Programming Digital Book World and the kind of consulting we do require that we spend a lot of time in our office trying to figure out what the industry should be thinking more about. On that topic, there was this recent post with my thoughts about what should be top-of-mind for publishers these days as well as others laying out topics for next March’s Digital Book World.
A recent DBW agenda planning meeting, which had participation from most of the ten biggest trade publishers, some literary agents, and service providers ranging from marketing services to digital distribution providers, yielded a lode of really interesting ideas that we’re going to act on.
1. One thing that came through loud and clear was big publishing’s interest in hearing how books fit in the greater landscape of digital change. They want to hear from curators of other media and online retailers from other businesses about how they learn about their customers, position a variety of products, and work with search and social media.
2. One participant, whose business provides digital sales data and analytics to a variety of clients, posited that there are four “stages” of behavior that we want to watch around consumer interaction with books. His paradigm is that we want to know:
How they find out about the book
How they purchase the book
How they read, or navigate, the book
How they talk about the book
All of these things are visible in the digital world and this was a helpful frame. In a conversation with my Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy afterwards, we reckoned this could elide a very important component: how you get from “find” to “purchase”. That’s what Pete would call “middle of the funnel” or “in the funnel” activity.
In fact, a great deal of what is important about understanding and influencing customer behavior occurs in the middle of the funnel. One of the tempting fallacies of analyzing digital purchase behavior is “last click attribution” of sales. That is, just because the cash register rang in a particular place doesn’t prove that the customer was sold on the book there. Publishers want to concentrate marketing efforts where the decision is made, not necessarily where the transaction occurs. And, in fact, we’re figuring that as time goes by, more and more ebook readers will buy on the particular platform they most favor regardless of where they learned about the book. So there is a fifth activity — how they get from knowledge to purchase — which could be called “the consideration phase” which needs to be thought about separately. This was a very helpful paradigm for understanding customers that will find its way to the program.
3. A very smart independent publisher in the room said “we need a new industry conversation about apps”. When the iPad first happened, quite a few publishers lost quite a bit of money trying to build and sell ebooks as apps. The merchandising environment was all wrong, including that so many apps are free or cheap. But apps can do things ebooks cannot, and they provide a method for ongoing communication with a user, if they use the app. So I think that publisher is probably right.
4. I brought up a complaint I had picked up from a major publisher in the UK. This CEO thought that getting publishers to cooperate around marketing an author when they shared the author’s output was very hard. But the gang I had in the room for the DBW meeting didn’t agree. Big publishers felt that marketing cooperation when one publisher had part of an author’s list and another had another part was entirely possible. And that it was being done. With the help of agents, we’re going to look for instances of that and try to get a DBW panel put together on it. It begs a lot of “next questions” about ownership and allocation of marketing efforts on the author’s website and the use of mailing lists that might be developed through those marketing efforts.
5. Another topic that came out of the meeting was sparked by a discussion of TBR (to-be-read) lists. As one publisher put it, that used to be the stack of books on your bedside table. We were well aware for a few years that January was a very hot month for ebook sales because people got new devices (often, their first device for ereading) for Christmas and were “loading up” in January. But with fewer and fewer readers — particularly heavy readers — now getting “new devices”, that phenomenon (which one participant identified as a close cousin to the sales growth publishers saw 20 years ago when new big box bookstores were opening regularly: “filling the pipeline”) has perhaps waned, or even ended. Understanding how much of what ebook readers buy they read, how much they have sitting on their devices, and whether what is “bought and not read” tends to be low-priced, are all things that should be find-outable and worth knowing.
6. I’d be a lousy blogger if I didn’t save best — or most proactive — for last (except in the post titling, of course). I told the assembled group that I wanted to do a panel on “the future for indie- and self-publishing.” There was remarkably little interest in the subject from those in the room. One literary agent said, “four years ago, indie publishing had us quaking in our boots. We really wondered whether our whole business model would be upended. We don’t worry about that anymore.” Another said “we counsel our authors about self-publishing, but there is less interest in it and less of a rush to it than there was a couple of years ago.” The publishers were similarly relaxed about whatever “competition” self-publishing offers.
So, from the perspective of the publishing establishment, the whirlwind of change has slowed down, we are in a “new normal” and there is absolutely no shortage of writers pining to be published for the deals the industry is offering and the output from those willing writers continue to deliver sales that keep big trade companies profitable. If self-publishing is constituting some mortal threat to everybody’s existence, that appears less evident today than it did a few years ago. And, of course, every big publisher is set for the next X years (unknown numbers that might be different for every big publisher, but almost certainly three or more for all of them) with their single biggest intermediary relationship since they’ve all just done deals with Amazon. One big variable in their commercial calculus that had been highly problematic in the recent past is now stable for a while into the future.
I’ve been making the case that the trade publishing establishment is not in any danger of disappearing anytime soon but the indie world still seems to harbor a fervent contrary belief, which is completely evident in the comment string of the linked post.
The question, “is indie publishing an imminent threat to the establishment?” is one where there is great but contradicting certainty on the two sides of the debate. It looks like the establishment side has largely lost interest in the discussion. I’d love to see if we could “prove” something at Digital Book World, but with so much of the relevant data entirely within the walls of Amazon, which has no apparent interest in sharing it (nor can I make the case that they should), that might be very hard to do.
We are still very much interested in feedback from readers about the topics for the DBW Conference. Feel free to chime in here. And if you have thoughts to contribute about the program for Publishers Launch Kids, that survey is here. If it would be easier for you to just email suggestions, send them to [email protected].