Just a reminder. I’m talking tomorrow at The Booksellers’ 2008 seminar called “Reaching Readers Online” aimed at helping anyone in the publishing industry who might be “seeking to forge direct relationships with consumers”.

The presentation is done, and will be posted on here and on SlideShare as soon as I can after tomorrow. (I’ll supply it with notes, and as a PDF, and hopefully the Bookseller will be recording it to make available as podcasts. Maybe don’t hold your breath for that one.)

In the end, I will be going through the case studies called for by the programme (including one on coversourcing) but not in any great depth. Instead I want to go out from the brief a bit to give publishers four really easy take-away things that they can actually do in 2008 (clue: widgets won’t be involved), along with some snapshots from us of where the industry is headed (clue: it’s not pretty) and where it could go if it does better digital stuff (another clue: that should be a much nicer trip).

I’ve found out from George (fellow speaker and panelist in our bit of the day) that Chris from Salt can’t make it – so we may have a bit of extra time for questions.

Hope to see you there.

I’ve been asked back to The Bookseller’s Reaching Readers Online seminar, which takes place at the end of this Month.

There’s some really interesting people looking like taking part, including those within the publishing industry (from Penguin, Little Brown and Headline) and within the wider digital media landscape. The chair this year is Cameron Saunders, who does Channel 4’s digital marketing. (I hope it’s the same guy who was behind the great stuff they’ve done for the equally brilliant Skins)

I’ve got a fairly open brief this year, and am giving a 30 minute presentation on (apparently!):

“how publishers can build communities, authors and series brands online”

which could be pretty much anything. Before I go off on one, I’d like to (1) see if there are any readers who will be thinking about going and (2) to see if there is anything anyone thinks I should cover in particular. I’ll be putting the presentation up on slideshare (as I did for a talk I gave to some students about what a “producer” does) so you won’t have to go to get the gist of it. I’ll also encourage the Bookseller to podcast it, which they didn’t get round to last year but should be possible this year.

Either email me (via the site, or peter [at] aptstudio.com) or comment below if you have anything you’d like to hear. I’ll maybe post some thoughts in the next week or so if there is interest in seeing where it’s all going.

Peter

The great thing about any fair (or marketplace) is that it brings so many people together – and that is a fantastic starting point from which to do business. The idea and value in such a meeting is not a new one, but it is one that is shared by the successes in the new media economy as well as the old.

In current business speak, “leveraging the long tail is all about aggregation”. Come again? What it means is that if you can attract enough people to your market, you’ll sell lots of different products. And, suddenly, publishers are realizing the future of selling books lies in the web.

Precipitated either by Google’s scanning plans, the changes in the film, music, TV and advertising businesses, the growth of MySpace and YouTube (and their subsequent acquisitions by figureheads of old and new media), the entropy on the high street, or for whatever reason, publishers have gone web crazy.

This is a good thing. Publishing, as with film, music and indeed advertising before it, has been slow to adopt the web as a serious and integrated part of its development. They have left it to others to demonstrate and exploit the massive opportunities of the web, and now remain firmly in catch-up mode.

For the last ten years, Amazon’s growth and revenue has clearly demonstrated the unstoppable desires of consumers to buy products, and books in particular, online. It is debatable whether Amazon’s aggressively simple original customer acquisition strategy – be cheaper than everyone else – has led us to the difficult, price-led state of the high street, but it’s doubtless a factor. But the facts are clear: you can sell lots of books online. Amazon does this by being the one-stop for online shoppers. By aggregating.

Publishing, and traditional bookselling, on the other hand, is in a pretty tight mutual spot. Need I go into details? Maybe high street retailing isn’t quite dead, but whether there is enough life in it to sustain a healthy book industry must now be a serious topic of debate. It is hard to see how things will get any easier, but not difficult to imagine them getting worse. Suffice to say, this is a bad thing.

I have often wondered what is stopping the industry (in the form of the most powerful houses in the UK – including a delegation from the Independent Alliance) getting together and taking on Amazon.

The creation of an ‘aggregating’ internet channel through which to sell ‘books’ – be it physical books, eBooks, audio, articles, POD or whatever – is the logical response to this current climate. Yes, it would be expensive, difficult, and require some bitter pills to be swallowed. But is it so different to what the airline industry created with Opodo in the face of the new business model brought on by Lastminute.com?

A consortium of publishers could doubtless create a channel that could add significant value to the consumer – enough to attract customers without attracting the attentions of the Competition Commission.

Access to content would be the key differentiator over Amazon, as well as the ability to do new and exciting things with the content in the site – things that could not be done without the say-so of the copyright holders.

Why else would customers come? Well, looking back to how Amazon gained customers, the rival could easily compete on price, range and service. Such a service could, and would have to be, advertised and marketed successfully. Loyalty could be bought through perfect execution.

We can see from the activity at the fair that sourcing titles is not the problem facing publishers – it is getting them to market at a fair price. This idea may be radical but radical thinking is surely what the book trade needs to evolve for the 21st century.

The brief was to write something accessible for the majority of visitors to the fair, and to also try to make it topical. I thought I had sledgehammered the article into meeting the latter requirement, and that it was all a bit too jargony to meet the first. Anyway, here it is.

In the caffeinated, optimistic and excitable spirit of the fair, and following the trends of the wider business world, we could now talk about how we are all leveraging web 2.0, blogs, MySpace, Twitter, user-generated content, YouTube and Flickr. We might even discuss RSS and Second Life avatars without losing the will to live.

We could do. And if we were all twenty (or forty) years younger, spent more time online than in front of the TV (or with our faces buried in manuscripts), we might possibly do so knowledgeably. Who knows, between us we may yet today have a conversation that turns into a startup company heralding publishing’s second coming.

It’s certainly seductive to believe that the future of publishing, bookselling and marketing lies in the arcane, youthful and ever-emerging worlds parallel to MySpace and YouTube. And in very many ways, it well might.

My personal view is that a “MySpace for Books” (or some other book-related web service) will emerge, if it hasn’t already (and I’m not referring directly to Bloomsbury’s latest venture). Such a service may even become wildly popular. I just can’t see it being born successfully out of a publishing house – or on top of an e-commerce proposition.

Why not? For two main reasons. Firstly, publishers do not have the skills, experience, perspective or – vitally – the time to make such an endeavour a success.

Secondly, none of the web 2.0 success stories we’ve all heard about has yet been based around a transactional model (which must be the justification for it being set up out of valuable publishing revenues). Instead they have been born in garages, delivered by little more than passion and guile.

Paradoxically, many of the successes of the internet – Amazon, eBay, Google, MySpace and upstart LibraryThing – demonstrate web users’ interest in, and love for, books – as well as the web’s innate aptitude for serving these passions. So, to be sure, online marketing remains a massive opportunity for publishers to exploit.

The problem with the “web 2.0″ technologies listed above is not just that they are incompatible with the target audiences of most books, but that publishers haven’t yet harnessed the basics of “web 1.0″.

How many publisher sites even offer rich, up to date, better-than Amazon data? Attractive, intuitive design? Value-added content, access to authors? Search engine optimization? Flawless commerce and customer service? Above all, consistent and engaging communication of the singular proposition of that house and its authors? Booksellers are not immune from this criticism either.

Without a grasp of what makes a good site compelling and successful, it is implausible that a publisher could “leverage” the new technologies to worthwhile benefit without wasting the ample opportunities before them. If you haven’t ever mashed-up a video on YouTube, what makes you think your readers will?

This is not to say that good marketing for books can’t take place through these channels. Quite the opposite. It’s just that, for most publishers, attempting to do so would be like running before you can walk. It may not be so exciting or sexy, but my point is that there are (for now) more effective technological methods for publishers to employ for selling more books to more readers.

By all means experiment with new technology, if you have the time, energy and digital experience to employ your critical faculties as to what makes one good. But do so carefully, lest you end up, as one of my sager clients described, being guilty of ‘corporate dad-dancing’, probably whilst wearing the emperor’s new clothes.

I’ve had a load of feedback from people who were there – unfortunately it wasn’t recorded for the podcasting – which has been great: thanks. However I do just want to dwell on one thing that I said which, judging on the feedback, may have been taken out of context (perhaps with a bit of wishful thinking attached).

When I said that the most effective thing you could do would be to hire a talented, enthusiastic and dedicated member of staff to take responsibility for content, I didn’t mean just do that and nothing else. Sorry – but as I hope I also said, there isn’t a silver bullet for making it work on the web – and getting the alchemy right will be a load of hard work beyond getting some cheap new blood in!

I meant: when you have everything else in place (i.e. technology, data, sales channel, customer propositions, customers – a winning web site in other words) and your site / strategy is demonstrating success and is therefore ready to grow, this is the point where you need to get someone in who will deliever on the potential you have. If you already have them there, then think about getting them involved in refining the strategy you’re developing. But just hoping that building the site means it will work is a guaranteed way to kill it – and all of the preceding hard work.

The last 10% is always the hardest bit to deliver – and it’s the publisher’s job. Most of the time it – and by it I mean the collection, creation, collation and posting of new content, and communication of your messages to your audiences – gets shunted from department to department until it languishes in isolation, quarantine, and then obscurity. Of course a marketing director doesn’t have time to do that – but they should have the time to take responsibility for it.

If you have everything I’ve mentioned above sorted – and in which case congratulations – then the irony is that you probably already have a great team and management who understands the value of everything we talked about on the day. If you don’t, then just finding out where to hire a graduate for £12k isn’t your biggest problem.

And if you are a graduate looking to get into publishing, then if I were you I would start (if not already) honing your web skills for exactly this. The future is yours, and before very long, it won’t be £12K that you’re earning…

Reaching Readers Online
15th March 2007, Riverbank Park Plaza, London

I’m on a panel chaired by Bebo’s new UK MD Shaa Wasmund
, who apparently runs a very tight ship, along with:

• FutureFoundation’s Barry Clark (whom I worked with when he was at HC looking after the Tolkein list)
• lit blog and publishing hero Mark Thwaite, who runs Ready Steady Book and the Book Depository (although I don’t think he’s the same guy that used to be in the Mission and played on Tricky’s albums – Mark?)
• Kathryn Hellewell from Vue Cinemas

We’ll be talking about “Recognising new routes to readers”, with the following focus:

• Where are consumers spending their time online?
• How much potential is there for book marketing?
• Who are the most influential books bloggers?
• How can publishers influence them?

as well as us, HarperCollins’ Shiona McDougall will be giving a presentation. All on her own.

The whole afternoon should be interesting if you’re in publishing and read this blog…

Details (also see here):

15th March 2007
Reaching Readers Online
Riverbank Park Plaza,
Plaza Rooms 1- 5,
18 Albert Embankment London
SE1 7TJ.

What follows may be a one-off, or the first of a few articles, based on how interesting the readers and editors find it.

In some ways it’s an introduction to my overall view of how publishers should use the web, and therefore more general than I’d like to be, but hopefully that will change over time.

Written July 7, 2006

An enlightened client once used a memorable and self-explanatory phrase to me, describing a project which had, prior to his involvement, languished in the ‘too hard box’.

Publishing is an industry, where for many, the only ‘customers’ publishers have in mind are the retailers. Despite needing to get closer to readers, to find out more what drives purchases, publishers remain at least one step removed from their ‘end-users’. Any industry in as competitive and difficult a market as the entertainment ’space’ must put their consumers higher in their minds.

The easiest, most obvious way to do this is online. Whether it is via a content-rich website, in combination with a mailing list or – even better – a blog, publishers who just expect some 3 for 2 promotions and a bit of tube advertising to get their books moving are deluded. The barriers between technology and book buying have long since broken down, and online is a component of all of our lives – it should be a no-brainer component of every marketing strategy.

Yet this is not a popular idea among a lot of publishers, or sales directors. Many put their websites – which they undoubtedly spent a lot of time and money on – firmly in the ‘too hard’ box, gathering dust and excuses. They devolve responsibility to IT, and it passes eternally between sales, marketing and editorial. Or they emphasise that the business they know best is publishing, not book selling. Quite.

Another riposte is that offering discounts online to consumers will alienate the trade. Given that independents already go to Tesco to buy stock, while consumers have been trained to now expect heavy discounting, is this really a valid concern?

Given the state of most publishers web sites these days, I’m not surprised that they do seem to want to turn visitors away at the door. From scant information, ludicrous pricing, eye-watering p&p charges and enforced registration – the barriers to purchasing are incredibly high. I’ve seen ‘books of the month’ for sale for twice the price of the same edition at Amazon – an insult to visitors.

Publishers need to make their sites more welcoming, and rewarding, to those tiny percentages of readers who do visit. They need to nurture these audiences and build them up, organically, to become loyal customers. And that means adding value that they’re not getting on the high street or from Amazon – and that comes in the form of content.

Publishers aren’t going to get rich from sales made on their web sites. But the opportunity here is to create a relationship with consumers, and to use that relationship to generate better market information on both sides. Yes this means invoking another taboo concept in publishing – the ‘brand’ – but this doesn’t have to just be about you as a publishing house, it can relate to any of your author or book brands as well.

Communicating with readers is how you will sell more books, and for the moment, the best channels of communication are not in publisher’s control – but they so easily could be. It’s time publishers took their relationships with consumers out of the ‘too hard box’.