Word got around Twitter pretty fast about about an exciting event at London Book Fair (#LBF09) run by the Society of Young Publishers: Canon Tales. See an excellent video on it here. We were impressed with the event’s positive vibe in the middle of what can feel like a never-ending avalanche of bad news. Our own @dberthiaume thought we in the U.S. could do with a similar event at BEA: turning up the volume on what excites the most forward-thinking people in the industry. She brought up the idea with two rising stars, Ryan Chapman and Ami Greko, and they ran with it. They made the calls. We turned on the cameras. And the result left us all feeling like books have a bright future indeed.
Category Archives: Currents
Taking the Industry’s Temperature at BEA
Book Expo America is the publishing world’s most important single event of the year. It’s also the single best place to explore the industry’s hopes, fears, challenges, and promise. We talked with people from big houses, innovative independents, indie booksellers, bloggers, and all corners of the business. Here’s a video report we made from those conversations, produced together with IKA Collective (and with a soundtrack provided by Sound Hound). Was BEA 09 “The death march of the industry” or “An incredible rush”? Maybe it was both. But we left feeling like it was one of the most energized and interesting BEAs in memory.
Mobile comes of age
After years of hearing about mobile’s future potential, the market is now fully available to both consumers and advertisers. We have several plans in place to run on relevant apps within the iPhone and Blackberry environments. Because the marketplace for ads has not yet caught up to new consumer habits, it is now possible to gain significant Share Of Voice (SOV) with, for example, the New York Times’ popular iPhone and Blackberry apps. As advertising catches up with these new habits, we expect the costs to rise dramatically to gain this level of SOV. But now is a great time to reach these high income, plugged-in, book-buying audiences for budgets that work for even mid-list titles.
Looking forward, the devices will change, the media will transform, unit size and availability will continue to shift. But whether we’re using Facebook, Twitter, the next mobile device or simply “old-fashioned” flash ads, any marketing strategy must be highly targeted to the most engaged reader pool possible. As the tools evolve, our commitment remains single-pointed: to reach and develop readers, book by book.
Reaching readers through social networks
We know book readers are online, but where can we find them? The first place to look is on the major social networks, particularly Facebook. As reported in the May 18 New York Times, Nielsen confirmed that “Internet use for ‘short-tail’ sites with large audience reach has evolved since 2003. The change is from portal-oriented sites…to social networks.”
Facebook v. MySpace
While social networks were defined for a time by MySpace, American audiences—particularly the audience most likely to purchase a book—have gravitated primarily to Facebook. Despite its recent tailspin, MySpace remains a vibrant network for users interested in music. But for nearly every other category of interest, Facebook is now number one.
In the last six months alone, Facebook has grown from 50 million active U.S. users to 55 million and gains more everyday. Importantly for publishers, the fastest growing demographic is age 35+. It’s now even bigger than the 18-24 age bracket.
Advertising on Facebook, however, can be a challenge. By design, Facebook hampers our ability to deliver premium ad content and determine relevant location, pushing ads off to the side in an unobtrusive column with a small, single, static .jpg for art and limited room for copy. Facebook’s ability to micro-target means that ads do perform reasonably well on the network—in line with most online CTRs of .1-.12%–but certainly not as well as they could given the network’s ideal demo for readers.
Facebook Applications
Verso Digital currently recommends running campaigns on Facebook apps instead of on Facebook itself. Apps keep users within the FB environment and have all the advantages of Facebook—viral connectivity, ease of use, user engagement, and micro-interest ad targeting. But apps offer several unique advantages, including a pool of highly engaged users (and thus increased potential for viral outreach), greater creative flexibility (including flash and video-enabled rich media), and superior adjacency to relevant content. Recent campaigns have shown not only a significantly higher CTR with Facebook apps than with FB itself, but also an even more potentially powerful viral component. One of the most prominent examples of this viral potential is the “Visual Bookshelf” app: every time a reader puts a book on his or her “Visual Bookshelf” or writes a review, that message goes out to all of his or her Facebook Friends—120 on average. That’s a lot of value for each action taken. And it suggests another kind of answer for publishers and authors to the problem of shrinking book reviews. Neither blogs, GoodReads, or Facebook alone will answer the fill the gap left by disappearing print book review publications. But each represents another strand in the fabric of how readers are making new decisions about what to read next.
New Bowker data on building book audiences through digital media
While book publishing faces its greatest challenges in decades, new Verso Digital initiatives aim to do more than simply gain market share in a declining market. Our goal is to grow readership by reaching out to each book’s interest-group in targeted, measurable ways across multiple digital platforms.
As readers’ attention shifts from print to digital media, the old ways of reaching potential readers no longer work as well as they have in the past. This migration of attention, coupled with declining foot traffic in brick-and-mortar bookstores, makes it imperative that we reach potential book buyers where they are most active and engaged with their subject matter.
The latest data from RR Bowker confirms that this migration has already occurred. For the first time, average hours spent online has recently passed hours spent watching TV. Consumers are increasingly learning about books online.
This shift means that book marketing needs to move from a mass mindset to a niche one. When ads are broadcast across mass channels such as national print newspapers, radio and TV, the ads need to speak as broadly and loudly as possible. But ads can no longer be merely disruptive plays for attention. With micro-targeting now possible across a multitude of devices, advertising should be considered a service rendered to particular, interested readers, not a blanket message aimed at them. That’s why we created Verso Reader Channels–to target a reader pre-disposed toward a particular book’s subject, when and where he or she is interested in learning about it. Doing so not only increases our chances of converting attention to a “buy,” but also increases the chance of the message spreading virally across networks of like-minded readers.
Verso Reader Channels Partner with Book: The Sequel
This year’s BEA was thrilling like a reverse roller coaster ride. Instead of the rush that comes from plunging from a coaster’s heights, this year’s show began in the trenches but quickly launched upwards through exciting conversations started in the aisles, over cocktails (especially at the Verso-sponsored BEATweetup), and among the terrifically diverse and focused information panels—including the inspiring 7x20x21 panel sparked by our own @DBerthiaume and turned into reality by Macmillan’s dynamic online marketing duo of Ryan Chapman and Ami Greko.
Have You Earned Your Media Today?
“All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.”
–Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunas”
For marketing departments, all the new thinking is about “earned media,” which means social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For publishers this resembles all the old thinking about “earned media,” meaning book reviews. The old saw is ads don’t sell books, reviews do. Of course, ads and reviews in fact support each other—they’re not mutually exclusive—but that idea never gained much traction in traditional publishing circles. (Even though the most commercially successful books tend to be those with bigger ad budgets and no review coverage; but I digress…)
However you stand on ads versus reviews, the old saw doesn’t cut it anymore because major book review pages are declining precipitously. Publishers Lunch reports that review coverage from 1st quarter 2008 to 1st quarter 2009 fell 14%. Further, 2009 review coverage is down 18% compared to 2005, and 24% compared to 2004. At the same time that books are losing exposure in major print media, ad budgets are naturally getting slashed. In this environment, online advertising makes a lot of sense. You can target customers in new ways, and even build new audiences by targeting vertically by interest. Ad networks like the Verso Reader Channels make this easy to do for a small investment.
Social media is a crucial piece of any online marketing plan. It is beyond its “inflection point;” sites like Facebook are now part of the fabric of our daily interactions. Facebook already has 55 million active users in the U.S. alone, and more every day. Most importantly to book publishers, the fastest growing FB demographic is age 30+. In just the last two months, the largest demographic over all has become 35+, taking over from 18-34. So it’s very important that authors and titles have presence on some kind of social media –especially Facebook and/or Twitter. Similarly important for selling books, the highest indexing group on Twitter is now the 45-54 demographic—that’s the demo we need to sell $35 hardcovers.
So we agree with the talk at last week’s Ad Age conference about the importance of social media. But we disagree about the terms. Continue reading
Fascinating New Yorker Piece on the Power of Advertising in Hard Times
It seems Kellogg’s only became the leading cereal maker during the Great Depression, when they outspent Post on R&D and advertising.
Context Matters — New Research on Display Ad Effectiveness
Paid Content reports that a new UK study shows how “specialist sites are more effective than general-interest sites for ad delivery.”
73% of specialist site users say they pay attention to ads on those sites. But the news is much different for “large” websites, where just 12 percent of visitors often look at ads.
While the report does not speculate on the reason for this difference, the meaning is clear. Display ads still work… if you run them in the right places. As specialist sites rise in importance for every interest from politics to crafting, military history to romance and more, the idea of “mass marketing” becomes less important than reaching the right aggregation of niche sites. As Jeff Jarvis argues in his book, What Would Google Do?, “The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches.”
From the Wacky World of Broadcast
Verso’s broadcast buying partners, ever on the prowl for great opportunities and bargains, have provided us with a good overview of the current state of radio and TV:
First and foremost: if you think you can’t afford it, you might very well be wrong! Some of the highest rated shows are willing to come way down from their sky-high prices. This is not to say that you’re going to get on the Superbowl for $10,000, but the bargains are out there and if there’s a program that you think might be perfect for your next big book, it never hurts to ask. Radio and TV alike.
Secondly: timing is important. We have recently taken advantage of huge discounts that were offered to us for national spots on the Today Show and Evening News. Remember: it’s all about supply and demand.
Just in case you were wondering: reality shows and awards shows still top the ratings in Network Programming (we’re looking at the week of 2/2/09). On cable, TNT’s The Closer is rated #1, but USA continues to dominate the Top 10 with Wrestling, Burn Notice and NCIS.