Direct response

My generation of publishers is distinguished by a few that really understand the opportunities and value to the enterprise of selling backlist and creating evergreens. Peter Workman is the master of this. Quite aside from the intrinsic quality and appeal of much of what he publishes — which is considerable — he has always pushed books based on their markets and the opportunities, not based on the date they were first issued. Charlie Nurnberg was the same way at Sterling. He has often reminded me that “every book is new to the person who hasn’t heard of it yet.”

Peter and Charlie, and other publishers and sales executives who also stressed the backlist, learned that in the physical world it became a game of managing inertia. The first challenge, with chains or independents, is to get a quantity in the store that will sell. The second challenge is to get it reordered when it sells. That requires fighting inertia because most books don’t get ordered for most stores and most books that are stocked only get an initial order and no re-order.

But after a while, you can get inertia on your side. If the book is seen to have “backlisted” (think Workman’s “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” or a perennial Charlie built called “Gemstones of the World”), it becomes one of the books that is put on auto-pilot with computers, and then it will get re-ordered as long as its performance passes a periodic review which is usually not frequent.

Most publishers “learn” (institutionally) that it isn’t worth promoting backlist. To begin with, most publishers aren’t staffed to do it: the head counts and working processes of publicity and marketing departments are built around the requirements of “launching” books, not “piloting” them. And there’s logic to this. Marketing should always be dedicated to books which are available for purchase. Up until 15 years ago, a book not in stores was not nearly as available as the ones which were. And up until very recently, the non-store sales for most titles was growing to significance, but actually growing pretty slowly.

The fact that the availability differential between new titles and backlist is sharply reduced and shrinking fast is a very significant change. When I came into the business, it was a sign of knowledge and savvy that you didn’t spend money promoting a book that wasn’t in the stores. That meant “don’t promote too soon before publication.”

And it also meant that any promotional opportunity for a backlist book was only seen to have value if you had the lead time to push books out before the promotional event occurred. This fundamental of publishing has been painstakingly explained to authors for years, usually triggered when they call their publisher to tell them they have a major newsbreak occurring the day after tomorrow.

This piece of wisdom becomes less important every day. Soon it will be anachronistic sophistication for those of us who are saddled with it.

Publishers, agents, and authors are all seeing bumps in backlist sales because of newly created ebook availability. It would be my hunch that, sure as there is such a thing as word-of-mouth, the ebook backlist sales will spark a pop in print sales for the very same titles. Alert publishers and the retailers that have stores and also have insight into ebook sales (you know who you are) will probably find ebook sales and online print sales good leading indicators of what should be brought back into stock in the stores as well.

Remember those ebook catalogs I suggested might be a good idea? Why not start by putting one with an entry for every title by an author into every ebook by that author? That’s a pretty obvious opportunity. I’ll make my last publishing prediction of 2010: anybody not doing this by the end of 2011 will be seen as “behind.” (It might be that any agent not already suggesting this, if not insisting on it, is behind now.)

Every ebook sold offers a publisher and an author a significant opportunity for engagement with a real human being who will, almost certainly, buy another ebook in the future. The Peter Workmans and Charlie Nurnbergs of 21st century publishing will build their success on that fact. How well that opportunity is exploited is a future success trait that should hit many consciousnesses soon. (That’s why we tried to stress the importance of direct-response marketing knowledge in two posts some months ago.) As people wake up to these opportunities, how they’re pursued is likely to become the focus of some extensive discussion along the value chain (between publishers and retailers, between publishers and authors, and among publishers).

PS. The first time I met Charlie Nurnberg was in about 1974 at the suggestion of my father. (Len said: he’s a smart guy; you ought to talk to him.) That day Charlie explained to me about granting permissions for excerpts. You do it, he said, and you require a credit line that reads “from Title X by Author Y, published by His Publisher, Address, book price plus $1.25 postage and handling”. That’s how he always did it and money just rolled in. Sometimes the credit line was appearing in Readers Digest with 20 million or more readers. Charlie worked for a small publisher called Frederick Fell at the time.  (They had one huge author, but that’s another story.) With a standard device, he turned regular engagements into revenue streams. There’s a thought worth preserving in that.

I write this in my home aerie, 17 floors above snow-covered 2nd Avenue, within 10 minutes by foot or subway from just about all of American trade publishing. Like everybody else, most of my information exchanges are online, but the intense proximity of literally ALL of consumer publishing’s editorial, marketing, and business decision-making is, at the very least, an extraordinary daily convenience. (Last week Connie Sayre and I saw seven major company CEOs for 30-to-60 minute meetings in between lots of other work. Try that in any other industry and any other town.) It is a frequent source of joy. And it is an indispensable component of whatever knowledge feeds my consulting practice and this blog. One question that it is fair to ask is whether, in a wired world where we SKYPE today and will have conversations tomorrow with a hologram apparently sitting in the next chair, does Manhattan still matter? I believe that it still does and that it still will but I will admit to being as sentimental about the dense and quick-paced Manhattan gestalt as some people are about the smell of the paper and the smell of the glue. (And I’m well aware of how sentimentality can cloud their thinking!)

And on that flight of fancy, I wish everybody a Happy New Year and a healthy and prosperous 2011.

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In a conversation earlier this week I learned that the big Hollywood talent agencies have come to the recognition that “audience aggregation”, a component of what I have been calling a “vertical” strategy, needs to be incorporated into their thinking going forward. This was signaled very strongly recently when longtime publisher Steve Ross took his fledgling business offering self-publishing advice to authors with him to the Abrams Artists Agency where he set up a new department for them to represent authors rights to publishers.

What does that mean? It means that the celebrities will start increasingly try to “own” their audiences: to gather them in networks, bind them with various content offers like newsletters or other material from the person they “know”, and sell them stuff. The people managing the careers of movie stars are seeing the writing on the wall. The intermediary structure that connected the stars to their public — studios, producers, theatrical distribution — is suffering the pain of all media: declining prices for content because of the increase in supply and consumption habits changing because of more and more quality screens and digital delivery.

Many authors, of course, are trying to do the same thing. They have web pages; they collect the names of those who want to keep in touch with them; and they are, increasingly, selling them stuff. Sometimes the stuff is content (with a way blazed by Joe Konrath and his successful conversion from published author to self-publishing author, so far almost exclusively through Amazon) and now, thanks to Open Sky, they could be selling anything at all.

So the authors and the movie stars are getting ready for the day when they have to bring real live customer contact to the party if they want to be invited. But the big publishers are lagging behind here. Why? One reason is that the big accounts appear to have intimidated them from selling direct to consumers.

This is the kind of thing you don’t know for sure from the outside. Conversations between publishers and their top accounts, like conversations between publishers and the agents for their top authors, are private and closely guarded. But it has been anecdotally reported in the past that Barnes & Noble is not happy if publishers sell to consumers. And I’ve also heard that Amazon has told publishers that if they charge any price lower than the suggested retail in a direct sale, Amazon will consider that lower price to be the basis of their discounts, not the suggested retail.

That threat effectively prevents any publisher from selling direct unless they operate on the agency model and have eliminated price competition in the marketplace. (Of course, under the agency model, all sales are considered sales by the publisher, except, of course, that they don’t have the names or the customer relationship!)

In a business that is built on the leverage of intermediary trading partners who aggregate customers, which trade publishing is, very few are in a position to gratuitously annoy the two most powerful levers they have.

So the publishers have been reluctant to be seen to be selling direct. This concern also applies, for the same reason, to the wholesalers Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Both depend on bookstore business for their survival and it is, perhaps, an enlightened position not to compete with their core customers so neither company sells directly. But it is very constraining. Baker & Taylor really needs a full-line store to sell their BLIO ebook platform, but they can’t do it themselves. And Ingram — our client but we have not discussed this question with them at all — serves publisher clients as a DAD and as an ebook wholesaler who could use a retailing capability; but it is a very longstanding Ingram policy not to compete with their bookseller customers.

That’s the context in which LibreDigital announced their new SkyShelf service last week. SkyShelf is a direct-to-consumer ebook sales capability for the publishers LibreDigital serves as a digital distributor, but it gives them a certain amount of “deniability” or distance from it.

In my opinion, the big publishers must face some very critical questions fraught with customer relationship management challenges.

On the one hand, publishers — all publishers — must start forming direct relationships with end users. They have no choice. Authors are doing it. The retailers are doing it. The Hollywood stars and politicians and ballplayers they want to write books for them are doing it. Part of what the publisher wants to get paid for is marketing. When the most important marketing asset for any book is the number of likely-interested people who can be emailed about its publication, publishers without any names to offer will have a harder time selling their value.

Publishers who do have names on file — from Digital Book World owners F+W Media to Hay House to Harlequin and including others that grow in number every day — are already benefiting. They’re selling more copies expending less marketing money and they’ve got something important to offer authors looking for a publisher.

But it is hard to collect names and build a relationship with an audience if you don’t sell things to them. That’s one place that big publishers are really stuck at the moment. That’s why LibreDigital built SkyShelf to help them out. At the same time they put their competitor Ingram in a ticklish spot because it is hard for them to offer a similar service for the same reason that publishers need the help!

At the same time, the big retailers are pushing their way up the value chain into the publishers’ territory. Amazon has had self-publishing capability that is aimed at authors for a long time. Barnes & Noble invested in iUniverse, one of the first self-publishing start-ups (now part of Author Solutions), over a decade ago. Now B&N has delivered a suite of services called “PubIt” to compete with Amazon’s offering for authors.

Amazon has such a large share of the online print and ebook businesses that, with the publisher disintermediated and the author able to take a much larger share, they can credibly make the argument that a branded author — or one that otherwise does her own promotion and marketing — can make as much money through them alone as through a publisher serving the entire market.

It is more difficult and expensive for Barnes & Noble to leverage their store shelves for self-published authors but, to the extent they can, it will be a very attractive lure. I’d be very surprised if they’re not thinking about how to do that. Borders did a deal with self-publisher Lulu a couple of years and a couple of management changes ago. How long will it be before they revitalize that arrangement and add more competition for the authors’ attention?

The names of people potentially interested in a book who can be contacted for free will be the most important coin of the publishing realm in a short time; in some cases, it is already. There are publishers who are emailing to millions of names every month right now, but none of them are the biggest publishers. If gathering names is not a major priority at any publishing house, it surely should be. It’s mission-critical; it’s about survival. Seen in that light, it must certainly be worth some tough negotiating with major accounts if that’s what publishers have to do to make it happen.

This post was provoked by new information, about what the Hollywood agents are doing and about the launch of SkyShelf. But we’ve been pounding this drum of direct contact for some time. We did a pair of posts (here and here) with the help of direct response expert Neal Goff a few weeks ago trying to push publishers in this same direction. Those posts were about how. This one is about why.

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Sometimes you hear of an idea or a new business that seems so right-on-the-money that you wish you had invested in it and figure it is just a matter of time before it grows into something very powerful and important.

Here are three of those — all of which should be of interest to publishers  and which everybody who is interested in the content on this blog should know about — that are unrelated and similar only in one way. If they execute and deliver on their promise, which in the last of these three cases is really beyond question, they should have very bright futures.

One is a new business that was dreamed up without publishing as we know it in mind at all. It’s called Open Sky, and it enables any web site to sell any thing. Open Sky aggregates wholesale pricing arrangements from suppliers of anything at all and enables any website (or blog) to sell the goods at a profit. And they provide the web site with whatever technology or functionality they need plus a social commerce platform to enable harvesting and use of customer information.

So from the manufacturer’s perspective, they are the front end to a lot of distributed eyeballs and resellers. From the website or blogger’s perspective, they provide both the commercial relationship and the web tools necessary to “stock” and sell items relevant to the site’s audience. They’re brokering business arrangements that are useful on both ends and enabling sales that would simply not exist if they did not exist.

Former book editor and agent Mary Ann Naples saw the potential for Open Sky with clients of hers who were book authors and bloggers. Imagine being a blogger who writes about cooking and wants to tout and sell her favorite pots and pans. Mary Ann represented people like that and she’s been taking Open Sky into the book business.

From the perspective of a guy who has been telling publishers to use their content as bait to attract and aggregate eyeballs because they’re bound to have remunerative value, Open Sky provides an answer to the question I face the most when I lay out my thinking. (“Great, Mike, but how am I going to make money?”)

The second is a publishing business you’ve probably heard of (or should have) called Flat World Knowledge. Flat World creates college textbooks, doing the creation more-or less the old-fashioned way, although somewhat faster and cheaper than the big players. What’s different about Flat World is their commercial model. All their content is available free on the web in HTML, but you can buy it (printed or digitally-delivered) if you need to possess it or mark it up.

Wrapped into the Flat World model is the capability for professors to add other material, theirs or somebody else’s, to the Flat World text. That material becomes part of the offering to the student and soon Flat World will add the optional capability to make the material available to professors in other schools to offer to their students (with a royalty, of course). Flat World has had books in the marketplace for about 18 months; they’ve learned enough to know about how much the free HTML exposure drives profitable sales. And “how much” is apparently “enough.”

In a world where the price-and-margin pressure on the textbook model just gets increasingly difficult for publishers and students, Flat World’s new approach looks very likely to succeed. It is worth noting that Macmillan is now delivering the professor customization part of the Flat World model, but it is extremely difficult for an established publisher with a legacy cost structure to compete with their free-on-the-web commercial model. This will becoming a growing threat to the established players in the college textbook space.

The third initiative comes from two giants in the trade world: Macmillan and Ingram. (I always tell you when this is the case: Ingram is, at the moment, our client.) They have just signed a deal by which Ingram’s print-on-demand, warehouse space, and shipping capability becomes an extension of Macmillan’s own operation. Books can be seamlessly shifted from a pressrun model to POD (and back). Macmillan is alleviating warehouse space pressure, keeping books generating revenue past when they would otherwise have been out of print, and anticipating the inevitable future reduction of infrastructure that will be mandated by the shift from print to digital.

In a recent blogosphere conversation sparked by Evan Schnittman’s observation that the impact of the ebook shift could be an expansion of the market, Eoin Purcell wrote about the commercial impact of readers shifting from ebooks to print. Purcell fears that publishers might be forced to give up the print book revenues if printings were eroded too much by ebook uptake. What he sees is that as press runs go down, printing costs go up, and if that forces book prices up, it will exacerbate the decline of print and could diminish it to the extent that it just isn’t worth doing.

Certainly that’s a challenge publishers face, and they know it. The Sales Director of a Big Six house with a lot of bestsellers, anticipating that his ebook sales could pass 20% of the total for most of his books as soon as next year, said “I hope we’ll be smart enought to manage down our printings and distributions.” Hitching Ingram’s capabilities to the publisher in the way Macmillan just did helps ameliorate that problem and a myriad of others. It’s a way for publishers to reduce overheads and increase operational capabilities at the same time. I’d be surprised if we don’t see many, if not most, other publishers going for this solution in the months to come.

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This is the second post based on our recent conversation with Neal Goff, a longtime publishing executive with extensive experience with direct response who is now consulting to publishers through his firm, Egremont Associates. Because we believe that trade publishers have to become B2C marketers like they have never been before, we think it is important to take on board the fundamentals of managing contact with consumers. Neal is explaining them to us, and we’re trying to pass that understanding along.

In the first post, we wrote about the importance of name gathering, the data that should be captured (recency, frequency, monetization, and affinity) and the challenges publishers might expect to face putting their marketing database together. In this one we’re going to say more about what seems to be Neal’s favorite subject: testing.

By the simple device of changing one element of an emailing effort, one can learn which choice of that element produces a better result. But you must change one element, not more than one. If you change more than one, you wouldn’t know to which element to attribute any noticeable change.

There are three major components of any mailing that can be tested: the list, the “creative”, and the “offer.”

The list is the names you choose to mail to, which is comprised of the group you selected from (recent purchasers, or recent purchasers of a particular book, or people who said “send me material about this author”) and the selection criteria you used to pull the names from that list (males, or people in urban zip codes, or people who had spent more than $100 in the past year.)

The “creative” is the emailing itself. In the old days, that would include the envelope (windowed or solid, red or blue); in the email world it certainly includes the “subject line” of the email. Of course, it also includes the wording of the email and its presentation: headlines, graphics, etc. It includes the “from line”: does the email come from a person or the company? (Neal says it’s generally more effective if the email is signed by a person at the bottom, but that’s not necessarily what you want to show to get the email opened.) You can test a short email against a long one. And you can test the impact of HTML email against plain text.

The “offer” is what you are putting forward to the customer for an action. Historically, the action being sought was a purchase, and the offer might include a sweetener — a discount, for example. In an online context, it might be something else, like suggesting that the recipient come back with a request for a free chapter, or that the recipient offer their testimonial for the author or the book, or that the recipient register at a web site to stay in touch with the author or the publisher or the subject.

Neal argued strenuously that there should be a testing component to every mailing. He gave us a history lesson that dramatically underscored the advantages of the new email world. When direct response mailings were packages in envelopes, there was, of course, a significant cost for each piece dropped. Mailings would cost often 35 to 75 cents each — or, in marketing parlance, $350 to $750 per thousand pieces mailed — including the unavoidable cost of postage. For reasons that direct marketers could only hypothesize about but were borne out by experience, mailings tended to be most effective in January and July, with less activity occurring in between. And because the cost of mailing was so high, lists were rigorously “tested” before being “rolled out.”

But the process of mailing, getting response, and analyzing response was quite time-consuming. It took a minimum of weeks; sometimes it took months. Incorporating the results of the testing —  to change the list, creative, or offer — would then occur six or 12 months later.

Emailings deliver results within days, if not hours. Reflecting what is learned from a mailing in a new mailing takes days, not weeks or months. That’s why Neal believes that the testing regime should be continuous.

Neal also taught us an old direct mail principle: TIOLI. That’s “take it or leave it” and it refers to the belief that there should always be a simple offer with one choice: usually buy or not. Now, this violated one of Shatzkin’s First Laws of sales, which is “always give the customer a choice of answers, one of which is not ‘no’”. “Red or green?” “One dozen or two dozen?” Of course, this law was formulated for a face-to-face selling situation (the kind I’m more familiar with). Neal saw the logic of that and agreed that direct response in the email world might enable a back-and-forth that would have been impossible in the snail mail world. His response was predictable.

“It’s testable,” he said.

Neal also wanted to make the point that just because emailing doesn’t cost any cash, that doesn’t mean that mailings are “free.” They’re not, because every emailing will result in some number of your names “unsubscribing”, or revoking the permission they had granted for you to mail to them. (We see this at The Shatzkin Files. Most of our posts result in some “unsubscribes” from our mailing list, although there are always more new subscribers than unsubscribes.) As Neal pointed out, all your names have a “lifetime value”: the average number of dollars you’d expect to get out of them in the fullness of time. If you mail to 100,000 names and 2% unsubscribe, you’ve lost their lifetime value. If they each had a lifetime value of $25, you’re losing 2% of that, or 50 cents per person on your list. That’s a “cost” of $500 per 1000 mailed!

In other words, don’t casually spam your lists! And rigorously measure the cost of your unsubscribes.

These two posts are really surface-scratchers, but they spell out the basics every publisher should take on board today. If a publisher isn’t already pulling together the names it has into a marketing database, creating a way to capture responses and sales information and tie them to the names, building their list of names creatively and aggressively every way they can, and beginning a program of rigorously-monitored communication with those names, they’re behind where they should be. They need a dedicated and focused effort monitored by top management.

These posts have not touched on many complex subjects publishers will face once they start this effort. As one of the comments on the first post has already said, Amazon has more consumer names, and more information about the books they want, than anybody. All of the other online booksellers will have theirs too. Authors are aware that they should own names and many big authors already have a lot of them. There are complex negotiations in everybody’s future about how those names can be used and shared to everybody’s advantage. A publisher will only be a factor in that conversation if it has its own well-structured and robust marketing database.

Bookstore shelfspace will continue to reduce. Publishers can’t stop that. Amazon will continue to dominate the business of selling books online to consumers and publishers can’t stop that. But publishers can stop the sheer waste of customer contact and outreach, which includes placing into many hands printed books that could carry URLs and mailing list solicitations and offers on them. It is past time to start building equity with what has always been thrown away.

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Until his knee gave out a couple of years ago, I used to run regularly with a Big Six C-level executive. In about 2007 I told him I thought all the big publishers needed, but lacked, a complete and thought-through email list compilation and marketing strategy and policy. I suggested we could help his company by looking into that and designing one. (Consultants dream up ideas like this that require both outside expertise and extra hands and feet because that’s how we get work.)

My pitch got me nowhere.

In the intervening years I have become increasingly convinced that collecting names and using them right is now mission-critical for all publishers and most critical, and most difficult, for general trade publishers. And from what I can see, it isn’t getting the attention it should from anybody. (I’ll be delighted to get comments telling me I’m wrong, but I’ll bet they come only from very small publishers or thoroughly vertical ones.)

This is not my field. I know a lot about the traditional book supply chain, with first-hand experience dealing with every part of it. But my knowledge of direct response principles, starting with list-building and maintenance, is mid-level amateur. So I did what I would have done if my running buddy had responded positively to my suggestion that we help: I engaged a very smart person I know is a real expert on direct response to help me learn and think through what publishers need to learn and do. This post and at least one more will share that knowledge.

The smart person is Neal Goff, owner of Egremont Associates, most recently the CEO of My Weekly Reader Publishing. Neal has been applying direct marketing expertise in executive positions at Book-of-the-Month Club, Time-Life Books, Prentice Hall Direct, and Scholastic Library (formerly Grolier) Publishing for large chunks of the past three decades.

I started out with Neal declaring my assumption that publishers can make use of names they gather in at least three ways:

1. They can sell books to them.

2. They can use them for marketing, to spread the word about a book.

3. They can enlist them to be part of a community, interacting with you and others you gather, for the collective value (informational, monetary, curative, content-generating) the community can provide.

For openers, I asked Neal: if we want to help a publisher, where would we start?

Before he would tackle that question, Neal wanted me to understand a couple of very basic things about what is needed in a marketing database.

Obviously, we want to build a database that has all the consumers (millions, so the database has to be able to handle lots of them) we’ll be tracking and all the information about them by which we will ultimately want to “select” their names in the future. Neal emphasized that the most valuable information about them will be derived from their “actions” (when they click or buy or request information), much more than from our own (when we mail or post or offer.) And what we most want to know about those actions is summarized as “RFM” — recency, frequency, and monetary value — plus affinity, which is the similarity between what we’re selling and what they’ve bought before.

Recency refers to “the last time they did something.”

Frequency refers to “how often they’ve done something” (particularly when they do something positive, like buy a book from us).

Monetary value refers to “how much they’ve spent with us.”

Tracking affinity may require some work. Our fulfillment system knows exactly what they’ve bought from us title by title, but this information won’t be terribly useful if, every time we do a promotion, we have to go into our database and select the names of our book-buyers, one title at a time. That information has great value, though, if we aggregate our customers into meaningful groups, like those who bought a photography book or a military history title or a romance novel.

This means that transactiondata is critical. Neal explained that most publishers, particularly trade publishers, don’t necessarily have easy ways to capture individual customer transaction data in a marketing database. That may require a bridge of some sort to be built between your fulfillment systems, which capture the data necessary to complete transactions, and your marketing database, in which you want to aggregate fulfillment data in order to make it more useful selecting names for future outreach. That includes the affinity grouping described above and also such information as how much a customer has spent with you in the last six months.

Knowing that, one is equipped to start thinking about gathering names.The first step is to round up all the names you already have and put them together in one database, capturing the data you have about them in a consistent way. The next step is to establish procedures for collecting more names. All of this should be done with future selection criteria in mind which requires you to start thinking immediately about what the meaningful segments within your customer base are likely to be.

Every publisher already has a lot of names. People who have purchased from the publisher previously will have provided contact information, for confirmation purposes at least. People will have contacted the publisher for customer service, inquiries, or to sign up for newsletters or alerts.

But, often, the publisher will not have requested the necessary “permission” from the consumer to use their name for email marketing contact. (Seth Godin has been making this point for a very long time. He invented the term “permission marketing.”) The task of collecting and collating the names that are already in the house’s possession will provide a painful lesson in how much good customer information has been wasted because permission to contact was not secured when the name was collected. That lesson needs to be applied to the publisher’s future efforts.

Neal explained that you want to set yourself up to get permission from people as early as possible. On all purchase and customer service forms, when you collect email addresses, you have to include the option for people to choose to stay connected to you. You invite your contacts to check a box saying “keep me informed of other books you publish ‘on this subject’ or ‘by this author’ or ‘which will be of interest to me.’” You want to word your permission statement so that it doesn’t scare your customers into thinking you’ll be spamming them all the time, while at the same time keeping the wording broad enough that you don’t unwittingly cut yourself off from future marketing opportunities.

He also pointed out a paradox. The higher you set the permission hurdle, the fewer people you’ll get to give you permission but the higher the quality of that group will be. So if you make people “uncheck” a box to prevent permission, you’ll get more permissions. But if you make people “check” a box to grant permission, you’ll probably be more successful engaging the ones who grant it.

This took me back to a belief I held even before Neal started explaining the basics. Most publishers’ efforts to harvest email addresses have been weak and underthought (which isn’t surprising if there is no active plan to use the names). Can publishers create better reasons for the book’s consumer to engage the publisher? Can the publisher offer free additional content, for example, or notifications of updates (most likely to apply to non-fiction, of course), or a web site that offers additional value at which registration might be captured? Capturing the name and email address of somebody inquiring about a book or even one purchasing a book is all well and good, but wouldn’t those who signed up after already owning the book be that much more likely to be candidates for future engagement?

So where a publisher has to begin is to gather the names they already have, which are buried in nooks and silos around the company, tag them for where they came from and by the kind of “permission” to use them that exists, and work out how to add the additional contacts made with those people, especially including all transaction data, to the database.

In the next post based on Neal Goff’s direct response knowledge, we’ll talk about using the names, including how to act on Neal’s point that many things are “testable”, and that every customer outreach presents a valuable opportunity to test something. And we’ll explain why even though sending email is “free”, mailing to your free list too often or with bad execution can actually cost you money.

Here’s an unrelated postscript. We’re putting together a database of enhanced ebooks because we think the world needs one (at least temporarily.) Our newest teammate, Chesalon Piccione, has been doing the work on this and has posted on the E2BU blog about her efforts and what she’s learning by looking at the aggregation. It will take us a little while to wrestle the database itself into something postable, but we’re working on it. In the meantime, if you’ve got an enhanced ebook project, send Chess an email ([email protected]) and let her know so she can include it. A list of the data points we need is in the linked post.

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