How to Book an Online Ad: A Primer to Online Advertising

Savvy marketers know an economic downturn is the best time to advertise. As your competitors scrimp on promotional budgets and ad-supported publications scratch and claw to make sales goals, you can take market share and reach your readers on the cheap.

Print is dead?

Some in publishing have been so bold as to suggest that print advertising (like print) is dead (heresy!), proselytizing that advertisers devote their entire budgets to online advertising. They say things like, “You can track everything online but not in print!” and “Online ads can move, print is static!” and “A newspaper ad is dead tomorrow. For the same price, an online ad can run all month!” They also say things like “No one reads print anymore!” They are dubious company for a book ­publisher. As a cog in a print and online media and events marketing company, I believe that both print and online advertising can work together. Here’s a primer on how to begin advertising online.

Reader safari

Go find your readers’ online digs. If you need some ideas, here are a few to consider:

• There’s a website for everything. In fact, there are probably a few of them. Grab a beer, put on some tunes, and spend an hour or two letting Google guide you through the most promising results for keywords that match your book’s content. Websites offer you lots of individual visitors. They are good for finding new customers in new or existing markets.
• There’s a forum for every topic, too. If there’s one thing Chris Anderson’s long tail theory nailed, it is that the Web brings together the strangest little niches of people. Somewhere online there is a preexisting community interested in your book. “Bulletin boards” or “community forums” were one of the first applications of the Internet. A forum is a website devoted to conversations about a particular interest. Conversations are sorted by specific topics, and any member of the forum can reply to a message or start a new topic or “thread.” Devoted enthusiasts might spend all day browsing a forum (aka “multitasking”). Forums accept advertising, and it’s often cheap. Forums offer you smaller numbers of individual visitors, but lots and lots of opportunities for them to see your ad. They make for good branding.
• Google offers Ad Planner, a service that reveals Web traffic for specific websites or audiences. As part of this function, Ad Planner can suggest websites that specific types of customers visit. For example, if you’re about to publish a book on football, you can load a pre-defined audience called “football fan” and Google will reveal which websites they visit. Many of these will, of course, be mainstream sites like AOL or Yahoo!, but dig deeper and you’ll find niche sites that require less ad budget. You can also build a custom audience using various demographic criteria, or you can type in sites you know are on target for your market and Ad Planner will suggest similar sites.
• Most magazines have a companion website.
• Most events, like trade shows, have a website.
• There’s a trade association for everything under the sun.

Ad formats for your specimen jar

While you’re perusing these websites, pay attention to the ads that are there. What ads get your attention? What positions on the page do those ads occupy? Do those ads run everywhere on the site (“run-of-site”) or in specific departments?

Websites will typically offer a suite of possible ad types and positions. Ads can be banners (something rectangular and horizontal), towers or skyscrapers (rectangular but vertical), boxes or buttons (roughly square), pop-ups (squarish and highly irritating), text ads, or something unique.

Now that you’ve built a list of websites that appeal to your potential reader, let’s get shopping. Look for an “Advertise with us” link or the “media kit.”

Media kits are not really for the media

A media kit is a brochure that contains information about a publication and its readers. A good media kit includes reader demographics, advertising prices (the “rate card”), ­specifications for its ads, an editorial calendar, and good photos of a mountain range or an athlete or a kitchen, or whatever best represents the audience the publication is trying to reach. Download it and read it.

Your website of choice may not have a media kit. “Contact us!” it will say, and it will include fields for your name, email address, phone number, and reason for writing. While your suspicion that no one will ever get back to you is justified, your reason for writing should be this: “I’m interested in advertising on yourwebsite.com. Please email me more information.” If you can, avoid giving your phone number; you want to be well informed before you speak to an ad rep.

The information you’re trying to get from the media kit or the ad rep is this:

• How many people visit the website? (unique visitors)
• How many times are those people likely to see your ad? (page views)
• What’s it gonna cost ya?

Let’s say you’ve got your mitts on a media kit and it’s terribly unhelpful. Let’s pretend it lacks any useful information but pricing. This is both a potential warning sign and an opportunity.

Warning sign: Either you’re dealing with amateurs who don’t want to tip their hand, or you’re dealing with pros who don’t want to tip their hand too soon.

Here is where opportunity knocks…

Every self-respecting website on earth is running some kind of analytics code that tracks how many people are visiting, and it’s probably Google Analytics. Conveniently for you, Google Ad Planner taps into Google Analytics and Google Search data to compile an estimate of total web traffic for many websites. It only takes about 5,000 unique visitors per month to start showing up on Ad Planner’s radar, and let’s be honest—would you really advertise on a site with less traffic? So go snoop about Ad Planner and see how much traffic Google thinks your target website gets. Remember that this is an estimate and is likely to underreport.

Since you know every site has analytics code running, you can ask them for it. In most Web browsers, select “View” and “Source” to see the source code for any Web page you visit. Scroll to the bottom and look for “google-analytics.com” in the code. There are other analytics providers, too (Webtrends, StatCounter, ecommStats), so if you don’t see that code, don’t despair. Find an ad rep on the website. If no rep is listed, try the publisher. Email them something like this: “I’ve reviewed your media kit, and I don’t see much information on Web traffic. I see that you’re running Google Analytics. Would you please send me last month’s visitor report?” You’ll be surprised how many websites are willing to do this.

Haggle like a camel trader

In the best-case scenario, you’re now familiar with the website, its readers, ad positions and sizes, pricing, and traffic. It’s time to get down to nickels and dimes: what’s this ad gonna cost ya? After all, if all the great things the Web offers are free, advertisers must be paying out the nose, right? The Web, in all its customizable glory, has many pricing schemes. The most common are:

• CPM (cost per mille or cost per impression): You pay X dollars per 1,000 impressions. Ad reps may spin CPM as “per 1,000 people that see your ad,” but that’s untrue. Just because your ad loads into a browser doesn’t mean the website visitor saw it. And just because your ad loaded 1,000 times doesn’t mean 1,000 unique visitors did the loading. CPM pricing is most common on highly visited websites.
• CPC (cost per click): You pay X amount per clickthrough. There is usually no limit on the number of impressions. Google’s AdWords program uses a version of CPC pricing.
• Flat rate: You pay X amount for your ad to run for X period of time. You get as many impressions and clickthroughs as you get. Flat-rate pricing is more common in forums and some lower-traffic websites and it’s typically first-come, first-served.

Since it’s easy for competing companies to act as an ­advertiser/imposter online and since online ad prices can fluctuate wildly, some companies are secretive about rates. If they weren’t readily available in the media kit, ad reps will eventually relent once you’ve demonstrated the necessary interest. It might, unfortunately, require a phone call.

Don’t feel that because online advertising is trackable that the ad rates are nonnegotiable. It’s true that online advertising seems less negotiable than print advertising, which has a notorious reputation for infidelity to the rate card, but ad reps have two ways they can meet you halfway. First, they can “overdeliver.” If Web traffic is particularly strong in any given month, the website might have more impressions than paying advertisers. In that case, ad reps will decide which clients will receive the overflow—for free. You’ll usually learn about overdelivery at month’s end, but it doesn’t hurt to ask the ad reps during negotiation if they are expecting to overdeliver this month.

Another tactic is to play for sympathy. Erudite people love the idea of books. Explain that book publishing is a low-margin business and ask the reps if there are ways they can help. Offer them a copy of the book, especially if this is an enthusiast website. You can also gamble on pricing by showing them your hand early. Tell the reps you have X dollars available and ask what inventory they have available. Obviously, the dollar figure you quote should be well under the ad rep’s asking price and what you actually have budgeted.

Finally, you can try to book ad space at the last minute, just a day or two before the beginning of the next month. Much like car salespeople, ad reps have sales goals to meet.

Pricing will vary by ad format and position. Big, beautiful banners in prime real estate at the top of the home page, for example, will cost more than smaller buttons stashed several mouse scrolls down the page.

Let’s say you’re in the market for a nice, book-friendly 300 × 250 pixel square in the middle of the home page. The ad rep quotes you a price of $25 CPM. What the heck does that mean?

That means you’ll pay $25 per 1,000 impressions. If the site gets 10,000 impressions in a month, you will pay $250. If the site gets 100,000 impressions, you’ll pay $2,500.

Here are the formulas to calculate CPM, impressions, and your cost:

• Your cost in dollars = (# impressions / 1,000) × CPM
• # impressions = (your budget / CPM) × 1,000

Are you at the whim of Web traffic? Not at all, and this is part one of the beauty of online advertising.

Part 1: You pay for what you get

You can tell the ad rep that you want to buy a block of 10,000 impressions. At $25 CPM, you have committed to an ad spend of $250. This would be a very reasonable thing to do. The only problem is...very few people pay attention to online ads.

We humans are great at ignoring things, and so you need many people to have the opportunity to pay attention to your ad. Naturally, publications are wary to release information on clickthrough rates. Some online advertising industry estimates are that clickthrough rates are considered strong in the range of .08 to .11%. That means roughly one-tenth of one person for every one hundred people will click on your ad.

(The human ability to ignore is why print advertising is still useful. Print publications seduce people into a reading mood during which they will tolerate [even enjoy!] reading well-designed ads. Most websites force people to scan for the information they want.)

So you’ll either need to buy a lot of impressions or make ad creative that is so eye-catching and compelling that it is irresistible (or both). It’s wise to take the book trailer approach: advertise the benefits or the experience of reading your book rather than a photo of the bound book itself. This is why online ads have gotten so distracting with mouseovers, flashing lights, talking heads, and video.

Why advertise in this environment?

Part 2: You can measure effectiveness

Marketing professionals take it on faith that marketing works. We’re delighted on those rare occasions we can prove how good a job we’re doing. Online advertising is one of those occasions.

Since the Web is an unending database, it’s unendingly trackable. It’s possible for highly engineered companies like Google to know 75% of the websites I’ve visited in any given day (in part because I use Google so heavily). Individual websites boast even more capability; they can follow your every mouse click through their entire website. When a user visits a website, they are assigned a small piece of uniquely identifiable code (a “cookie”) that the website reads on this and future visits. If that user is among the one-tenth of one person in 100 who clicks on an online ad, that click is recorded. The ad will direct the user to another website, which will detect what site sent the user. More sophisticated ­e-commerce websites will add their own cookie so that they are able to track how much a visitor spends. In other words, advertisers with the right software can directly attribute ­revenue (and individual transactions!) to specific ad campaigns. Now that is trackability!

Unfortunately, not all publishers have e-commerce websites and not all e-commerce websites have robust Web ­analytics that integrate with their shopping cart software. Fear not: there are ways to track your ad campaigns.

How to track ad campaigns

Any self-respecting website you advertise on should happily send you a monthly impression and clickthrough report and a campaign summary. In fact, you should make this a requirement just before you sign the contract with your ad rep. But who wants to wait until the end of the month to see how your campaign is performing?

Once you’ve successfully bought your ad campaign, you’ll submit your online ad to your ad rep along with a destination URL. The destination URL is where you want website visitors to go when they click on your ad. You can make this any URL you want: your home page, a product page on your website, your author’s blog, your page on Facebook, an Author Central page on Amazon, a landing page custom-made for this ad campaign, etc.

If you choose to send traffic to your website, you can get real-time statistics on your ad campaign’s performance in several ways. Most basically, you, your IT manager, or your Web host can check your server logs for spikes in ­traffic to your campaign’s destination page. If you have Google Analytics installed on your website (you should), you can easily check on performance without the IT department’s eye-­rolling and can learn a lot more about where traffic is coming from and ending up.

You can even detect traffic from individual campaigns by customizing the destination URL you provide to your ad rep. Here’s how this works:

A non-customized URL looks like this:
http://www.velopress.com

I can customize it by adding a “?” to the end of the URL. The “?” allows me to then add anything—anything at all—after it. Like this:
http://www.velopress.com/?kentwatsonlikesbeer

The customized URL will work in the same manner as the non-customized URL except in one way: your server will see that someone visited “http://www.velopress.com/ ?kentwatsonlikesbeer” instead of “http://www.velopress.com.” Now I can check my server logs or Google Analytics traffic report and look for the custom URL. Any traffic the custom URL gets is directly attributable to the ad campaign for which I provided this custom URL.

Let’s say you decide to advertise with two different ad formats in two different ad positions on a website. With this hack, you can assign each unique URLs so that you can compare their performance.

There is one situation in which the “?” hack doesn’t work: when a website is already employing the same hack. In other words, if the destination URL already has a “?” like this: “http://www.velopress.com?id=232” then adding a “?” after “232,” will show an error message. In this case, add “&utmref=” instead like this:
http://www.velopress.com/triathlon.php?id=288&utmref=kentwatsonlikesbeer

These two hacks work almost everywhere. They are harmless, entirely legal, and extremely useful for marketers promoting books online.

Was it worth it?

Many marketers also take on faith that advertising is worth it. The trackability of online advertising helps justify itself, but it’s not without flaws. You can’t, for example, track sales from customers who clicked on your ad but then decided to buy the book in a bookstore or at Amazon.

So online advertising still requires some faith. Isn’t that true of all promotion and publishing?           

This article appeared in the PubWest EndSheet No. Three (fall 2009)

Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager for VeloPress, an endurance sports and fitness publisher. Dave has run over 2,000 online ads. His best long-term clickthrough rate is .99%. Please leave Dave’s server log a “&utmref=” message at davetrendler.com.

Exploit the Internet's Most Useful Company...for Free

Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” My mission is to illustrate how publishers can take advantage of Google’s useful services to better manage their brand, publicity campaigns, and websites. From simple search to Analytics, here is how Google can help you.

Google Search
Unless your commitment to paper and ink is so firm that you still use a phonebook, you probably use Google Search every week. As the world’s online Rolodex, Google handles 60 percent of the world’s search traffic. The Google search engine is so accurate and fast that it obviates the need to bookmark any website. Key in a common search, and the first result is often what you seek.

Google Search has powerful operators that make the service even more useful:

• Quote a phrase like this: “book packager,” which is more likely to return service companies than cardboard boxes.
• Find all instances of a word or phrase on one specific website like this: “ “My Book Title” site:nytimes.com.”
• But Google’s real usefulness is in its value-added features—the parsing of all those correct searches and their delivery to you.

Google Alerts
Instead of going to the news, let the news come to you. A well-tuned suite of Google Alerts can be like a news website that is custom-made to deliver only the news that interests you. Google Alerts allows you to create a continuous search that will periodically report on its results. Instead of visiting google.com once a week to sift through all the search results for new information on Lance Armstrong, I can create a Google Alert that will search 24-7 for new search results on Lance Armstrong. Alerts will send me an e-mail as soon as it finds a new search result, once a day, or once a week. For those of us with clogged inboxes, Google Alerts are also deliverable via an RSS feed.

How Publicists Can Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts streamlines the task of tracking online publicity hits with continuous searches for a book title or author name. It’s best to quote a phrase for more relevant results. With Alerts, you can discover new websites or bloggers that might be willing to review future books.

How Editors Can Use Google Alerts. Find new authors using topical Alerts. Say you acquire books on birding and you’re looking for an author to write about birds in Maine. You could create a Google Alert for “birding in Maine” to see who shows up in the results over a period of time. As you become ­familiar with the landscape, you could further hone your Alert keywords. An author in hand is worth…

How Production Can Use Google Alerts. Using a keyword search, such as “print-on-demand” or “ebook xml,” production ­editors can follow trends and new developments.

Blogger
Until recently, publishing has been a one-way dialogue, but publishers and authors can learn a lot from their readers. Create a community using Blogger. Blogger is Google’s free blogging service. Within two minutes, you can register, pick a visual design, and begin blogging with text, photos, video, and more. Authors can tag each blog post with topical keywords. Blog readers can leave comments, beginning a dialogue with authors. Readers can subscribe to the blog using its built-in RSS feeds or via e-mail. In fact, with some design know-how, a publisher could created a full-featured website and online catalog using nothing more than Blogger.

How Publicists Use Blogger. Raise an author’s online profile and create a community around an author or book. Since Blogger is part of Google, blog posts that link to outside websites will quickly raise the blogger’s ranking in search engine results. The most popular blogs on the web treat blog posts as conversation starters.

Google Search-based Keyword Tool
Everyone wants to know how to get more website traffic from online searches. The answer, “search engine ­optimization,” sounds technical and fancy, but Google has a strong self-interest in making your website relevant to its users. Google provides the Search-based Keyword Tool to help make websites more relevant.

Here’s how it works:

• Plug your website URL into the Search-based Keyword Tool.
• It scans your website, noting keyword phrases.
• It compares your keywords against searches by ­actual Google search users.
• It suggests keywords you should use on your website to capture more traffic from future Google searches.

Google Ad Planner
This is undoubtedly one of the more powerful services Google offers because it gives users a glimpse into web traffic statistics for a huge number of websites.

How Marketers and Publicists Can Use Ad Planner. Discover websites that your potential customers are visiting. Use Google’s default audiences (“Baby Boomers,” “Culinary Aficionados,” etc.) or set custom geographic (country, state, city) and demographic (age, household income, gender, etc.) criteria to find the websites that audience is already frequenting. If those websites are part of Google’s vast ad network, you can launch an AdWords campaign directed at a specific group of websites and their underlying demographic. Marketers can build campaigns around keywords or target websites, too. This is an unbelievably powerful tool.

Discover difficult-to-obtain web traffic statistics for most websites. Since Google provides the majority of web searches, captures traffic data via Google Analytics (see below), and collects ad-serving data via its AdWords network, it is in the unique position to make educated guesses about the extent of web traffic for any given website. For example, Google Ad Planner tells us that 21 million unique visitors visit nytimes.com each month, viewing 880 million pages of the site. In my experience, Ad Planner underestimates web traffic, but it offers both a ballpark and a pecking order. These data help publicists determine which websites, and for the first time bloggers, are most influential to their publicity campaigns.

Google Analytics
How well do you know your own website? Google ­Analytics can bring to light critical data about who is visiting your website, what they read, and how they got there.

How Marketers Can Use Google Analytics. There are books on this topic. Put simply, tell Google Analytics what websites you want to track and it will give you a piece of code to insert into your website. That code tracks your website’s traffic, offering you a wealth of data.

The key data are these:

• Visits: number of visits to your website in a given time period
• Pageviews: number of pages those visitors saw
• Absolute unique visitors: number of individual computers that visited your website (approximates individual people)
• Direct traffic: number of visits from people typing in your URL or using a bookmark to your URL (approximates the loyalty of your visitors)
• Referring sites: number of visits from sites that link to yours (These data are particularly useful for publicists to discover the influence of online publicity or specific websites)
• Keywords: the words a user typed into a search engine that led them to your website

Google Analytics delves much deeper and can tell you what keywords a reader used to find your website, what pages they read, how big their monitor was, what web browser and operating system they were using, and more. You can use this information in dozens of ways, and many marketers will use Google Analytics to improve website navigation, tailor their home pages to match user interests, create landing pages for hot titles, and track online advertising campaigns.

A Quick Case Study in Googling
One of our authors is named “Jamie Smith.” He has a common name and his book with us was his first. Jamie is a bike racer and bike race announcer, but he had no “platform” at all. In fact, he was invisible to Google—you couldn’t find the right “Jamie Smith” in the first five pages of results.

So I set him up with Blogger. I bought him two domain names, ridersready.net for his blog and thatsbikeracing.com for his, um, bibliographic information. I filled each site’s metadescription with good keywords to make them more relevant to Google Search. I linked both sites to each other and to velopress.com, which raised their Google PageRank. Next, I hooked Jamie’s blog feed into AmazonConnect (now Author Central), juicing his PageRank even more. I “burned” his blog feed using FeedBurner, which gave his blog better search engine visibility and more ways for readers to subscribe to his posts. Before launching his book’s press release into the wild, I made sure to list both websites in the “About Jamie” section in the hope that websites and bloggers would link to them, which would raise their ­PageRank. I blogged about Jamie’s new book on the ­VeloPress blog, linking to both sites and boosting that PageRank even more. I installed separate Analytics tracking codes into his blog html and his biographical site, shelled out a few hundred bucks for a little online advertising to help get Jamie’s blog off the ground, and watched the web traffic roll in. Today, my “Jamie Smith” is the third Google result and “Jamie Smith Roadie” is the entire first page of Google results. Take that, other Jamie Smiths! Oh, and over 13,000 people have visited Jamie’s blog.

And all this is free, courtesy of Google! All you need to get started is a little time and a username (or four).    

Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager at VeloPress. He has somewhat accidentally accumulated at least four Google accounts while using Ad Planner, AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, Blogger, Book Search, Calendar, Chrome, Custom Search, Desktop, Docs, Earth, FeedBurner, Gmail, Goog-411, iGoogle, Image Search, Keyword Tool, Maps, News, Picasa, Profiles, Reader, Search-based Keyword Tool, Toolbar, Trends, Voice, Webmaster Tools, YouTube, and his most recent addition—a Google Wave account.

This article appeared in the PubWest EndSheet No. Two during summer, 2009.

The Long Tale: Should Publishers Buy into the Long Tail Theory?

In a mere 10 years, the Internet has shaken media industries to the core. Chris Anderson's long tail theory-that the rise of the searchable Web would unleash an enormous pent-up demand for obscure products-was so compelling that our industry sent his book onto the best-seller lists (wikipedia primer on the long tail theory). But a Harvard Business Review article, "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" by Anita Elberse, began partially debunking Chris Anderson's theory of the long tail last year, replacing it instead with a less optimistic worldview: The Internet is actually entrenching pop culture more deeply, and Anderson's uprising of niche-loving nerds is a myth.

Anderson's theory has inspired smaller publishers that lack blockbuster promotion budgets. The implications of his theory justified the existence of small-to-midsize publishers. If you publish niche content and make it easy to find, readers will come.

To test Anderson's theory, Elberse (an associate professor of business administration) investigated the music and movie markets, two industries that book publishing has watched closely in the post-Napster, BitTorrent era. Analyzing vast amounts of data made available by Rhapsody, Quickflix, and Nielsen VideoScan, she found the following:

• The long tail is composed of a rapidly growing number of products that rarely or never sell. The tail is longer and thinner, not longer and fatter.
• Best-sellers and blockbusters are more important than ever.
• Most consumers choose the most popular products and only occasionally choose obscure products.
• Those consumers who choose obscure products are the heaviest consumers of the category.

Pulling it all together, Elberse's findings appeal to our common sense: Casual readers read best-sellers; serious readers read best-sellers and less popular books. What's more, she reports that both casual and heavy consumers of a category rate obscure content as less enjoyable and popular content as more enjoyable.

The bottom line is that for each book lover who delights in the discovery of obscure, or classic, books, there are millions who have enjoyed best-sellers. It appears that we are social animals and there is no escaping the tyranny of the masses, even on the Internet. In fact, the Internet, contrary to Anderson's theory, is enabling the masses to reign with an ever heavier hand.

Yet some publishers have found ways to exploit both the best-seller and long tail models. At Nolo, located in Berkeley, California, the long tail begins with the printed book. Jackie Thompson, vice president of trade sales, explains that the book is then reformatted for a variety of uses, many of which fit nicely into the long tail.

"Once we have the information for, say, a business book," she says, "we take that same information and post some of it on Nolo.com for our free Nolopedia, which drives search engine optimization and web traffic. Then we submit the book to Amazon Search Inside and Google Print to drive more traffic to Nolo.com. We format the book as an e-book and an audio book and submit those versions for sale and for licensing. Sometimes we create software or online applications to sell online. We've even put a book together knowing it won't break even in the book trade, but that it will generate significantly more revenue in its various parsed formats on Nolo.com."

When asked the difference between investing in the long tail and in a great website, Thompson says, "For Nolo, investing in the long tail is investing in a great consumer website."

Mike Campbell, director of sales and marketing at Graphic Arts Center in Portland, Oregon, is receptive to Elberse's findings. "Books in the long tail are there for a reason," he says. "Instead of trying to sell books that consumers don't like, publishers need to sell more of what's selling well." His advice? "Build on the success of your hot sellers, and don't try to give equal treatment to long tail books or you'll just confuse your customers."

There has been some great irony to Elberse's findings. Chris Anderson has since posed another theory (Wired, July 2008). Mining massive amounts of data for correlations will replace the testing of hypotheses. Elberse did just that, disproving his long tail theory. Now that Anderson's book is safely off the best-seller lists, perhaps his own book sales will also prove him wrong.

Elberse's findings show us a world in which the best-seller is an increasingly important marketing tool. What does this mean for smaller publishers in 2009 and going forward?

For your general list:

• If you don't have one, invest in a low-cost website. There is no tail at all for publishers without web sales or sales through Amazon.
• Lead your niche. Indie publishers often can't compete at the blockbuster game. If you can't win at mass appeal, then be the best at what you do.
• Divert resources from books with limited appeal and focus on creating best-sellers.

For best-sellers:

• Promote best-selling books to the broadest possible market.
• Match the promotion to appeal: Books with mass appeal should get as much promotional support as possible (and vice versa).
• Lead with your best-sellers. Elberse cites the heavily discounted seventh Harry Potter book as an example.

For long-tail books:

• Spend as little as possible on products with little appeal or low sales. (POD, anyone?)
• Promote books with the narrowest appeal to only the heaviest users of that content.
• Make your long tail books more easily found by the heaviest consumer at the lowest cost possible. or example, line-list less popular books in your catalog, but keep them online.
• Leverage the popularity of your best-sellers by cross-promotion. Think like Amazon and use website cross-sells ("You might also be interested in . . .").
• Bundling best-sellers with less popular books ("Buy X, Get Y") can stimulate long tail sales. Revive old best-sellers in this way.

"Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" by Anita Elberse is available for free online viewing at the Harvard Business Review website. Chris Anderson responds to the article on his blog at longtail.com.

Dave Trendler is Marketing and Publicity Manager at VeloPress, an endurance sports and fitness publisher. To see Dave's previous EndSheet contributions, click here.

Endsheet Blog Review: Lifehacker.com

On July 25th, Google announced via its blog that the world’s most popular search engine has identified at least 1 trillion unique pages on the web.

That is a lot of websites. And with the explosion of free and easy-to-use web services, how’s a person to know which ones are most useful?

For this purpose, I turn to my favorite blog, Lifehacker.com. Run by a software programmer and a small team of contributing editors, Lifehacker is an award-winning blog devoted to online and offline productivity. Lifehacker reviews fascinatingly named web services—like Hulu, Remember the Milk, Jott, and Sandy—explaining their benefits and providing easy walkthroughs. Lifehacker’s clarity and ease of use has made it one of Technorati’s top-linked blogs on the web.

A sampling of stories on Lifehacker.com:

• Use Facebook as a Marketing Tool
• Repair Your Own Books
• Track web site stats with Google Analytics
• Zoomii Browses Amazon Books Shelf by Shelf
• Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix them
• Rent Books Netflix-Style with BookSwim
• Five Best Note-Taking Tools (yes, pencil and paper made the list!)
• VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2 Now Available

VM-what? Okay, so Lifehacker isn’t for everyone. It is for people who like finding clever ways to do things better, faster, or cheaper. It’s especially for those who get stoked about hacking their wireless router’s firmware with a Linux-based OS to boost their sign—oops! Sorry.

Lifehacker has made my life better, or at least more productive. The blog keeps me up to date on the newest and most useful web services, like Syncplicity, a simple way to my work files updated on my home computer—no emailing, DVD-Rs, thumb drives, or external hard drives required. Or like Jott, which will email me a text transcript of the voicemail I leave when I call from a cellphone. With 1 trillion pages to choose from and web services becoming increasingly powerful, Lifehacker’s insight is invaluable.

As a product of Web 2.0, Lifehacker is free and requires no registration. Just point your favorite browser to Lifehacker.com and enjoy a more productive life! Technophiles will appreciate Lifehacker's many RSS feed options: all stories or top stories, full text with ads or just ledes sans ads. Luddites, fear not. The wisdom of Lifehacker is also available in print. Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker, just published a book of life hacks called Upgrade Your Life (Wiley, 2008), available in bookstores and, naturally, online.

This article was originally published in the fall 2008 issue of The Endsheet, the newsletter of the Publishers Association of the West.

Follow the Reader: How publishers and booksellers can reach new readers

Americans are reading fewer books each year, a fact confronting publishers big and small. Even as publishers continue to ratchet up production, they know that a digital frontier of publishing has arrived, and in order to remain a relevant among the iPhone and Web 2.0 users, they must find new ways to reach their audience. Or as I like to think of it, they have to follow the reader.

Formal and informal, the studies indicating fewer readers are many. Last November, for example, the National Endowment for the Arts released "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence," which concluded that our country is experiencing "a general decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans," and that "both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates." Though this study built on the NEA's 2004 report, "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America," the challenge to publishers remains clear: How do they sell books to people who don't read books?

Or are publishers interpreting the data correctly? At O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in February, Stephen Abram delivered a keynote address entitled "Information 3.0: Will Publishers Matter?" and pointed out a crucial distinction: Americans are not reading less, they're reading differently. To the point, they're reading online, a shift that explains MIT's estimated 25 percent annual growth rate in the number of websites. Abram explained that for today's reader, the Web's authority not only rivals that for printed material-it's beating it. If online information is reliable, convenient, and free, the real question to ask is, how can the printed book compete?

In his closing keynote at the 2007 PubWest Annual Conference, Andrew Savikas spoke to this issue and maintained that the Internet is "rapidly superseding the function of print publishing." Information that, up until recently, could be found only in print is now available online for free, 24/7. Entire categories of books, for instance cookbooks and travel guides, are under seige from websites like Epicurious and TripAdvisor. According to Savikas, book publishers must expand their model of publishing into one that supports and interfaces with digital media, enabling houses of all sizes to divide and repurpose book content into formats that accommodate readers' new reading patterns. Here are a few steps to consider when following the reader:

• Every book should be available in multiple formats: print, digital, and online subscription.
• Publishers should sell chapters individually.
• Book content should be divisible into articles available online for free, both as separately usable content and as teaser for the complete electronic or printed book.

However, publishers should not move to the Web without care, WIRED magazine's Chris Anderson, best known in publishing for his "long tail" concept, describes the pressures facing digital content in the March 2008 issue in this way: "Anything that becomes digital becomes free."

Many in the industry believe that the printed book will continue to hold value for readers long after publishing has transitioned into the digital era. They also believe there will continue to be a need for distribution, and for the bookstore. Arsen Kashkashian, buyer for the Boulder Book Store in Boulder, CO, is a believer but says that reaching or creating new readers poses a "vexing problem" for independent bookstores. Kashkashian follows his readers by focusing his efforts on retaining his best customers and rewarding frequent buyers for their repeat business. He has also designed the store to be welcoming and comfortable, like "a living room and not a library". To encourage reading, the Boulder Book Store donates pallets of children's books to local schools and schedules a wide range of events intended to appeal to nontraditional book readers.

Kashkashian believes the decline in reading is simply a cultural phenomenon, and feels the problem is exaggerated. "We didn't run around in 1957 fretting about how many people were reading," he says. "Some people were reading and passionate about books, and the publishing industry catered to them. Today, the problems facing bookstores and publishers are ones of competition, with websites and stores both offering an endless array of titles being published in an already cluttered marketplace. Perhaps the anomaly is the explosion of mega-stores, the number of published titles, and the commoditization of books, and not how many people are reading.

The Web is both threat and opportunity. Traditional print-only publishing faces an inevitable decline as the supply of information overwhelms the demand of a book-averse public. Yet the Web offers publishers an opportunity to serve (and follow) readers in new ways. While the Web's short history has shown that digital content eventually becomes free (think Google), the Web brings readers closer to publishers than ever before-and at close quarters, it promises to teach us how to stay connected to our readers.

This article was originally published in the fall 2007 issue of The Endsheet, the newsletter of the Publishers Association of the West.