The last post here, where I suggested that publishers should reconsider how they handle first serials, begs a number of follow-up questions. Two people commenting on the post raised the concern that HarperCollins wouldn’t have been able to handle the traffic the “Go Set A Watchman” excerpt would generate. My IT advisors say that is actually a trivial concern. In fact, if News Corp has the capacity in any of its businesses, that capacity could have been “lent” to HarperCollins for the purpose. Or it could have been leased from someplace outside. All it would take is a modicum of advance notice.
But if the challenge of getting the necessary bandwidth is really a trivial one, it is a bit more complicated to come up with a strategy that addresses this new reality. It is fine and dandy to know you’ll “self-publish” book excerpts and drive links and traffic to them to get visibility for the books and engagement with their audiences, but those are tactics, not strategies, and they need to live within a bigger context.
Here’s the overall point. Any business that makes money by selling content must have a direct marketing component to their strategy. For some, including trade book publishers, that should be about having marketing platforms that they own and control, not primarily about controlling the sales transactions. But content can be used to foster audience engagement and the set of engaged potential customers that can be generated is an asset that will become a necessary component of every publisher’s toolkit.
This post is essentially about creating verticals. It should be emphasized that verticals are not an “all or nothing” proposition. You can build out audience-centric interest to highly varying degrees and gain benefits even with an effort as small as where these suggestions start: a landing page.
With that in mind, here’s a battle plan every large publisher should adopt. The strategic approach suggested here can be configured to work for fiction, but it is best to start with non-fiction topics.
1. Look at every topic, subject, or category for which the house has 20 or more backlist titles and which define audiences to which you intend to publish in the future. Identify all the relevant titles you have for each audience. (Here is a hint that no publisher should need: ask your special sales department.)
2. Select three-to-five categories to start. Make your choices based on which ones have the most active backlists and/or the most new titles being planned. The more focused you can be, the better. That is, “baseball history” is better than “sports history”; “knitting” is better than “crafts”; “adventure travel” is better than “travel”. Everything we will suggest will work best if you have a “tentpole”: a title or author that is very famous and popular so definitely include any categories for which that is true for you.
3. Create landing pages for each of those categories under the publisher domain. So those pages would be called something like “publisher.com/baseballhistory” (which doesn’t exist). We’re recommending this approach initially to exploit (and over time to build) the domain authority of the publisher site, which will be reflected in better SEO for each component and, in fact, for everything the publisher posts.
4. While the “landing page” will contain links to all the relevant books that led to its creation, it is best to have rich and unique title-specific copy created specifically for that page, rather than the “canned” marketing copy that already exists. Aiming the copy at people who probably found the landing page through a search will work better both for SEO and to better engage those who come to it.
5. The excerpts offered for each book should not be “first chapters”. Those already live all over the web. Duplicated content is bad for everybody’s SEO. Different excerpts should be posted for this mini-vertical. And every time you post an excerpt to the vertical, promoting that excerpt through press contacts and social media effectively promotes the entire little enterprise.
6. Authors should be offered the opportunity to post relevant content here, to promote themselves.
7. The appeal and power of the mini-vertical will be enhanced if relevant books from other publishers are included as well. This is not necessary but it would add value.
8. Each mini-vertical needs an “editor-in-chief” who will post something relevant on a regular (weekly) basis. But one EIC could handle several of these sites. Certainly one person can handle the 3-to-5 we suggest as the starting group.
9. The mini-vertical landing pages will develop their own SEO juice over time, in direct proportion to how much new content is posted — which can be a lot if there are lots of new books from which to post excerpts, let alone author Q&As or promo videos or other material — and how much what is posted is promoted, which generates inbound links.
10. The point to this whole exercise is engagement. The site EIC should respond to all queries and comments. If excerpts are offered frequently, signing up for free subscriptions to that content should be enabled. Purchasing should be made as easy as possible, preferably with links to all of the top retail vendors. (Offering a direct purchase from the publisher is the least important sales option.)
Starting and managing a handful of these mini-verticals should be quite doable for less than six figures, a trivial investment for any publisher doing $50 million or more in sales and a manageable one for publishers doing much less than that. At the very least, the publisher who does this will build a network of engaged consumers that can be reached for nearly zero incremental cost, reducing marketing spending and multiplying marketing efficiency for new books far into the future. The publisher’s “domain authority” will be substantially enhanced, adding SEO juice and audience for every piece of content they ever post.
But the payoff could actually end up being a site that becomes a world of its own, worth spinning off to its own domain, and capable of being a self-sustaining (or even profitable) business in its own right.
This is a low-risk, high-reward strategy. Some publishers are already pursuing a variant of it. Any publisher without the capabilities it can deliver will increasingly be challenged to be competitive with those who have it.
I don’t mean to imply that there is no “content marketing” among publishers today. The Content Marketing Institute did a profile on Rodale which, being a vertical publisher, has a more obvious path to thinking this way. But Simon & Schuster has vertical sites — TipsOnHealthyLiving.com and TipsOnLifeandLove.com — and has tried others. Peter McCarthy was in on the building of a number of verticals at Random House. And the genre fiction publishers — perhaps, most notably, Tor — have really tried to talk directly to their readers. But the opportunities to build marketing platforms for publishers that have access to content and to self-interested author labor have hardly begun to be explored.