The Book Marketer’s E-commerce Checklist by Denny Hatch

Posted by a TeleRead Contributor on March 14th, 2010

ecommerce.jpgAfter attending several sessions on e-books and e-readers at the Publishing Business Conference and Expo, I came away with the following:

* A paradigm shift is under way.

* Book publishers—accustomed to promoting to middlemen middle-persons (retailers, wholesalers, librarians)—are now able to reach end-users and are desperate figure out how to “satisfy their needs.”

* Marketing is not about satisfying needs. It is about creating wants.

* “I had forgotten what my professor Frank Knight used to say, that what people wanted was not the satisfaction of their wants, but better wants.”
—Herbert Stein Economist, adviser to presidents and father of Ben Stein

* What book publishers must do right now is get up to speed on old-fashioned Direct Marketing 101.

* I would guess one question that exists: do you want the prospect to order direct from you—thus bypassing amazon.com and retail stores? Or are your e-efforts purely informational?

* If you do not receive the order directly, it is impossible to track the success—or lack of it—back to your lists and promotional efforts.Assuming e-customers respond to e-marketing efforts—and assuming you are fulfilling product—here is a basic checklist:

1. Is the subject line of your e-mail no more than 35-40 characters max?
___Yes ___ No

2. Is the subject line of your e-mail a grabber—irresistible?
___Yes ___ No

3. Will your subject line get past spam filters?
___Yes ___ No

4. Is your e-mail message short and so compelling that it gives the prospect no reason not to click through to learn more?
___Yes ___ No

5. When the response link is clicked on, is the prospect taken to a special satellite page that directly relates to the specific offer just seen—as opposed to your general homepage?
___Yes ___ No

6. Remembering that you’re one click from oblivion, is your landing page powerful, to the point, easy to navigate, and not wordy or boring?
___Yes ___ No

7. Does your copy employ at least one of the following 7 Key Copy Drivers (and preferably several)—the emotional hot buttons that make people act?
Fear – Greed – Guilt – Anger – Exclusivity – Salvation – Flattery
___Yes ___ No

8. Does your copy contain some or all of the 13 most powerful and evocative words in the English language?
You – Save – Money – Guarantee – Love – Results – Proven –
Safety – Easy – New – Health – Discovery – Free
___Yes ___ No

9. Since “you” is the subject of every sales effort, is your promotion about “you” (the prospect)—as opposed to “we,” “us” or “our?”
___Yes ___ No

10. “Probably well over half our buying choices are based on emotion.” —Jack Maxson

“When emotion and reason come into conflict, emotion always wins.” —John J. Flieder

Is your sales pitch emotional (rather than analytical and rational)?
___Yes ___ No

11. “The prospect doesn’t give a damn about you or your company. All that matters is, ‘What’s in it for me?’ “—Bob Hacker

“People want quarter-inch holes, not quarter-inch drills.”
—MBA Magazine

Are you emphasizing the product, author and benefits and what they will do for the prospect, rather than yourself and your company?
___Yes ___ No

12. “Your job is to sell, not entertain.” —Jack Maxson

“Cute and clever simply don’t work.” —Nigel Rowe

Is your presentation cute, clever and entertaining?
___Yes ___ No

13. Is you e-mail letter effort signed by a real person with a real phone number and e-mail address in case the prospect has a question?
___Yes ___ No

14. Do you include reviews and/or testimonials from happy readers?
___Yes ___ No

15. Do you make an offer?
___Yes ___ No

16. “The right offer should be so attractive that only a lunatic would say ‘no.’ ” —Claude Hopkins

“If you want to dramatically increase your results, dramatically improve your offer.” —Axel Andersson

Is your offer is the very strongest one you can field (e.g., free shipping, pre-pub price, buy-2-get-one-free or a combination)?
___Yes ___ No

17. Does the order link and 800-number appear in numerous places—maybe at the bottom of every page—so the reader can act the moment the urge strikes rather than having to hunt around?
___Yes ___ No

18. Is your offer so simple an idiot can understand it?
___Yes ___ No

19. Do you make it easy to order?
___Yes ___ No

20. Has your paranoid legal department destroyed the flow of the argument with disclaimers, footnotes and other deal killers in gray sans serif mousetype and/or a bunch of the following in superscript: * ‡ © 1 2 3?
___Yes ___ No

21. Before going live, have you handed your promotion off to a half dozen strangers—who have no skin in the game—to make sure the whole thing makes sense, tracks and the ordering mechanism is smooth and easy?
___Yes ___ No

22. Before going live, have you verified that the e-links and the 800-numbers are correct and working?
___Yes ___ No

23. Can customers respond in the manner most convenient to them: mail, phone, fax or e-mail?
___Yes ___ No

24. Will the phone be answered no later than the second ring?
___Yes ___ No

25. Will everyone that answers the phone or receives an e-mail order be expecting the contact and have a working knowledge of the product so that questions can be answered?
?

26. Did you provide the customer service (or order intake) folks with copies of offer(s), so they know what specific offer/product the caller talking about—as well as actual product samples, so they can answer questions on the phone or via e-mail?
___Yes ___ No

27. Do you have a fail-safe system in place that enables you to measure responses by source and determine return on investment (ROI)?
___Yes ___ No

28. “The sale begins when the customer says ‘yes.’ ” —Bill Christensen

Does your fulfillment or follow-up message resell the product and reassure the customer that buying it from you was a really smart decision?
___Yes ___ No

30. If the promotional effort is successful, can you turn on a dime and roll out with it immediately to new prospects?
___Yes ___ No

—Denny Hatch
dennyhatch.com
BusinessCommonSense.com

Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. Digg Slashdot Facebook Twitter del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati NewsVine LinkedIn MySpace Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter Netvibes PDF


Jason Epstein looks into the future of publishing

Posted by Chris Meadows on March 14th, 2010

Jason Epstein, who was interviewed by NPR for the e-book pricing story we mentioned yesterday, also has a fairly lengthy editorial printed in the New York Review of Books this week in which he looks back to the birth of the printing press, and ahead to digitization’s replacement of its fruits.

(I discovered only after writing this piece that Paul also mentioned Epstein’s editorial back in February, even though it has a date of March 11th. Time travel? But my piece is much longer than Paul’s was, so I’m posting it anyway.)

In digitization, Epstein sees both a blessing and a curse. It will be possible for anyone to become a publisher, “and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping". Publishers will have “imprints” in this digital world, the way they have brand names in bookstores today.

Solitary Creation vs. Collaboration

I find it interesting that Epstein sees literary creation, even in a networked world, as strictly a solitary activity:

The difficult, solitary work of literary creation, however, demands rare individual talent and in fiction is almost never collaborative. Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them. Until it is ready to be shown to a trusted friend or editor, a writer’s work in progress is intensely private. Dickens and Melville wrote in solitude on paper with pens; except for their use of typewriters and computers so have the hundreds of authors I have worked with over many years.

I, on the other hand, have participated in writing any number of stories collaboratively—either by working solo in a shared world, or by working together with other writers in shared-workspace editors such as EtherPad.

Epstein should be paying more attention to the on-line writing community that has been going on at least since the mid-to-late 1980s (as covered in my “Paleo E-books” series) because that is where the first signs of innovation in form can be found—writers adapting to the difference in form between the Internet and printed works. We were writing Superguy stories decades before Elizabeth Bear and friends came up with Shadow Unit using a very similar writing formula.

Piracy-Proof Revenue Models for Authors?

Further down in the article, past a discussion of how the business aspects of publishing might change without the overhead of printing facilities acting as a gatekeeper, Epstein addresses the matter of piracy:

Some musicians make up for lost royalties by giving concerts, selling T-shirts, or accompanying commercials. For authors there is no equivalent solution. Refinements of today’s digital rights management software, designed to block file sharing, will be an ongoing contest with file sharers who evade payment for themselves and their friends, often in the perverse belief that "content wants to be free"—much as antiviral software is engaged in a continuing contest with hackers. Unauthorized file sharing will be a problem but not in my opinion a serious one, perhaps at the level that libraries and individual readers have always shared books with others.

I personally think that the matter of finding a way to “make up for lost royalties” is just a matter of looking and trying different models. Sure, a writer can’t give a “concert”, but there are other things he could try.

For example, the “Storyteller’s Bowl” model used by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller grossed $30,000 for Fledgling and $27,500 for Saltation (1,200 and 1,100 subscriber copies sold, respectively, at $25 each). Even if the books hadn’t been picked up by Baen, and Lee and Miller had to pay for editing, printing, and shipping the books themselves, there would probably have been a respectable amount left over.

And Lee and Miller have also started auctioning off the original marked-up manuscripts for some of their books, serving the dual purpose of getting them a little extra cash and getting those big piles of paper out of their house.

For that matter, maybe some writers could sell T-shirts, or other custom merchandise. Or go on a lecture tour. Who knows? I’m sure other models are out there. It’s just a matter of looking.

Backlist and the Long Tail

A really interesting part comes later in the article where Epstein talks about the economic factors that led to the decline in bookstores and the subsequent erosion of the backlist. Suddenly stores needed to turn over their inventory as rapidly as possible, and as a result publishers dropped more and more older titles that were still selling, but not selling quickly enough.

In the mid-1980s, Epstein says, he launched a catalog store offering 40,000 backlist titles by mail order, but overhead was just too high to make a go of it. It wasn’t until the expansion of the Internet and the growth of Amazon.com that it became feasible for stores to expand to cover the entire backlist.

With digitization, the out-of-print backlist may become entirely a thing of the past, as there will never be a reason for an e-book to be unavailable as long as people want to buy it. Though Epstein does not use the term, what he is describing is the “long tail” effect—since there is virtually no overhead associated with keeping old e-books available, the random occasional sales of thousands of books will add up to a tidy sum in aggregate.

Conclusion

In the end, Epstein thinks that inexpensive multipurpose devices will expand e-books’ share of the book market, and might even lead to new forms of literary expression. He is doubtful that multimedia extras will catch on, though—reading is too focused an activity for most readers to want to deal with such distractions.

This is a very interesting article, and there is certainly more in it than I have had time to discuss.

Related: We covered another look into the future by Jason Epstein back in 2004, but the linked article is now behind a paywall. We also mentioned Epstein’s theory about the decline of the bookstore and backlist in 2006.

Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. Digg Slashdot Facebook Twitter del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati NewsVine LinkedIn MySpace Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter Netvibes PDF


French piracy increases after three strikes law

Posted by Paul Biba on March 14th, 2010

strike.jpgA study published by the University of Rennes shows that the critics of the three strikes law were right. Instead of the threat of disconnection deterring pirates, the incidence of piracy actually increased 3%.

Additionally, researchers found that half of all the P2P users who downloaded copyrighted music also buy digital music and videos online. This means that if they were disconnected as a result of the new law than music and video sellers would, in fact, loose paying customers!

You can find more information about the report here.

Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. Digg Slashdot Facebook Twitter del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati NewsVine LinkedIn MySpace Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter Netvibes PDF

Last Week’s DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-03-14

Posted by Charles Bailey on March 14th, 2010
Related Posts
  1. Last Week’s DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-03-07
  2. Last Week’s DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-02-28
  3. Last Week’s DigitalKoans Tweets 2010-02-21

La couverture survivra-t-elle au livre papier?

Posted by Clément M. on March 14th, 2010


Hubert Guillaud nous gratifie sur son blog d’un article dédié aux couvertures de livres. Il part du constat qu’elles sont les parents pauvres du livre numérisé, bien souvent oubliées ou mal optimisées. Les readers actuels ne rendent pas justices à leurs nuances, oublient la couleur et estompent parfois leurs détails. Pourtant, toutes ses couvertures sont nées en numérique ! Paradoxalement, le support numérique final n’est pas encore à la hauteur.

Est-ce que l’arrivée des tablettes multimédias, avec un écran couleur de qualité, rendra enfin justice aux couvertures? Tout dépend du logiciel, car si l’on pense à l’iPad, certains logiciels qui existent pour l’iPhone oublient tout simplement d’en afficher une. Si ces programmes viennent à être adaptés pour la tablette d’Apple, espérons que les couvertures auront une place, comme sur iBooks.

Il ne faudra pas s’arrêter là. On peut déjà imaginer des couvertures animées qui permettront d’accéder aux “menus” du livre (table des matières, préface, index etc.) de manière interactive et originale, afin que cet espace de créativité ne disparaisse pas.

Partager cet article : Twitter Facebook Digg del.icio.us Wikio Netvibes email Print PDF

Découvrir ePagine

Posted by Hervé Bienvault on March 13th, 2010
Logo A noter l'entretien avec Stéphane Michalon (ePagine) sur Littexpress. Quand les libraires passent au livre numérique...

Asus DR-900 en présentation

Posted by Hervé Bienvault on March 13th, 2010

Un lecteur très attendu dans les mois qui viennent c'est le modèle DR-900 chez Asus. Un grand format 9 pouces qui va bénéficier du vaste réseau de distribution de la marque. Sortie prévue à la rentrée de septembre (via eBouquin merci).

Energy Book 1060 sur Rue du Commerce

Posted by Hervé Bienvault on March 13th, 2010
ENERGY-BOOK-1060 Le lecteur 6 pouces Energy Book 1060 distribué par la société espagnole Energy Sistem vient d'apparaître en France sur le site Rue du Commerce au prix de 249€. Le premier d'une série de trois lecteurs. A noter la garantie sur trois ans et la mémoire de 2GB. Attention, je ne vois nulle part que ce lecteur est compatible avec la DRM Adobe; je viens de demander au fabricant, je relaierais.

Quick Notes: Que enqueued, iPad, Playboy, DRM, Ebert, and more

Posted by Chris Meadows on March 13th, 2010

Plastic Logic has announced it is delaying the Que for several more months. As CNet points out, with the advent of the iPad this may be a product whose time has already come and gone. It is hard to see paying $649 for a black-and-white-only reader, no matter how big it is, given that the iPad starts at $499.

Speaking of the iPad, from order numbers it was estimated that it sold 50,000 units in just the first two hours of its presale period yesterday. Not a big surprise that people are anxious to get their hands on it.

Meanwhile, Gizmodo has a pair of opposing articles on why you should or should not buy an iPad now. Amusingly, the “should not” article was written by someone who did pre-order, and the “should” article was written by someone who did not. Devil’s advocacy, anyone?

A number of magazines have made electronic archives available on-line, but not many have put them in a computer game. But that’s about to change, at least for Playboy Magazine. Fellow NAPCO blog GamerTell reports that the game Mafia II , set in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, is going to feature period issues of Playboy (or at least the covers and centerfolds from them) as in-game collectable items. Presumably this game is going for a “mature” rating…

Valve’s Gabe Newell won the Pioneer Award at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards this year, and he gave a slide show presentation on the drawbacks of DRM. The audience was reportedly quite pleased.

“One thing that you hear [Valve] talk a lot about is entertainment as a service, it’s an attitude that says ‘what have I done for my customers today?’” he said. “It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get into that mindset it helps you avoid things like some of the Digital Rights Management problems that actually make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them.”

When it comes to monetizing web content, you might not immediately think of film critic Roger Ebert, but it turns out he has developed an interesting “value added” membership program for his website. All it costs is $5 per year (though until April 1, you can get the special introductory rate of $4.99). Ebert is not charging for content that used to be free, but providing some member-only “perks” that are well worth the $5. Reportedly, he has “a few thousand” members so far.

Another media organization is pondering a paywall. This time it’s ABC News, according to an interview with PaidContent.org. Paul Slavin, the SVP of ABC News Digital, says that they are working on developing a strategy, and they hope to have some preliminary ideas figured out by June.

The FCC is asking consumers to test their broadband speed, entering their home address at the same time so that the FCC can correlate the information with location to help them determine what areas need the most attention for the national broadband plan they are considering. Some people think the testing methodology may be suspect, but the FCC has clarified it will be combining the results with other information to get a clearer picture.

Digg us. Slashdot us. Facebook us. Twitter us. Share the news. Digg Slashdot Facebook Twitter del.icio.us Reddit StumbleUpon Technorati NewsVine LinkedIn MySpace Suggest to Techmeme via Twitter Netvibes PDF