Seth Godin

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 (cpiccione@idealog.com) 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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What shoved other news aside this morning was the word from Seth Godin that he won’t be publishing books with publishers anymore. This is another early indication that it is going to get harder and harder for trade publishers to sign up books.

It is not the first one. Thriller writer J.A. Konrath discovered the virtues of publishing through Kindle about 16 months ago. With the help of audience-building through his own blog, plus completed manuscripts that the New York publishers didn’t buy, he was pushed into learning how to monetize his own work without a publisher.

Last December, the news was that S&S author Stephen Covey had taken his backlist to ebook publisher Rosetta which had, in turn, made a temporary exclusive deal with Amazon. The motivations, apparently, were a bigger share of the ebook pie and the unique marketing capability Amazon has to really push something direct to appropriate consumers. That deal seemed to be with the original publisher’s explicit consent. (Agent Andrew Wylie recently formed an imprint to do the same thing with a batch of his clients’ backlist apparently without prearranging consent, although no lawsuits have been filed to date.)

At the last BookExpo, one of the leading agents in New York told me he is working hard to learn about self-publishing options because his authors are asking him about it.

Last week, one of the leading publishing consultants to “brands” told me that the 25% standard ebook royalty was pushing her company’s clients to think harder about self-publishing.

And it happens that right now I’m reading a book about my favorite subject (baseball history) called “A Year in Mudville” (about the Mets inaugural season) that was self-published through Smashwords but which, in editorial quality, exceeds many titles I’ve read from established houses. I don’t know whether author David Bagdade didn’t want to bother with the bureaucracy of pitching trade publishers, was rejected by them, or just chose the control and better margins of Smashwords, but Smashwords rather than one of the established players is dividing with the author 70% of the nine bucks I gave iBooks for the purchase

This way lies destruction.

Many years ago, my friend and sometimes colleague Mark Bide and I were talking about threats to the scholarly journal paradigm. For those not familiar with how journals work, it might be an eyebrow-lifter. Universities pay professors’ salaries and encourage them to write peer-reviewed articles. The journals get the articles for free, operate the peer-review and publication process, and then sell the collection of articles back to the university’s library. So the university both pays for the content’s creation and purchases it in its published form. Since the beginning of the web awareness, it has been predicted that disintermediation of journal publishers would occur.

What Mark told me was “watch the level of submissions.” That is, he believes the first sign that journal publishing is in trouble will be if the professors stop sending in their articles. So far, that hasn’t happened (that I’m aware of.)

But it’s going to be happening in trade.

On an email list I read, you can detect the annoyance of publishers who point out that neither Konrath nor Godin would be where they are today if publishers hadn’t invested in them and built their fame. There’s some resentment that neither Konrath nor Godin emphasize this point and, by not doing so, seem to suggest “anybody can do this.” I’m not sure that they’re saying “anybody can”, but it isn’t necessary to push that idea to do real damage to publishers’ futures, because the authors who can do this are among the the ones publishers need the most.

Starting in the 1990s, publishers started to ask “what’s the author’s platform” when they signed up books. In those days, they were asking whether the author had a radio show, a newspaper column, a speaking circuit, or extensive media contacts that could give them a leg up to promote the author’s book. But with the turn of the century and the development of inexpensive websites and blogs, authors were able to build their own platforms. And, lo and behold, they were able to build them faster and better if they had legitimately published books in the marketplace.

Publishers should have remembered the axiom that you should be careful what you wish for. This was, perhaps, the beginning of the unbundling of the publisher’s suite of services to the author. It used to be that the publication of a book was the platform and the publishers’ publicity and marketing efforts worked to capitalize on it. This was all part and parcel of the package: paying an advance; editing and shaping the book; putting it into a distributable (printed and bound) form; getting it known; and, of course, getting it into a store where a customer could buy it.

Publishers still pay advances although they’re doing their best to scale them back. Many don’t provide the same level of editing services that they used to; they often expect more books to be delivered by each of their editors and they also lean to agents they can trust to do a lot of the work of putting a book in shape. Putting it into distributable form isn’t nearly as hard as it used to be and doesn’t require inventory investment if the form is digital. Getting it known is something that Godin very articulately and accurately suggests he can do better himself. He is not alone and authors who can do this are explicitly what publishers are seeking. And getting the content into the customer’s hands is a drastically different proposition in a digital context than it was in the pure print world of 20 years ago, and digital distribution can be done with far less investment and far less organizational muscle.

So there’s less for a publisher to do for an author than there once was. And the publishers sent that signal when they started to focus on the author’s own ability to promote and then, over time, turned that ability into a frequent requirement for publication. If the publisher is going to do less, the author wants to pay less for it. Joe Konrath is very clear about the advantages he sees in getting the lion’s share of the revenue his books generate, rather than a mere author’s royalty.

But, somewhat more ominously, making more money through disintermediation does not appear to be the primary driver for Seth Godin. What Seth seems to be saying is “I want flexibility. I want to use what I write in whatever is the best way to build my overall career, revenues, and audience. I don’t want to be locked into publishers’ schedules and bureaucracy.”

That’s a massive challenge for big trade houses but it will be of increasing importance to big authors, particularly big non-fiction authors. It is much easier for a publisher to provide real value if they’re vertical. On the same mailing list I mentioned above, we got a comment from a biggish independent publisher who claims that the house is finding more and better ways to work with authors and really investing in them. But, we are told, they are all in verticals.

Godin may be a unique case. There are unique aspects to Covey and Konrath too. But it is not comforting for trade publishers to see that authors have alternatives, that as ebook sales rise the viability of the alternatives grows, and that the authors most likely to strike out on their own or look for new partners are those with the strongest existing connections to audiences.

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