow, digital marketing departments have been unable to implement much in terms of innovation. There is risk in innovation, we know; there is risk in trying something new, but we have to take that (HUGE!) plunge, lest we get nowhere. Now is the time.

Publishers, it’s time to fully embrace technology (*gasp*) and let the marketing team step up to the plate. It’s time to stop funneling money into traditional publicity and moving it toward web development. It’s time to start running a digital business. [More on this in a later post.]

A new business means new teams and new objectives.

In today’s world, no one’s role should be static. In an ideal publishing house, the digital team can and should be responsible for business development online, marketing, advertising, even, dare I say it, creating revenue streams from various web properties. Our strategy should encompass selling product, not just gathering the biggest email list, or getting the most people to sign up for a newsletter, or getting tons of hits on a blog. 

So, I revert back to the concept of safeword. Currently, we are in a state of being tied up, unable to move, inert. What is it going to take so that our houses are going to let us go and move forward? As sales continue to plummet for most shelves, we need to start acting now. It is time to move from sub to dom, from passive to active, from concept to execution, from inertia to making this a great, dynamic industry both online and off.

Welcome to Publishr

Publishr is the publishing industry’s edgy, boundary-pushing, ahead-of-the-curve, zine.

Our essays focus on frank discussion of the issues surrounding digital production, eBooks, technology, online marketing, early adoption, exploiting new tools, and the future of an industry that has not had a future since Gutenberg.

We are the new face of the publishing industry.

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