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While browsing through a local Borders store I noticed a special shelf in the sports section. The shelf display read "Mike & Mike Picks" and it featured a handful of books, presumably some of the favorites of Greeny and Golic from ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning.
I'm a big fan of the show so I couldn't stop myself from spending a few extra minutes giving these books a good looking over. Then it dawned on me. What a brilliant idea, but why isn't Borders doing more of this?
Why aren't there a couple of shelves in the politics section, say, one for Bill O'Reilly's picks and another for Rush Limbaugh's? How about one in the cooking section with Giada De Laurentiis's favorite books? The possibilities are endless. And just because every one of these celebrities also has a book or two (or more) of their own, don't assume they wouldn't recommend others; after all, Greeny has a book of his own too and yet he's part of the Mike & Mike combo.
The idea isn't just limited to celebrities...it could be built around other brands as well. For example, "Sports Illustrated Picks" for sports books or "Expedia Picks" for travel guides. Again, there are a lot of interesting ways to build this out.
So what's in it for the celeb or the brand? First of all, visibility. It's certainly not a bad thing to have the "Mike & Mike" name in Borders, reminding sports fans of the radio show. Secondly, there are other cross-promotional opportunities. Borders could (and should) feature these "picks" lists on their website, include links to the celeb/brand and insist on reciprocity; after all, it's also good for Borders to get visibility on the Mike & Mike site as well as any others they'd enlist. Finally, if that's what it takes to get some of the big names involved, I think the bookstore should consider giving the celeb/brand a small cut of the transaction, especially if part of the deal calls for that celeb/brand to help promote the Borders name.
I'm curious to see whether this becomes nothing more than a one-time deal limited to Mike & Mike or if Borders will leverage it into a broader promotional vehicle throughout the store.
Normally I wouldn't speculate about something like this, but after hearing a common theme so many times I can't resist... I'm talking about Google's AdWords program and whether it's a good investment.
In the past few weeks I've had three different conversations with three different people from totally different industries and all of them were complaining about the poor ROI from their AdWords campaigns. Only one of these three companies is involved in book publishing, but it was interesting to hear how all three have come to the same conclusion: They're all abandoning any future AdWords campaigns because the click-thru's have been so expensive and the conversion rates are miserable.
My own browsing experience is a reasonable example. I rarely click (maybe 6 times in my whole life) on any of the "sponsored links" in Google search results and I've never bought anything as a result of those clicks. Never.
I wonder how long it will be before someone comes up with a more effective advertising model than this. I realize that Google is making money hand over fist but it sure seems like there are opportunities to build a better mousetrap. I'm hoping that 10 years from now we'll look back and laugh at the simplicity and inefficiency of the current online advertising model.
Literary Video's tagline is "Creating Multimedia Content that Sells Books." I discovered this service last month and exchanged a couple of e-mails with David Woodard, Founder and Creative Director. With the ever increasing importance of video in the publishing world I jumped on the opportunity to do a blog interview with David. Here's what he had to say about Literary Video and what they're up to:
JW: You had been working for a publisher in Nashville for awhile and decided to launch this new business venture, Literary Video. What's your vision for the business and what drove you to create this start-up? DW: Working in book marketing for eight years taught me many things, but one of the most impressive things I learned was that the best salesman for a book is almost always the author. There are exceptions to this, but by in large it is true. That is why when the bigger books release (think John Grisham, for example), these authors pop up in various media like The Today Show, Good Morning America, or even Oprah or People Magazine. No one can sale the story like the author can.
The internet and the proliferation of video online gives publishers and authors new and relatively inexpensive ways to reach their audience. According to USAToday, "Book videos are increasingly common and, publishers say, essential." They are the new book cover.
Literary Video has come into existence to help publishers and authors not only develop multimedia content, but multimedia content that sells books. We feel our background in book publishing and marketing gives our clients an advantage that a generic video production house can't give offer. We not only facilitate the creation of content but help mold the content in a way that sells the project most effectively.
Changes in the marketing structure of the publishing house for whom I had been working gave me a unique opportunity last fall to exercise not only the skills and knowledge I had learned but also the contacts and network I had cultivated the last eight years in the industry. Literary Video was born.
JW: Success here largely depends on how many eyeballs see each video, right? With that in mind, will Literary Video also help show authors how to increase the exposure of their videos? If so, are there any details you can share?
DW: You are right in that like any advertising collateral, impressions are key. A book video is not an end in and of itself, but a part of a greater strategy. However, book video offers a more intimate "experience," and, it has the capacity to become viral. Book videos are marketing by offering content and not interruption.
But just as posting a web site does not guarantee visitors, creating a video doesn’t automatically assume viewers; you have to have a bigger marketing strategy in place. However, there are sites, like YouTube, BookVideos.TV, & ChristianReader.TV that people visit in order to find video content. A compelling video posted to the right places can find an audience. This is where Literary Video becomes not just a content producer, but a partner in distribution strategy as well.
JW: I'm a big fan of widgets and it would seem they would represent a useful vehicle for getting videos out on as many websites as possible. Are you looking to offer widget functionality for Literary Video?
DW: Incorporating video into widgets represents the cutting edge of video distribution. If done right, it not only offers a compelling way to present the video in an easy to use fashion, but also creates a "portable" marketing collateral that can become very effective in viral and grass roots marketing efforts. In other words, if a viewer can forward the widget to someone else, or even take the widget and embed it in their own blog or website, then the widget has become portable. This can also be effective in sales efforts, as book retailers can post these widgets on their e-tailing sites and product pages.
If a client desires to use widgets, Literary Video can develop the content, widget, and help strategize for the most effective use of the widget.
JW: What are the most innovative and interesting elements of some of the better book trailers/teasers that you've been involved with? DW: I can think of three that I thought exploited unique dimensions of books that would have been lost in traditional advertising efforts.
My Go to Bed Book is a charming children’s book in the tradition of Good Night Moon. It was originally published in the 1950s. B&H Publishing Group released a 50th anniversary edition in the fall of 2007. The backstory as to how this edition came to be is in itself a very charming story. We created a mini-documentary telling this story called The Story Behind the Book, as well as an e-Galley for the book.
Squat is novel written by first time novelist Taylor Field. Taylor's personal story as a pastor running a mission in New York's tough lower East Side is the inspiration and backdrop for this novel. Think Rent meets The Passion of the Christ. The colorful world of Manhattan's Alphabet City is a major character of the book itself. Squat Movie is a mini documentary (embedded below), shot on location in the east village with Taylor as our guide, bringing the landscape and the real life people that inspired this tale. Squat Movie was awarded the bronze Telly Award for 2007.
Biblical Barbie is a fun book trailer that emphasizes entertaining content over hard selling. Making fun of stereotypes, the video is just fun, with a soft sell for the book The New Eve at the end. It is viral marketing at its best. We partnered with stop-motion film maker Greg Pope to create book video that entertains first, and sells second.
This INDEX // mb blog post offers some perspective on book ads and how they've lost personality over the years. The key point is that most book ads these days feature the cover and not the author. Actually, now that I think about it, I'll bet I've seen dozens and dozens of book ads in USA Today, BusinessWeek and countless other newspapers and magazines over the past six months...and I can't recall the specifics of a single one.
One of my favorite phrases is "unique and memorable." If something is unique and memorable it's bound to stick with you. I can't tell you the last time I saw a book ad that was unique and memorable.
It's interesting to look at the Paper Cuts blog post INDEX // mb links to as well as the related slide show of 1960's-1970's book ads. The author photos really do add personality to the various ads. I guess that's one of the reasons I've always liked the cover design for our WROX imprint; even though the WROX cover template is consistent from one title to the next, the author photo element helps make each cover that much more unique and memorable.
While dining with the family and waiting for a table at The Cheesecake Factory Saturday night I decided to kill some time in Brookstone's. They had a device on display that really caught my eye. It's called the SportCast Wireless Baseball Scoreboard. It's a simple LCD display that provides up-to-the minute box score and standings information, all received through a satellite feed.
I'm a baseball junkie but even I feel the $99 price tag for this was way too high. I look at something like this and think of what it could become though...
The device's dimensions are ideal for placement on a desk or shelf. Sitting next to your computer you'd have a bit of additional content surface area that could be used for a variety of things. It's also a great size to take with you. I could see them adding a flap that's set up to serve as both the stand and a protective cover.
Why make it more portable? Because I think there's a great opportunity to provide more content. Think of this as a stripped-down Kindle. Thanks to the satellite feed it could receive all sort of additional content. Would I want to read a book on this thing? No, but it would offer a great way to take newspapers, magazines and other short form content on the road, always up-to-date. If there's not enough memory already built in to house the content, just add an SD slot for customers to increase it on their own.
Then there's the advertising component. It would be pretty simple to create an additional revenue stream by including banner ads, for example. They could offer two subscription models: One that's less expensive with ads and an ad-free one that's a bit pricier.
(Speaking of advertising, when we finally got seated at The Cheesecake Factory I noticed that every other page of the menu is an ad for another store in the mall. Pretty smart, especially when you think about the captive audience reading the menu and the fact that they're already at the mall.)
Suddenly that $99 price tag wouldn't seem so expensive, especially if this device could be my gateway to portable content that's priced at the same level as what Amazon charges for the same content on the Kindle. I wouldn't need the sexier eInk technology for this...a simple LCD would do the trick.
I recently got an e-mail message from the PR team at HarperCollins (HC) for Tom Breitling's book Double or Nothing. Although I'm not interested enough in the topic to read the book I have to admit the message got my attention. Why? HC is offering access to the entire book for free on their website till April 14th. So if you really think you can read a 256-page book via HC's Browse Inside service, go for it! Details are on Tom's site and here's the link to HC's Browse Inside access for the book.
The reality is very few people are going to read the entire book online even when the price is zero. Rather, what HC is doing is leveraging their Browse Inside service to see how much of a sales bump they can create by providing full access for a limited period of time. As a fellow publisher, I'm intrigued by the experiment. And thanks to the magic of Bookscan data, I can keep an eye on the sales trends during and after the free access period. My gut tells me they could leave the full access in place indefinitely and it would only help sell more copies in the long run... Regardless, I love it that a major trade publisher like HC is experimenting like this with free access to e-content.
You probably remember that Chris Anderson launched his Long Tail book idea with a feature article in Wired magazine a few years ago. He's at it again with this article called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business. As is the case with everything Chris writes, it's well worth reading. It's also a nice teaser for his next book, simply titled FREE and due out next year. (See the pattern?... ;->)
The article lays out several options on how to leverage "free" in a product mix. Here's my favorite excerpt:
People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line
as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other
price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great
market and none at all.
How true. I can think of plenty of times where I started to sign up for an online service because it seemed free but then I either had to commit a very tiny amount or give my credit card number for charges after the "free" period. I typically abandon the sign-up process at that point, so yes, there's a huge difference between zero and any other price.
I'm curious to see how Anderson's publisher (Hyperion) is going to leverage the obvious angle of "free" for this next book. At the very least I would think they'd take a page out of the Oprah/Orman book and have a limited time free e-book promotion.
There's been a lot of speculation about whether advertising can create a viable revenue model for book publishing. While it may be unlikely that an advertising-only model will work, I tend to believe it could be part of a multi-pronged approach that has potential (more in a moment).
Author Kevin Kelly is dabbling on this front with the latest edition of his True Films book. He's created a PDF version of True Films 3.0 and when you open it with Acrobat version 8.0 you'll see it includes context sensitive advertising from Yahoo. The ads don't seem to have a high level of relevance, perhaps because Yahoo is still building out their system. I also would have thought that the ads would change as you scroll from page to page, assuming you're viewing on a computer with a live Internet connection, of course...but they don't. Again, the model is young and likely to evolve to support this sort of dynamic functionality in the future.
The market for people interested in reading books on a computer screen is probably fairly small, especially for narratives. On the reference side, however, I could see where this model could be very effective. And how about this angle: Should Amazon consider a model like this for Kindle ebooks? Pay one price for the book with no ads but get it for a lower price if you're willing to live with ads on each page; let the customer decide which price and model they prefer. Some customers would be willing to take a risk on an unknown author or an offbeat title if the price is lower, even if that means they have to view some advertising. That's the multi-pronged approach I mentioned at the start of this post, btw.
Silly me. I tried Google AdSense when I launched this blog and was disappointed with the results so I dropped it. I gave it another shot a year later and was making about a dollar a day. Yeah, I know that providing that sort of information is a violation of the AdSense terms and conditions. Not to worry...I got an e-mail from Google today telling me that they've disabled my account. Why? I'll let them tell you. Here's an excerpt from that message:
While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers. Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we've decided to disable your account.
Please understand that we consider this a necessary step to protect the interests of both our advertisers and our other AdSense publishers. We realize the inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.
What a crock! Google won't tell you why you're shut down, so all I can assume is that some knucklehead clicked several times on the same ad, producing an extremely unusual pattern that stood out. After doing some research tonight it's clear that many, many others have been shut down for this sort of thing. (Just do a search on phrases like "AdSense sucks", for example, to see for yourself.)
Gee, so that means you could just walk up to a computer at BestBuy, CompUSA, the Apple store or any other public facility, go to your competitor's website and click on ads like a madman. Poof! You'll knock out their AdSense account. How ridiculous.
I was toying with the idea of removing my AdSense block from this and my other blog, Kindleville; the prime real estate I gave AdSense just didn't seem worthwhile. Google just made that decision for me. Those ads are gone now and I'll never go back to AdSense. I might explore Yahoo and a few other providers, but no more AdSense for me.
P.S. -- It's one thing for Google to arbitrarily shut down an account like this. It's quite another for them to charge their advertising partners for all these clicks but never pay the site owners a penny. I seriously doubt all the clicks since my last payment were rogue. Google billed the advertisers for all those clicks and my cut of the deal was accumulating in my AdSense account. Now Google can simply say "game over" and walk away with all the proceeds from the advertisers. How convenient for them. Gee, I thought Google's mantra was "do no evil."
I've read this post on the Dilbert blog 4 times now and I still don't get it. Seriously. It seems like the sort of story Scott Adams would poke fun at in the always entertaining Dilbert comic strip.
Adams is going to cut back on his blogging activity for a number of reasons. Let's look at them one at a time. First, he's not making much money from advertising. For a guy that must have a pretty sizable annual income from the comic, syndication, books and everything else he's involved in, did he really think he'd get measurably richer from blog advertising? If so, that was a bad assumption.
Second, he says that some readers of his blog are sabotaging his latest book's Amazon reviews because they're afraid Adams will stop giving away future book content on his blog. Is this really an issue given that his daily comic strip is also accessible for free from the Dilbert website? I looked at sales trends for his latest book and they're solid so far. The book also continues to have a very respectable ranking on Amazon, despite these reviews (which still average almost 4 stars overall).
He then talks about his desire to grow his audience via the blog but that one disgruntled reader could post a negative comment and cause others to abandon him. Hey, even if his blog goes away tomorrow that scenario can still play out from his comic strip. One angry reader can comment on any number of blogs, websites or Amazon itself to voice their negativity. I firmly believe the positives of him blogging far, far outweigh any potential negatives, including this one.
It's good to see that he's still adding new pieces about once a day since this post was made. Maybe he'll rethink this and stick with it and remain as active as he's ever been. I've always enjoyed the Dilbert strip and I think it makes tons of sense for him to have a strong, active blogging presence as well.
While browsing through a local Borders store I noticed a special shelf in the sports section. The shelf display read "Mike & Mike Picks" and it featured a handful of books, presumably some of the favorites of Greeny and Golic from ESPN's Mike & Mike in the Morning.
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