Every conversation I have with a publisher about digital marketing sitting with Peter McCarthy is an education for me and for them. The dialogues are peeling away layers of an endless onion, working through levels of understanding of what it takes to have truly discoverable content, surfaced to the right people in response to the right queries in whatever venue they search today. (But, as we keep learning, the “best practices” at any particular time are likely to change.)
Of course, we’re learning too. The challenge in “scaling” Pete’s knowledge is to get people in our industry, with their uniquely complex stakeholders and requirements, to be able to buy the services they need him to direct without taking a lot of his very precious time. (If you take his time, we can’t be economical, which we’re trying hard to be.) Our approach is to “productize” our offerings but, of course, our clients and potential clients each have very specific needs by their own lights. The challenge we almost always face is not “whether we can” but “how we can” deliver what they want in a way that works for us and for them. And we keep finding new ways to morph each product idea into another and then another to address those needs. The evolution of our thinking and our business probably provides useful clues for anybody trying to tackle the beast that is digital marketing of books in an evolving marketplace.
Although it is not simple to harness Pete’s knowledge, it would be absolutely impossible to replicate it. He’s read (and understands and remembers) every patent Google has ever filed about search. (Don’t try to start gathering that knowledge now; Pete started it in the 1990s.) He works with a huge number of listening and analytical tools. Some have obvious uses such as analytical and “SEO” tools, but some require a more interpretative approach to apply them to create better marketing. They numbered 140 when we last counted, but he seems to discover a new one or two just about every day. So far, I haven’t met anybody else in publishing who claims knowledge of a fraction of that number. Pete’s knowledge of Amazon’s algorithms and behavior similarly outstrips everybody else’s, understandings partly gained through a capability he had at Random House that nobody else we’ve met has ever had: an unlimited number of affiliate codes that allowed him to track conversion across a wide range of A/B tests and other variables.
(It should be noted that the unlimited number of affililate codes came about through serendipity, not any official negotiations or favoritism. It was not a formal “policy” move on either side.)
Knowing how the clicks you send Amazon convert is beyond very important. As an example of what this can reveal, Amazon loves it if you send them clicks that convert. When they see that happening, they help you. They don’t like it if you send clicks that do not convert and when they see that, they (metaphorically) throw sand in your gears or, at least, don’t put the wind in your sales. The many winds they can make blow happen at what for Pete are predictable kick-points. We don’t have an unlimited number of affiliate codes at Logical Marketing, but we do know that if we’re sending clicks that convert we’ll see Amazon buy keywords to get more of the traffic. If they don’t do that, the clicks aren’t converting and we stop sending them. We have other ways as well to see when the winds are blowing.
How many of our clients know that? We haven’t met one yet that did. That means that virtually every publisher is sometimes paying for clicks that are actually harming their sales. And they don’t even know when that’s happening. And I’d add that Pete himself doesn’t believe this is among the most profound insights he has about optimizing Amazon sales.
We do our work across three loci of interest: titles, authors, and brands. Authors are brands, but so are publishers (B2B, B2C, or both), imprints, and series and, in rarer cases, fictional characters. We can do a quick and cursory look at a title or author, or a deeper and more comprehensive one. For authors and brands, we can do a “360 audit”, which delivers a voluminous (80-100 page) deck, rich with data about how the author reaches their core and potential audiences. They tell you everything from how they sort on dozens and dozens of high-value search terms; their engagement in social media; the precise and thorough characteristics of their followers and, if they have them, “subscribers”; advice about how to optimize their owned web presences in terms of content, architecture and technology; and very specific recommendations to improve their discoverability and their sales.
We will also aim our analyses at any specific questions or concerns a client may have. For example, “how might we break this author in the UK market” or “can we reach and convert women into fans” are questions we can address. We answer based on what the data tells us and provide the degree of granularity and technology/publishing knowledge to act.
For a franchise author, or an author on which a publisher will spend substantially promoting their next book, these reports — costly though they may be ($5,000 and up) — are invaluable tools. They even tell you what days and times to tweet and which cities to choose for heavy print laydowns and tour activity. We’ve had several occasions where these reports confirmed hunches based on experience or a house’s analysis but there are almost always nice surprises too. Those are not always fun to hear when they upset previous plans but they will result in more efficient sales reach if they’re acted upon.
But sometimes an author or agent might be after information or analysis that is easier (and cheaper) to deliver because it is very targeted. One agent friend said to me, “I don’t care about the title descriptions. Doing those right is the publisher’s job and they wouldn’t listen to me if I wrote a better one anyway. But I want my authors to be list-gathering machines. Can you show us how to do that?”
A targeted ask of this kind is much simpler than a 360 audit. We save time and effort when we’re looking for very specific actionable data and then confining our report to just that. We analyzed three of that agency’s top authors, with recommendations about how to improve their web sites for email list optimization, each for much less than half of a full 360.
As we’ve noted before, management of author web presences is a weak spot in author-publisher relations. We just did 360 audits for three different imprints of a major house. In two cases, the authors in question controlled their sites and the suggestions for improvement devolved into discussions of how to persuade the close friend or relative of the author who maintained the presence to make changes. (Having the authority of our very well-designed and thorough report would help, of course.)
In the third case, the house controlled the site. It turned out to be very important that they did. One thing we found in the audit was that this well-known author wasn’t appearing for searches of “best thrillers set in London”. We could see that he very likely could, easily and within short order, rank high for that. We saw that with great likelihood; it wasn’t a guess. With a host of books that fit that description and rankings of 4.5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads, all it would take is a properly set-up landing page to make the author rank highly for the term, and the rank would be deserved in the eyes of Google and humans and likely to be self-perpetuating. That search is not only frequently employed, it would bring in likely customers who might well not yet know the author. It is roughly analogous to an evergreen end-cap with face-out display in just the right aisle for a book they will love by an author whom they probably have not read as yet, and one who happens to have plenty of books.
And setting up an optimized landing page is easy to do.
All you need to do is know that the term is important and that the author isn’t sorting for it and probably can. But only using the methodologies developed and employed by Pete would assure you’d find that out.
Google’s recently reported de-emphasis of Google Plus has led to widespread misunderstanding about Google Plus, but more importantly here, about author websites. One agent friend recently asked whether they just weren’t necessary anymore and if authors could just focus on social media. That’s a dangerous misunderstanding. An author’s website along with an author’s Google Plus account enables Google to understand who an author is and what is important about them. Author websites are as important as they ever were, as is an author’s Google Plus profile. (And it isn’t just about Google. An author’s Amazon author page is critical for their success as well.) Any real-estate in the social landscape is rented, not owned and the leases change all the time.
The wisdom of our agent friend about the publisher’s responsibility to write the descriptive copy has also been reflected in the evolution of our thinking. We have been selling SEO-optimized copy as the key deliverable for our “foundational title audit”. The process to get to it involves research to find the right keywords, phrases, and topics to include in the copy and training our own staff in Pete’s techniques to employ those in the copy itself. We’re optimizing for multiple environments, primarily Google and Amazon, which complicates the task, but we’ve been able to train previously uninitiated people to do this effectively and fairly quickly.
But we’ve seen that most publishers don’t believe that anybody else’s copy is as good as what they’d produce in-house. They’d far rather have us give them the keywords and write the copy themselves. That’s easier for us, and we can do it for less money, but then that requires us to train their team on how to use the keywords, phrases, and topics in the copy.
All that has led us to the latest addition to our offerings. When we started exploring this business nearly a year ago and launched it in the Spring, one Very Smart Publisher said “would you please just teach us how to do it ourselves?” I resisted that idea, partly because of the impossible challenge of replicating Pete’s knowledge and how he uses it in a training course of any length. But as time’s gone by, we realized that we did train our own staff. And Pete did a lot of marketer training at Random House. We have come around to the point of view that training people to do some things actually makes them appreciate even more the things we do that we can’t easily train. It also empowers them to innovate in ways we might not see or to provide feedback to us on what we might offer that we’ve yet to identify.
So we’ve now formulated seven specific training programs. We offer three-hour courses (if delivered in-house, or three 1-hour webinars if remote) called “Audience-centric Marketing 101”, “Author Optimization 101”, and “Advanced Optimization” (with the last one only open to those who have taken the first one). And we have four 1-1/2 hour programs as well: “Social Media for Publishers, Agents, and Authors”, “Supercharge Your Author Website”, “12 Tools for Marketing Success”, and “The 30 Chrome Extensions You Need Now”. The “Marketing 101” course would cover both the keyword research and the instructions on how to place them in the copy.
As a result of Frankfurt, we’re now taking our talents and capabilities to other countries to work in languages other than English. We’re about to start our first assignment for an Italian publisher and we have a big project pending that would take place in German. In both cases, we’re getting help from our clients to make sure that what we find and do in Google Translate and other linguistic processing tools doesn’t have gaps we can’t see and to understand what we have to do to make it totally effective.
The digital marketing business is a global business as is all publishing these days and digital marketing, and the running of a digital marketing agency, is a process, not an event.
At Digital Book World next January 14-15, Pete McCarthy is moderating a panel on “Marketing Skill Sets Required in 2015” with a star panel consisting of Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins, Hannah Harlow of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jeff Dodes of Macmillan, and Rick Joyce of Perseus. There is a host of other marketing programming on the agenda.