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.