The Band Plays On

It feels strange to be writing about the future of the publishing industry right now.  With all the drama going on in the industry right now, it’s hard to say which way things will go.  Nevertheless there are a few thoughts, rather hopes, which I have for the future of book publishing.  First, I do think the days of corporate consolidation are, while not necessarily ending, definitely in for a change.  The slow reaction speed and resistance to the digitization of the medium being put up by the big publishers is a recipe for disaster.  There seems to be a misconception that you can stall the process by which technology assimilates a medium, but the internet is like the Borg, and resistance is futile.  Once the idea catches on in the technophile niche, it is only a matter of time before the technology released makes it irresistible.  As a result I believe that those medium publishers who do a better job of adapting to the new market will have a definite advantage over the large publishers that are lagging behind.  Furthermore, the population of people born during the information age is increasing, leading to more and more people who are familiar with the winds of technological progress and are hunting for the newest innovations.  This generation not only consumes new technology, they demand it.  As a result the demand for new forms of consuming books is self creating.   As this trend continues, it will be necessary for the publishing industry to rapidly adapt.  The upside of this is that smaller publishers who are lighter on their feet may find themselves in greater positions of power, making the slow moving conglomerated publishers lose their domination of the market.

The other thing that excites me about the future of publishing is the very real possibility of an opening of the ability to publish to a wider public.  E-book publishing is something that can be accessible to anyone with a computer and the knowledge of how to do it.  While this may lead to an influx of unworthy material being published, it also means that the idea of the “great unpublished author” may never again be seen.  Publishers in this environment can capitalize by changing their function from the gatekeepers of what can and cannot be read to becoming the filters of worthy material.  By marketing the brand of a publishing house well, a publisher can put themselves in a position of trusted professional advisor to the public.  The public will see more and more tripe available in the market, but by connecting with their favorite publisher, who they know looks at the material they like to read with a professional and critical eye, the customer can be directed to the titles he or she wants to read.  This is even further enhanced with the idea of “smart-agents,” internet software that searches through the internet based upon parameters set by the user and provides him/her with a filtered list of results on a daily basis without the user having to do any searching themselves.  Publishers can be on the forefront of this software by providing a smart agent that simply allows customers to set the genre and author parameters of their search and will constantly show that user titles selected and endorsed by that publisher for their buying pleasure.

While my ideas may be a little out there, I feel like technology is opening up a whole new world of opportunities, and that a savvy publisher and businessman/woman could really take advantage of these opportunities to create a new way of reading and enjoying stories.

Our Lives Made Public

                I know I said I’d address Privacy last week and I intend to keep my promise.  Last week I talked about how new technology is connecting us to the world around us with increasing frequency and substance.  Soon it will be possible to target all advertising directly to a person based upon personal history the way we currently try to target our online advertising.  The fly in the ointment of this new age of connectivity is the very serious issue of personal privacy.  Just because it becomes possible to display advertisements anywhere a person goes does not make it strictly ethical. 

 

As the personalization revolution continues people are finding new means of keeping advertisements out of their lives.  DVRs allow us to skip past commercials on television, and for every new method of internet advertising invented, a new blocker or filter is introduced to remove that advertising from consumer’s screens.  This backlash has been created in response to tactics employed by guerilla marketing firms and unscrupulous scam artists.  There is fear, therefore, that further connection with the digital world will lead to further misuse of that connection to spam customers, scam them, or even steal identities.  

 

There is a dearth of trust in what we see online, and consumers will often pass up legitimate offers on the assumption that the offer is a scam or otherwise has some malicious purpose.  In order to bring marketing into the new era and take advantage of all the wonderful new technology we will be seeing in the near future, it is imperative that a standard for best practices and possibly a form of regulation be put in place in order to regain the trust of the consumer.  We have approached marketing on the internet thus far as a game of numbers.  As such a sort of shotgun approach has been the norm for most firms getting started online.  It has been thought that, like television commercials, the important thing is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible.  This strategy has led to an environment in which we are overloaded with ads on a daily basis.  Further complicating the situation, many of these ads are actually not for legitimate businesses or are delivery systems for viruses. 

 

With this kind of environment dominating the present marketplace, is it any wonder that privacy is such a hot button issue when people think about further connecting their lives to a global information network?  While such a world would provide amazing possibilities for finding niche audiences and for making sure consumers no longer have to sort through tons of information that they don’t find interesting, it also opens great dangers of identity theft and exposure of people’s personal information, even current location, to the world at large.  Reclusiveness is becoming not just a social faux pas, but a nigh impossibility.  As our interconnectivity continues to grow, marketers will need to work extra hard to make sure they respect the privacy and desires of the people receiving their ads, or as ad blocking software evolves, marketers will find more and more doors closed to them.

 

Opening a New World

When I read our blog topic for this week I had to chuckle a little bit.  This is a subject I have already talked at length about on my Facebook blog and it is a question that I have no hesitation in answering.  I can say with absolute certainty that reading the novel The Amber Spyglass, the third in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy defined my philosophical beliefs in several areas.  I originally began the series with The Golden Compass, Which is a well known and beloved children’s fantasy novel.  The first book is very light and entertaining, and I enjoyed reading it immensely.  I greedily grabbed the second when I finished it.  While the first book was light and presented a fun fantasy world dealing with the concept of multiple realities and the concept of identity being granted by a substance called “dust.”  The second novel began to explore more complex ideas, as the Author shifted focus to our world and presented directly the idea that the world as it is could reasonably have turned out in any number of different ways.  Things as simple as the English language could have evolved wholly differently based upon small decisions made in history.  Simple things like the word anbaric replacing the word electric (The word electric is derived from the Greek for amber, because it was noted that rubbing two pieces of amber together produced a static electric spark.  Anbaric uses the Arabic root word anbar, instead of the Greek electrum) word serve to shape Pullman’s idea of a world that is not dominated by absolute concepts.  He constantly sets the church as his opponent, but he is really railing against any institution that would seek to define reality in concrete and fatalistic terms.  In the end what really inspired me about the book was his message about coming of age in general.  He shows how many people in the world equate the ideal of innocence with purity and goodness but how this is a mistaken concept.  Rather, he states that we should be unashamed of growing up and that innocence is meant to give way to wisdom.  It is the opposite of the Genisis story which equates wisdom to sin.  It was thanks to Pullman’s story that I was able to reconcile my own beliefs on the nature of our existence as human beings.  I feel like it is because of this worship of innocence that many of our hatreds have been fostered.  The idea that experiencing new things or forming relationships with new people somehow taints our being is a concept driven by this idea that we should be striving to stay as close to our childhood identities as possible.  The idea that being good and pure is being as childlike as possible is absolutely anathema to my values, and it was a great boon to find a novel that could present this concept as eloquently as Pullman has in his trilogy.

 

The Age of Infinite Interconnectivity

We've become very blasé about the rate at which our technology advances these days.  It's considered par for course that we see a major technological advancement every year.  This has been very present on my mind as I've been reading a book written in 2007 and published in 2008 about the future of digital marketing.  I have been struck by the amount to which the predictions of the book have already come to fruition, or to which the world has presented an answer that has taken the digital world in different directions.  The last two years have seen the advent of the iPhone and the explosion of mobile apps.  It's also seen the advance of e-reader technology culminating in this year's release of the iPad and its competitors.  4G networks have begun springing up here and there and 3G penetration has covered much of the nation.  Soon it will not be inconceivable for everyone to have internet everywhere without the need of a modem or router in their homes, but instead will connect to their WiMax provider at all times indoor and outdoor.  The proliferation of wireless connection and mobile internet has led to the question: what we can do with this new tech in the future?  Suggestions have been raised that this constant connection to a global information network can lead to a greater interconnectivity between our personal devises and the world around us.  New advances in AR (augmented reality) allow us to manipulate the things we see with computer imagery on the fly.  (For more on AR check out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality.  For an example of AR in action, take a look here)  The proposal is thus:  Using personal information stored in a person's mobile devise, we can tailor not only the ads the customer is receiving, but the look of the very world around the customer using constant radio connection to the customer's equipment.  For example, instead of a window ad, a screen can be imbedded with an rfid tag, this tag sends a signature to your mobile devise, which then chooses an ad to serve up based upon your personal information and sends the ads unique identifier to the billboard or sign, which will display an advertisement that is directly targeted at the person viewing it.  Thus when entering a store, you will always see an ad that is relevant to your interests within a short period of time.  These ads would be an immense boon to the bookselling industry, allowing us to tool genre specific ads to customers, ensuring that every book published is finding its market as soon as it hits stores, without the cost of having to compete for ad space within the store.

Furthermore, the eventual incorporation of AR into this model will allow multiple customers viewing the same ad space to see different advertisements!  Imagine a world where every niche product can achieve blanket advertising to its niche for a fraction of the price paid today.  Imagine pay per click adverting becoming the standard for normal advertising fees.  I leave you today with the thought of that future, where the consumers, not the marketers, decide what advertisements become a part of their lives.  Next week we'll talk about the issue of privacy!    

Sex, Lies, and E-mail

Sorry, completely forgot to put this up on the blog last night.

I have a confession to make. I have never once purchased any products in response to an email advertisement. I know, as a young person living in this digital world this seems like a shocking announcement. My reasons for this are mostly based upon paranoia about opting in to just about anything. I worked as a fraud investigator for eBay.com for nearly a year in 2003. During that time I saw more phishing schemes perpetuated through email opt-in lists than anyone could believe. Not only that, I saw that many of these schemes were very cleverly put together and, if one is not careful, need very little from you to ruin your day. In fact the most successful scheme I came across involved posting links to inflammatory or inappropriate content on public sites like eBay, and then adding a very official looking complaint button at the bottom of the page. Clicking the button brought you to a prompt requesting your user name and password in order to lodge a complaint. Of course this lead to the poster gaining access to your account, after which they could use your account to run their more malicious schemes. So you can see why I would generally beware any opt in buttons that may lead to my personal information being available for someone to view. Furthermore, I have seen many reputable companies fall prey to having their email lists leaked or stolen, leading to floods of spam that can be very hard to escape from. Due to my habit of not ever opting in to any email marketing, I have thus had little reason to trust any ads I have received, as I know they were sent without my consent.
In order to make email marketing live up to its full potential, I believe it is necessary for a company to provide redundant opt-in and a legal disclaimer with customer acknowledgment that the customer’s email cannot be sold or given to other marketing agents. By redundant opt-in, I mean that I should be first given the option to click on a box stating that I want to receive ads, after which an email should be sent to me requesting confirmation of my opt-in. This insures that I don’t get signed up for something accidentally, which will poorly color my opinion of the company and their ads from that point onward. As far as the legal disclaimer goes, the clause stating that my information will remain private should be presented in a summarized form with a check box next to it to ensure that I understand that signing up for the ad program is safe.

Blog #42

I really didn’t know what to write about on this post. The news has been all about a topic that we’ve already discussed. The battle over the e-Book continues to rage, with most consumers blissfully oblivious to the realities of why MacMillan would want to control its pricing structure and honestly feeling like they should get all of their products for nothing. There’s already a major outcry against the “Multi-million dollar” Publishers who are pushing this agenda out of greed in order to improve their bottom lines, with little being done by publishers to show what the impact of Amazon’s model will have on this small margin field. Publishers have basically been labeled the bad guys here because people are still demonizing the music production industry and think that publishers are basically the same. I feel like MacMillan and publishers in general have not done nearly enough to explain their position and the precarious nature of the field. People just see that they are owned by big corps like Viacom and assume that they are billion dollar powerhouses. I feel like if publishers would release more news explaining what their problem with the $9.99 price point is, they may be able to avoid a lot of fallout later. If the fall of the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that PR is important in order to maintain the image of publishers as companies interested in the proliferation of literature, not media conglomerates interested only in the bottom line. If we can humanize the industry, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to weather the oncoming storm without resorting to the drastic price models that the music industry has had to adopt in order to maintain their business.

Keywords

Here's an experiment in writing an ad blurb for a book using search keywords!

Keywords:

Abraham Lincoln

Civil War

President

Lincoln in 1955

Lincoln Trillogy

Time Travel

Sent through time

Evanston, Illinois

Tony Wolk

Historical Fantasy

Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life is an inspired piece of Historical Fantasy that brings one of our greatest leaders to life.  Inexplicably sent through time, Lincoln finds himself in Evanston, Illinois, 1955.  There he witnesses the future of the Union and the results of his Legacy.  Briefly relieved of his burdens as president, Lincoln soon is faced with the results of the war and the idealized images that modern society has ascribed to a very human president.  His adventure is highlighted by his meeting with a 1950’s woman whose understanding of his nature proves too intriguing to pass on.  In the end he returns to the Civil War reinvigorated and more resolved than ever to ensure that his vision of the future comes to pass.

Written by Tony Wolk, this novel is the first in his unique Lincoln Trilogy.  In this story Wolk gives us a side to Lincoln that we almost never witness in our idealized perception of the Civil War President.  Though his storytelling, he brings this character to life, and shows us the man behind the legend.  Skillfully blending history with drama and fantasy, Wolk brings us into the mind of a man upon whose shoulders the fate of the world very literally did rest.

Being Dragged into a New Age

With the battle over e-books still raging, I would like to take this opportunity to address the publishing industry as a whole and the danger the industry faces as it moves into the digital era.  Presently, book publishing is on the cusp of a complete change in the way books are perceived as a product.  As a result, publishers will need to carefully decide how to proceed in the near future if they want the industry to be about the books rather than about the business of selling a product.  The closest likeness to the current situation that publishers have found themselves in can be found by looking at the Music and Movie industries.  Both are industries based upon providing entertainment to a customer and both have gone through the rocky road to digitization.  The first thing we can learn from these industries is simple; digitization cannot be resisted or put off.  It will happen and it will need to be dealt with regardless of the desires of those controlling the majority of the industry.  Furthermore, the slower the industry moved in accepting digitization, the less control the industry will have over the methods in which the media is produced and distributed.  It is absolutely necessary for publishers to move upon this new media form quickly and aggressively.  We should be seeking to broaden our e-product horizons by releasing more media at low costs and with fast and easy access online.  This is the time when readers need to become aware of who the publishers of their favorite books are and how they operate.  By seeing the publisher as the powerful money holder who will produce anything that might make a profit, consumers are left with little desire to fight for their favorite publishers and less moral conflict over stealing e-books through online sharing programs. 

The greatest mistake that the music and movie industries made when dealing with the move to digitization was to try preventing the free flow of data from one person to another online rather than taking advantage of the media to become the main online distributor.  For the most part, people are willing to pay for the entertainment they consume, however when you present someone with the option to either pay a high price for a product that has only minor value to them (e.g. One song off an album of 13) or easily steal the one part they want with very little chance of reconciliation, the choice becomes much fuzzier than it should be.  The battle that raged over digital music media and the record industries failed attempts to control it have spawned a new beast which is forced to keep selling hit singles at an astounding pace just to make ends meet.  The consumers have completely lost trust in the industry, and will often seek to support the bands directly by going to concerts and purchasing other merchandise rather than buying albums.  iTunes has helped to stem the tide, but the resulting model of selling only hit songs has left the industry forced to abandon fringe artists and artists that have fallen out of vogue in order to turn a profit.

Publishing is now where recording was about 10 years ago.  As it becomes easier to consume books digitally, the demand for these books will continue to grow.  If publishers take the queues that the Recording industry left behind and act aggressively to become the primary distributors of electronic books, we may see publishers gain from this paradigm shift.  If publishers follow in the recording industries wake and allow third parties to control prices while attempting to control the proliferation of the product with an iron fist, they will find themselves steamrolled by the unforgiving torrent that is the internet.

Clash of the Titans

So this past week saw Amazon's thus far unabated surge to dominance in the e-publishing market finally challenged and turned back by Macmillan publishing.  It seems like Amazon has up until this point been aiming to be just under the level at which anti-trust laws can really apply to a company.  By selling e- books at a loss, Amazon had sought to drive away competition in the market, becoming sole producer, distributor, and vendor of e-books created in the eDocs format.  Macmillan challenged their dominance by refusing to supply books to Amazon if they continued to short sell the product.  Amazon fought for a while, but finally capitulated under the pressure and bad press.  The question we are discussing today is what problems may publishers face in the future if the Amazon hegemony continues to grow, and how can this actually be advantageous to some publishers?

The downsides of an Amazon hegemony should be fairly obvious.  Publishers would continue to be unable to create any sort of direct sales support online, as they would simply be unable to compete with Amazon's prices.  Furthermore, Amazon's short selling of e-books may lead to an impact on sales of physical books as more people begin to shift formats.  New devices like the iPad and the Adam make the e-book market more accessible to traditional readers than ever, and it is likely that the e-book format will become a major competitor to watch out for in little time.  Publisher's are wise to be leery, as watching the fall of the newspaper industry should be taken as a lesson of what can happen if publishers don't approach the growing demand for electronic material both strategically and aggressively.  Amazon's hegemony threatens the options these publishers have and unless the publishers get control over the evolution of their business and work closely with the technology companies that are pushing it forward, they will find themselves going extinct.

The upside to Amazon's work has been the general opening up of the industry to make all of this possible.  As more and more people are becoming exposed to electronic publishing, the medium is becoming more and more desirable and advanced to keep up with the developing market.  This provides a great opportunity for book publishers to work with Amazon as a distributor to get their books to a wider market without having to deal with the costs of printing and shipping distribution.  With overhead costs cut, smaller publishers now have the potential to get their material to a wider audience.  In addition, with Amazon now on the defensive following the dispute with Macmillan, publishers may have an opportunity to negotiate a new distribution model for e-books that provides a greater profit for small publishers than the current model in which more than 50% of the money a book brings in goes to the vendor and distributor. 

Ones and Zeroes

With the big news about Apple's new iPad, I figured now was as good time to examine the collosal marketing effort thata is surrounding this hot new device.  As far as the product itself goes, the iPad definitely hits some notes which point in a good direction, but it also presents some aspects rather poorly, making it a very risky product.  What it does give us is a relatively inexpensive open platform to connect to the internet wirelessly and integrate all of the major functions of a computer into a lightweight, easy to transport device.  It combines the keyboardless navigation of the internet and text documents that is a hallmark of the iPhone, with the large, high definition screen of a laptop computer.  Apple is pushing the marketing on this product pretty hard, but I think they've made some pitfalls on the way. 

 

On the positive side, Apple has employed the effective tactic of thinly veiled false secrecy.  By denying any information about the device while allowing a steady stream of rumors and "leaked" information out into the internet, Apple built a powerful viral marketing campaign that had the entire tech industry in a froth priror to the official unveiling.  This has become a mainstay of most electronic and media companies who have embraced the reality of internet information leaks as an asset to their marketing model.  Given incidents of this occurrance in publishing (most notably the final Harry Potter novel which was leaked in its entirety before its release date, yet still had record breaking sales) it may be important for publishers to follow this model in the future in order to make the viral nature of online information work for the publisher instead of against. 

 

Apple has also showed a few bad cards when dealing with the media frenzy surrounding the press release of the device.  Most notably their mistargetting of the devices audience.  Rather than push it as a consumer electronic with a low price point, they attempted to make this into a new business device, capable of creating spreadsheets and editing text like a regular laptop.  The problem is that its functionality in this market is limited, and they may see quite a bit of resistance from businesses that can get cheaper laptops for their employees rather than buying this less useful gadget.  Apple's failure to make a convincing case for general consumers may be the nail that seals the iPad's coffin.  This is highly reminicent of the "if you build it they will come" conundrum we saw when looking at publisher's websites.  Having a device that is new and interesting doesn't necessarily guarantee an audience unless it provides functionality to back up the hype. 

 

So from the news we can take several different lessons about marketing a new big, high risk product.  Viral marketing may be the wave of the future for all entertainment outlets, including publishers.  But even new and exciting ideas don't make up for a lack of the fundamentals.

 

Holistic Marketing

Greetings!  Today we are talking about brand marketing vs. product marketing.  What are they?  Why are they important?  Is one more important than the other?  The answers may surprise you (but probably won't.)

When most people think about marketing their first thought is probably more in line with product marketing.  Comercials, newspaper and online ads, billboards.  All of these things are used for product marketing.  Technically defined, product marketing is any kind of marketing that increases public awareness about a particular product.  Brand marketing, by contrast is any kind of marketing that increases public awareness about a company or line of products.  Brand marketing includes putting logos on ads, passing out swag with logos on it, and generally positioning products in order to make your company well known in a certain area.

In the publishing field, product marketing would involve giving press or attention to a specific book.  Producing printed or media ads, putting out press releases, organizing release parties, and getting the book placed in a favorable place on the shelf are all product marketing strategies.  This type of marketing is highly important because it makes the public aware that the work is available and draws new readers to the product.  Ideally, a publishing house will combine this with brand marketing in order to create repeat buyers.

Brand marketing in publishing follows two separate courses.  Marketing the publisher to vendors and distributors and marketing the author (and to a lesser extent the publishing house) to the book buying public.  In order to get major book buyers to take you seriously, the publisher must have reputable status.  Buyers aren't going to purchase from a publisher that has a series of failed books.  Therefore a publisher must ensure that the name of their house is circulated around the trade favorably.  Doing this includes face to face meetings, careful correspondence, and simply keeping up a good name.  By choosing proper marketing tactics, the house can make sure that the first impression a major distributor gets from their publishing house is a good one.

The second phase of brand marketing is marketing the common factor that connects several products to the consumer.  In publishing this is usually the author, but can be a common setting or theme that connects multiple titles.  By marketing these commonalities, you can create repeat buyers who will continue to buy books that share that common thread. 

While brand marketing may sound like a more important undertaking than product marketing, it must be remembered that brand marketing cannot succeed without successful product marketing.  Product marketing lets people know that the book is out there and that it is interesting, brand marketing gives people a criteria by which to decide upon future purposes, thus making the future product marketing more effective.  They are twin sides of the same coin, and it would behoove any company to pay equal attention to them in order to achieve success. 

But wait, there's more!

Today we're talking about giving it all away.  That's right, You get a bestseller!  You get a bestseller! Everyone gets a bestseller!  I get a lawsuit for blatantly stealing Oprah's schtick.  What am I talking about?  I'm talking about the Kindle's ebook bestseller list.  Presently, more than half of bestsellers on Amazon's Kindle list cost exactly $0.  While some of these are public domain content, several of the titles are actually authored by writers who are trying to earn a living through their craft.  The New York Times posted an article recently describing the marketing reasoning behind the free books, which you can read here.  

What I'd like to talk about isn't why they would be giving these books away, as I think the writer of that article did a fine job covering those points.  What I'd like to talk about is how the internet, and eBooks changes the way we sample new media.  In earlier days if you wanted to try a new author's work, it was necessary to either purchase one of their books (as reading in a store was and is still frowned upon) or borrow a copy, assuming one was available, from the local library.  This system worked, but certainly kept new readers from branching out too much with new authors or trying newer publications.  I generally don't want to spend my money and my time on a book from an author I've never heard of, and usually the library's selection is limited and the books are not always in the best condition.  Often I find myself unwilling to check out a book if it looks well worn, attracted instead to the shinier new titles.  As such, despite being an avid reader, I find that I spend very little time checking out up and coming authors or newly started series.  Instead I spend my money and my time on established writers who I know will provide me with a certain level of quality.

Enter the Kindle.  Presently, my iPhone kindle app is filled with a number of books that I would probably never think to purchase in a normal bookstore.  I've downloaded these books simply because they were free, instantly available, and in a genre I enjoy.  This is only possible because the internet allows instantaneous transmission of a document that takes up no physical space and takes a fraction of the cost of a normal book to make.  I can thumb through the entirety of the text, and discard it if I don't like it, or save it if I think it's worth reading.  The advent of this technology has actually made it possible to sample an entire product instead of just a small teaser of it.

This isn't restricted to just books either.  Websites like youtube and hulu have made available whole movies and episodes of television series at no charge beyond your monthly internet connection fee, and if you happen to be in a wifi hotspot, you don't even pay that.  Like  Ms. Rich said in the Times article, the thinking of these campaigns is to drive sales of other content by allowing the consumer to get a free trial, but while the free trial is nothing new, providing complete content as a "trial" is something entirely unheard of. 

An exciting idea would be if the next step of this process would involve allowing users to download any book they want for only the cost of a single subscription fee.

Publishing Sites

The internet has become ubiquitous in the was people do business in the modern world. It is difficult to think of any successful modern American business that does not possess some sort of online presence. So it comes as no surprise that most publishing houses, big and small, have their own websites. The question I've been posed today is about how these sites target their audiences. Orders placed on a publisher's website make up a tiny fraction of sales made on any book. Publishers work mostly as a wholesale business, catering primarily to retail sellers. Yet for some reason publisher websites are still primarily targeted at end users. This fact has thrown me for a loop for the past few days. If publisher's can't expect to sell books to consumers through their websites, why do they target the website at consumers? Why not tool the website towards the needs of the booksellers that comprise most of their business? After giving it a lot of thought I've come up with three possible reasons that satisfy my own logic.

The first is the least exciting, that publisher's simply aren't connecting with how to best use their sites. The internet is generally seen as a tool by which one can address the masses. It is any given person's way to connect to millions of other people. This thought may be clouding some publisher's judgment into thinking that a website is primarily for reaching out to the general public rather than considering the possibility that the website might be a good tool to reach more small, local shops which may want to stock the publisher's books. While this might apply to a few publishers who are struggling to modernize, I hardly think that this trend would apply to every publisher's site out there, so it remains only a partial explanation.

The second reason I came up with is that publisher's expect growth in this area. They may perhaps believe that by making the material available, they can later drive traffic to the site through other marketing stratagems in order to reap the benefits of direct to buyer sales. Direct sales certainly hold a higher margin for profit, and as such a hopeful publisher may not want to close that door.

The third, and what I believe to be the most likely reason is that publishers want to show their booksellers, which they have already approached through traditional means, what kind of consumers the publisher itself is targeting with its material. By providing this information, publishers may hope that the booksellers will be able to get a good idea of what the publisher and the publisher's material is all about and how to best position their merchandise. This especially makes sense with online sales venues like Amazon, which can use the publisher's website as reference for how to best place the merchandise and what products might also sell well with it.

This final reason seems to me to be the most logical explanation for why a publisher would want to market towards end consumers, as doing so will help to connect with the book sellers and drive the final sales of the product.

Three Wolf Moon

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about irony.  Above is posted a picture that I think a few of you might be familiar with.  The three wolf moon t-shirt is every business’ dream:  A product that required no ad dollars whatsoever to change it from a cheap product that barely turned any profit into a massively successful product overnight.  This shirt currently stands as one of the top selling apparel items on Amazon.  It has spawned a major internet sensation that includes videos on collegehumor.com and Youtube, as well as a myriad of parody images.  All of this was not caused with a strong or catchy marketing slogan.  It doesn’t owe its success to a room full of savvy marketing experts who hit upon a golden formula.  The Three Wolf Moon shirt owes all its success to an ironic comment left on the Amazon.com review board.  User “Bee-Dot” wrote the now famous review, concluding:

”Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.”

The highly amusing review has led to an avalanche of further reviews from people looking to get in on the joke.  Currently the shirt has over 17,000 reviews, most of which reference the themes in Bee-Dot’s review. 

While Three Wolf Moon is certainly the most recent and successful instance of ironic internet meme turned marketing gold, it is hardly the only such instance of this happening.  In February of 2008 Australian eBay entrepreneurs George Patterson and Y&R Melbourne purchased a BMX bike off of eBay for 27.50 Australian Dollars.  They received the bike, and without making any changes to the product, reposted the item with the following description: 

“This is a max wicked sick BMX. It's a Reliance Boomerang and it's done heaps of maximum extreme stunts. I have mostly done stunts on this bike since forever. Once I did a boom gnarly stunt trick on it and a girl got pregnant just by watching my extremeness to the maxxxx. Some details about sickmax BMX: Comes with everything you see including: TOPS AS SUSPENSION REAR FORKS!! 2 x wheels 1 x seat I will even thrown my sick BMXing name for FREE - Wicked Styx. Has minor surface rust on handlebars and front forks (easily removed). More rust on rear forks (as shown in pics). Tyres hold air but are pretty old. Basically, it's an old BMX, but it's radness is still 100% in tact. Tricks I have done on this BMX: Endos - 234. Sick Wheelies - 687. Skids - 143,000. Bunny Hops - 2 (my brother dared me to do them, which I did because I'm Rad to the power of Sick). Flipouts - 28. Basically if you buy this bike you will instantly become a member to every club that was ever invented, worldwide, because you will be awesome. Pick up from Richmond in Melbourne. Throw your hands in the air like you just don't mind.”

Right away the pair received bids for higher amounts.  But the story gets more complicated.  The description was noticed by several blogs and internet forums and was lauded for its creativity.  By the time the final bids came in, the seller had released a statement letting buyers know that the whole thing was designed as a marketing experiment, yet the simple irony of the whole situation continued to drive the price up, until the bike sold for a staggering $134.50!  A 500% increase with absolutely no change in the product!  These examples and a whole lot more just go to show that the power of irony cannot be underestimated when marketing in the new age.  Knowledge of internet culture can prove to be a great benefit to anyone looking to sell products online.

What floats and what sinks

The question of the day is what makes a publisher’s website stand out in its methods of marketing to a target audience.  There are a lot of publisher’s websites out there; the modern age practically demands that a publisher have an online presence in order to survive.  To bring more focus to the topic I am only taking a look at publisher’s for whom I myself fall into the target audience.  I mainly looked at adult science fiction and fantasy, as these are the genre’s I most often read.  

For starters, I was surprised by the different strategies employed by the large publishing corporations and the small to medium sized presses.  All of the sites I visited utilized the format of placing a news column or blog on the front page with links to content surrounding the most recent news. Large publishing houses like TOR filled their pages with splashy graphics and constantly changing ads that plug their best sellers, while the majority of their books require you dig deeper to see.  By contrast www.orionbooks.co.uk, a smaller British publisher allows you to browse their entire catalog of titles by simply clicking one menu.  I was generally impressed with Orion’s site; it is simple, clean, and easy to navigate.  For each of the titles in their library, the cover art, professional reviews, author information, and even e-book download options are readily available and easily accessed.  Another impressive point was their company logo, which is small, tastefully designed and artistically interweaved with their pages.  The logo actually seems to fit into the page rather than seeming slapped on.  Choice of fonts and color schemes serve to bring the whole thing together in a rather aesthetically pleasing manner. 

I was very surprised when I saw the site for Bantam Spectra, one of the largest publishers in the science fiction genre.  While the site initially looks clean and well designed, there are some flaws in their system.  The site has a clean white theme, with genre listings easily enough accessed.  My problem with the site is that if you want to browse through their publications for any given genre, you must know either what you are looking for or select a month or year in which you wish to browse.  You cannot simply browse by genre.  When you do find their browse function, which is not very obviously placed, you must browse through all of the books published by Random House in a certain period (Up to two years back) and even then only bestsellers appear.  This means that they really don’t intend for you to shop around for direct buy.  I can only assume that they keep the site up as a method of delivering news to fans and expect sales to be generated through bookstores or Amazon, which is linked off the site.  While Random House is obviously big enough and powerful enough to do things this way without losing out, it still shows poor design that isn’t likely to sell a lot of back orders or new authors.

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