PubWest BookLore: Social Media for Publishing Professionals

In mid-May, I'll be presenting with Melissa Taylor of Pinterest Savvy to talk about some ways publishers are using social media.

Hope you'll join us! If so, please RSVP to Kent at executivedirector@pubwest.org.

Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:00 PM
Denver Press Club
1330 Glenarm Place
Denver, CO 80204

My part will focus on content marketing, which is using book content to sell books.

I’m going to talk briefly about online promo effectiveness and then spend some time on how I used WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter to promote:

• The Feed Zone Cookbook
• Slaying the Badger
• Swim Speed Workouts
• Inside the Box 

This will include some gimmickry, SEO, meta-tagging, keywording, post timing, cross-posting, and poaching celebrity Twitter handles.

I’ll then compare the effectiveness of content marketing with traditional online advertising by using online metrics and book sales data.

Facebook Is Designing an iPad/Kindle Tablet Device

I'm speculating wildly here, but play along.


Push Pop Press makes interactive ebooks. Their ebooks are more app or self-contained website than ebook, really, but it seems that this sort of convergence of web and book is one possible direction for the written word and its various formats.

The About page for the site has announced that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press.

This can only mean that Facebook plans to join Apple, Amazon, Google, BarnesandNoble.com, Kobo, Sony, Motorola, and the rest of the technologized world in offering some device that lets you read ebooks!

If this seems like a leap, just think about what that device might look like: it would be a walled garden device designed to funnel all your Facebook-enable social network channels into one device. It would play Facebook video, have a built-in web browser (FaceFox?), and have a store where users could buy licensed music, movies, and ebooks through Facebook's App Store... or FTunes? Fbookstore?

Brand it how you will, Facebook's IPO will launch it into the socially enabled content retail business.

Google Nearly Ready to Launch Editions, Its Ebook Retailing Platform

If the Wall Street Journal prints it, it must be true. The WSJ says that Google is preparing to launch Google Editions this month.

Here are the most salient points for book publishers and webby consumers, in my opinion:

• "Google Editions is set to debut in the U.S. by the end of the year and internationally in the first quarter of next year."
• Editions users will "be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets." Google's open approach is welcome. Now you won't have to be tied to Apple or Amazon stores or gadgets to be able to read an enormous number of ebooks. In fact, the lack of a Google ebook reader really opens up the market to any device that has an internet connection. The web isn't dead, Mr. Anderson.
• "Digital book sales are expected to more than triple to $966 million this year, according to Forrester Research, from $301 million in 2009." 
• "Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc. (Dominique was a keynote speaker at this year's PubWest conference.)
• "Some independent booksellers that can't afford to open their own e-bookstores believe that Google Editions could be their gateway into the digital marketplace."
• Google has scanned 10% of the world's 150 million scannable books.
• "Spurred on by the launch of Apple Inc.'s iPad last April, more than 15 million e-readers and tablets will be sold by the end of 2010 in the U.S., compared with an estimated 2.8 million e-readers sold in 2009, Forrester predicts."

UPDATE 12/6: Annnd it's open! Check out Google's new ebook store. Here's the NYTimes.com analysis.

Anatomy of a Publicity Stunt

It was a friend in college who introduced me to the concept that luck comes with hard work. He'd just beaten me at some game, on what I felt was a lucky shot. I told him so and he replied, "You make your own luck."

I've found it's double-edged sword to work in publicity. Rarely can a publicist claim full responsibility for some good press, yet it's often that a publicist can claim at least some of it. This week, some hard work paid off in the form of a lucky break, but it was a fan boy blogger and the quick-thinking, fastest pro cyclist in the world who deserve most of the credit.

In the 24 hours after Mark Cavendish sprinted to victory in the first stage of the Tour of California last Sunday, a book I'm promoting got mentioned on ESPN.com (since updated), in the New York Times (since updated), the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle (since updated), the Sacramento Bee, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and two cycling websites. This is a mother lode of publicity, more than many small publishers could hope for in a few years!

Last winter, we acquired Mark Cavendish's autobiography, Boy Racer, which  from the original UK publisher as a late addition to our fall 2010 list. We planned to publish the book in June, a comfortable month before the start of the Tour de France. In February, we made some print-on-demand ARCs (advance reader copies) of the book. Book publishers make ARCs to send to taste makers to ask for their endorsement and to magazines to line up publicity during the months it takes most magazines to plan out, develop, and publish their editorial content.

In March, I shipped out 20 ARCs to the big cycling print magazines and in April, I shipped 10 more to cycling websites and bloggers. I didn't ask for an embargo (because I think publicity embargoes are cheesy, especially in a small market like cycling), but I asked the magazines to consider book reviews and excerpts for their pre-Tour guides and mentioned to the websites that I was hoping for publicity after the Tour of California start.

Cav won the stage, which meant he was expected to take questions from the cycling media during a press conference soon after the race. Velonation described the scene like this:

"Following the race, Cavendish was relaxed and confident, and answered the myriad of questions with aplomb, but in an almost whisper. When asked about the Tour de Romandie victory salute debacle and whether he was thinking about that as he crossed the line, Cavendish was blunt and didn't pass up on an opportunity to give a healthy nod to his recently released book.

"I honestly don't think about my celebrations too much. You should read my book, Boy Racer. It's out in America now. I'll be doing some book signings during and after the Tour of California. It's a good book. In the book, I talk about how I switch off my emotions during the race. As soon as I cross the line, it all comes out. Most things are pretty impromptu, it's just all that emotion built up inside. When I cross the line first, sometimes I'm a quick thinker and come up with something, but for the most part, it's pretty impromptu."

At this point, a journalist in the crowd pulled out a copy and handed it to Cavendish. He dutifully held the book up and flashed a big grin." 

It looked like this.

That journalist was Richard Masoner, the blogger behind the Cyclelicious website, to whom I had sent a Boy Racer ARC just a few weeks before the race. He had taken his ARC with him to the Tour of California, hoping to get Cav to autograph it so that he could give the signed book away to a reader.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat described the events with more snark:

"Sprinters in cycling are like sprinters in track. They strut. They like to call attention to themselves. They are divas, showmen, who blossom like a peacock in front of a camera. When Cavendish stepped in front of the camera Sunday in the post-race press conference, he couldn't resist. From the podium he motioned to a man in the audience, presumably, and embarrassingly, a journalist. The journalist rose from his seat and brought to Cavendish a book.

It was Cavendish's recently published autobiography. That alone speaks volumes. Cavendish is only 24 years old. Some NFL wide receivers could get tips from this guy on self-promotion – which would soon become readily apparent.

The Brit then propped up the book, its cover facing the audience, pointed to it and said, “It's a good book.”

He smiled and he didn't stop smiling and he kept the book propped up for the couldn't-be-ignored photo op. Yes, maybe he had to squelch a defiant urge when he crossed the finish line but Cavendish couldn't be rung up for self-promotion."

It was Cav pimping his book after his win that caught the attention of the New York Times, ESPN, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and Velonation.

I learned about all this on Monday morning when I checked Google Reader and noticed the New York Times headline about Cav winning the stage. My jaw hit the floor when I saw how the book was mentioned, and then I raised my arms in victory!

It looked like this.

As any good publicist would, I printed the page to pdf and hit Google to search for more. I soon stumbled onto the ESPN and LA Times versions. (Quick aside: I noticed a lack of AdWords ads in the search results, so I took a few minutes to set up a campaign for Boy Racer.)

Another victory salute and then, having recovered my wits, I publicized the victory to some coworkers and our book trade distributor.

Finally, I noticed an email from Richard Masoner in my inbox. It said:

"Hi Dave,

I had Cavendish's book with me at his stage win in Sacramento Sunday afternoon. He saw it, grabbed it from me, and held it up at the press conference telling everybody they should read it.

The LA Times and NY Times both mentioned Boy Racer in Sunday's story on his win.

He also autographed the book for me. Is it okay if I give this pre-publication copy away in a contest?

Richard

http://www.cyclelicio.us/ is yummy!"

Yummy indeed! If I get the chance to meet Richard, I owe him a round of beers. Perhaps more than one round!

Of course, there are few less-than-perfect circumstances. First, the book isn't actually available yet nor is Cav actually scheduled to sign books during the remainder of the race. The book was bound and shipped to our distributor's warehouse a few days ago, which means it's sitting at a truck stop somewhere instead of selling like hotcakes; cycling fans who are now assuredly scrambling into bookstores are pawing through the shelves and walking away confused, frustrated, and disappointed. Publicity pushed demand, but the supply wasn't ready, and that means lost sales. I can only hope that Amazon and other online retailers just saw a bump in pre-orders.

Second, the cover on the ARC isn't the final one, and it's not as good as the final one. This is a pretty minor quibble considering only Cyclelicious posted the photo of Cav with his book.

Third, the book mentions have since been taken out of the ESPN and New York Times articles (which is why it's so important to print to pdf!). That afternoon, I emailed the book press release, cover image, and photo of Cav with book to all the reporters who mentioned the Cav-ARC incident to offer them a finished copy when they arrive next week. I hope this isn't what prompted ESPN and the Times to remove the mentions (both reporters were interested in receiving a copy). Should this happen again, maybe I'll wait a few days before thanking the reporter.


So if it's true that you make your own luck, then I'm happy to have placed an ARC in the right hands, even if it was those hands that put it in Cav's.

UPDATE: A coworker managed to catch Cav at the team bus today and got the final book into his hands!

It looked like this.

Photo of Cav with ARC used with written permission of Richard Masoner/Cyclelicious.
Photo of Dave with ARC and Cyclelicious website showing photo of Cav with ARC taken by Renee.
Photo of Cav with the final book used with permission of Ben Pryhoda.

Born to Run: Too Far a Leap

Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run is not about running, at least not what most of us consider to be running. Born to Run is a wide-ranging adventure story about elite, ultra-distance trail running, a cultish specialty of running that involves 50-mile races through wilderness terrain. 

Ultra running shares little common ground with the intended reader of Born to Run, the average American runner. Hard-core ultra runners seem like rock climbers; McDougall describes dirtball outdoors people who camp out near trail systems to run all day and party all night. By contrast, the average American runner is delighted to run a few hours a week on sidewalks, roads, and paths. To say that Born to Run is about running would be more than a small stretch.

In Born to Run, McDougall describes the events leading to a 50-mile trail race through Mexico's Copper Canyon. The race features a handful of native Mexican runners and elite American trail runners, and McDougall builds the race into a clash of cultures. The Tarahumara Mexicans are an indigenous society of agrarian hunter-gatherers that practices long-distance running for sport and survival. The Americans are mostly professional ultra runners who run impressive distances -- 50-mile and 100-mile races are typical.

But McDougall's book is written more like fiction than nonfiction. He has a mythology -- the Tarahumara are like a mythical people living in Shangri-La where all societal evils are neutralized through running. The Tarahumara have no cancer or metabolic disease. They have no violence or theft. They have no concept of sexism. The Tarahumara are the perfect society, McDougall says, because of running.

McDougall explains that the Tarahumara began running to escape eradication at the hands of Spanish colonialism. The people were driven into Mexico's Copper Canyon, a brutal environment lacking water, farmland, and so baked under the hot Mexican sun that colonists could not give pursuit. Realistically, the Tarahumara are a destitute people who live hand to mouth in a lawless, cartel-infested Mexican desert because they have no choice and few opportunities. McDougall provides the historical context, but his book conjures innumerable opportunities to characterize the Tarahumara as an ideal society when, in fact, they are an unfortunate lot.

For McDougall, the Tarahumara way of running has a magical quality; he characterizes it as "easy, smooth, fast" with little motion above the waist, but it's difficult to imagine. This video profiles the Tarahumara and Caballo Blanco, the hero of Born to Run who organizes an annual Copper Canyon race between Tarahumara and Americans. You can watch them run.

To me, these runners simply look like people who run a lot. The Tarahumara are not magical runners; they simply look that much better when compared to the average running American.

Chapter 25 of Born to Run lays blame for bad American running at the feet of Nike. Educated runners (and anyone who reads the New York Times fitness section) know the story: padding reduces the sensation of impact when our feet hit the ground. Reducing the feeling of shock makes it seem as if running is more comfortable, so it changes how we run. Untrained runners wearing shoes tend to land their feet heel first into the ground. Barefoot runners tend to land farther forward on the foot. Many biomechanists have shown that padded shoes distort our naturally evolved running form and actually may cause injuries rather than prevent them. (Stay tuned for a VeloPress book on how to run with shoes as if you were barefoot.)

McDougall takes the blame a step farther, saying that Nike's padded shoes have caused far more than millions of running injuries, they've also turned people off running, which has led to obesity, metabolic disease, and cancer. In short, Nike is the root of all Western ailments. The book pretty much says this.

In all of Born to Run, only chapter 25 seems grounded in reality, mostly because McDougall so heavily relies on what seem like second-hand interviews of authoritative sources like academics and scientists from interviews in the New York Times and on National Public Radio (specifically this 1997 This American Life episode about persistence hunting.). Still, I feel the comparison between normal running and the running in Born to Run too far of a leap. Trail running is very different from road running, requiring very different motions. Perhaps trail running's soft surfaces and its inherent variety of motions reduce its incidence of injury. After all, trail running must mimic the conditions under which we evolved to run much more closely than the hard surfaces and repetitive motions of road running. Unfortunately, I'm aware of no studies comparing injury incidence between trail and road running.

It's easy to overlook an important point here: none of the characters in Born to Run run without shoes. The traditional Tarahumara -- not all of them -- run with tire treads laced to their feet. Take a look at the video above and you'll see that their tire tread shoes are at least a half-inch thick. Even the character "Barefoot Ted" runs with Vibram Five Fingers, though the book seems vague about how often he actually wore them. Born to Run's entire mythology is based on the benefits of running -- specifically barefoot running -- and McDougall proclaims that America would be a better place to live if we all ran barefoot... yet just one person in the book runs barefoot and only some of the time.

Even McDougall runs shod -- in Nikes nonetheless. McDougall says he was inspired to write the book while seeking a cure for his own running injuries. Along the way, he comes to believe that running shoes injured him, but his own description of his rehabilitation at the hands of a running coach illustrates that McDougall was simply another bad American runner. His coach teaches him proper run technique and McDougall is cured. His comeback is evidence that Born to Run is a work of fiction: McDougall keeps his shoes on and is cured long before he runs with the Tarahumara.

This is the great joke of Born to Run: its entire premise is detached from reality. Born to Run is a make-believe book. McDougall tells us we should all run trail ultra marathons. The average American runner, for very practical and sensible reasons, should be skeptical. McDougall proclaims the benefits of barefoot running, yet no one in the book runs barefoot and back in Kansas, few competitive runners seem interested. McDougall's hero, Caballo Blanco, nearly gets into a fistfight with Barefoot Ted over what Blanco considers to be Ted's ceaseless and suicidal evangelism of barefoot running. 

Born to Run was an interesting and entertaining read, but the book requires suspension of disbelief from the first page to the end. Its writing style, which I've heard many compare to Outside magazine, is full of overstatement, jumped conclusions, and wondrous imagery. The day after I finished the book, I found myself Googling "Tarahumara" and "Caballo Blanco" during lunch at work.

I found this Running Times interview with Caballo Blanco. (The last question is telling.) I learned that, although the race has grown from 25 to 200 runners, the Tarahumara don't win Caballo Blanco's race anymore. I wonder how many Tarahumara compete for the corn and cash prizes for participants. You can read about Blanco's mission on his website.

Despite selling over 125,000 copies in its first year, Born to Run does not seem to have inspired many to take up barefoot running. Running.Competitor.com has been searching for barefooters for some time, without much luck. 

Born to Run accomplished two things. First, it introduced readers to the idea that running shoes might cause injuries. There is certainly some science to back this up, some of which is cited in Born to Run. Second, it has been raising awareness that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to run. For everyone in the running industry, this is good business. Both runners and readers should beware.

Should ebooks Be DRM Protected? HELL YES!

David Pogue of the New York Times asks, "Should eBooks Be Copy Protected?"

The answer is heck yeah!

Pogue comments that "the music companies are still in business." Um, okay, but their revenue has fallen by half and physical music retail has all but disappeared. At least musicians have a lucrative alternative -- people will pay to see them perform live. Who would pay a worthwhile sum to listen to an author read an entire book out loud?

Convenience and price trump quality. While the paper book presents information better, the ebook is cheaper and "good enough", with enough advantages in portability that it will eventually become the dominant form, just like the mp3.

Ebook readers will fall in price and paper will become the premium form of the book. People will only pay for paper if they need paper, e.g. a paper book on bike repair in the garage, a copy of a photo-heavy history book on the coffee table, a copy of a law book to help sketch out a contract on paper, or as a gift. 

The reason books haven't been Napsterized is that it's much more time consuming to scan a book than to rip a CD or DVD. Sure, you can build and operate your own book scanner for under $300, but few people will take the time. The problem is that, just like a CD, once the book is scanned or DRM-cracked once, it's potentially free forever, especially in tightly knit, niche communities.

As paper retail begins its inevitable slide, indies will disappear. Distributors will claw to claim what little shelf space is left at Barnes & Noble. The returns system will remain as long as Barnes & Noble stays in business. Publishers will distribute ebooks and POD paper books direct to consumer.

The trouble is timing. Should publishers shoot for first-mover advantage? Should we treat ebooks as seriously as abook sales warrant?

And pricing... Should we temporarily set extremely low prices to scare off the competition? Should we adopt the $10 price point and then make sure costs are aligned to support this new rate (until Amazon renegotiates)? Is there any profit left in producing quality print books if the market becomes dominated by ebooks?

The future of book publishing = DRM + fair pricing + easy access (i.e. a good online store with many titles). 

Relatedly, the NYTimes explores the economics of ebooks.

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.

Barnes & Noble's Kindle Killer Features Adorable Name

Barnes & Noble unveiled its ebook reader today and it's called... The Nook! It's a great name, I think, giving rise to warm associations like nooks, crannies, cozy little spots to curl up and read... a digital book. The name sounds like book, but perhaps that "n" is for new. It's just a short hop to "I'm reading a nook." Where "Kindle" conjured kindling (and paper book burnings?), Nook sounds nice.

The LA Times has a great bullet point review of the Nook's features, which you can also read on this Barnes & Noble product spec page.

The B&N product page offers a side-by-side comparison of the Nook and Kindle 2. Notable Nookish features include:

• both wireless and wifi connectivity
  
• support for the open-source EPUB and eReader formats
• grayscale e-ink and -- taking a page from the iPod's album cover browser -- a 3.5 inch color touchscreen for browsing your library and navigation
• USB connectivity for direct file import
  
• the ability to "lend" ebooks to any friend with a computer or smartphone for 14 days.
  

Combine this with B&N's industry-leading store (over 700K titles), and you've got a pretty compelling device. In fact, the only two features Kindle has over Nook are 4 more days of battery life and the ability to read Word docs.

News for Nerds Roundup: Book Publishing Edition

Google Announces Its Ebook Store
The world's largest ebook library announced "Google Editions", a 500,000 title ebook store that will launch during the first half of 2010. Reactions to the news varied. Bezos, with his 350,000 ebooks, was overheard muttering "Dang!".* Barnes & Noble's 200,000 non-Google-provided ebooks alternated cheers of "Crap!" and "Yahoo!"*. Manufacturers of the 15 ereader devices expected to launch by mid-2010 cheered for joy* while Kindle owners sighed with disappointment*, victims of their all-too-familiar love of glitzy proprietary formats (ahem, Apple).

Meanwhile, a Popular Science magazine reader explains How to Build Your Own Kindle
A Popular Science reader builds an ebook reader that's full color and can read any ebook format. Cost? 1 hour and $100 less than a Kindle. Disclaimer: Okay, the guy just loaded a few ereader software programs onto a tablet PC. Not that cool. Still, the point remains: Kindle is overpriced and underfeatured and, courtesy of Google, about to be out-titled.

Meanwhile, the RIAA and MPAA learned that they have no hope against BitTorrent.
Book publishers attending the Frankfurt Book Show this weekend fretted openly at this sign of things to come.*

Meanwhile, the Association of American Publishers scratched its head*, noting that ebook sales accounted for just 1.6% of the $5.25 billion in U.S. book sales in the first half of 2009.

*not really

Your Two Minutes of Hate, Amazon Edition

Amazon deleted ebook editions of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle users' accounts and their Kindle devices and then refunded their money.

Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle Devices

Amazon was right to delete these books from Kindle accounts. (It seems that the irony is the story here!) But this point is really scary: "An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function."

Yet Amazon sold the ebooks anyway because it didn't know any better.

This lapse demonstrates my leading critique of Amazon--that Amazon has no way to vet any of its content and relies instead on unreliable sources. Any user can suggest changes to an Amazon product page. From a product perspective, Amazon is a dumb database (and from a sales perspective, a pretty smart one). Amazon is the Wikipedia of the retail world.

Clearly, Amazon's reliance on the goodwill of its users and vendors is flawed. It's fortunate, then, that Amazon can delete its mistakes. Who knew Bezos had the right and ability to push a button and delete books off a Kindle?

Oh wait--he doesn't have the right. According to the New York Times story cited above, the Kindle terms of service say explicitly that when a user buys an ebook from Amazon, they have bought the right to a permanent copy of the book.

So what if an unreliable vendor sells an illegal copy on Amazon? Apparently, Amazon is willing to incite the wrath of its Kindle customers to defend a copyright. Nervous, future ebook publishers everywhere are relaxing just a little.

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.

Don't Be an Expert, Be a Fox

In Nicholas Kristof's recent op-ed in the Gray Lady, Learning How to Think, Kristof discusses how talking heads are always wrong in their predictions.

"Experts turn out to be a stunningly poor source of expertise."

"The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board."

"The only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones." Producers in the ad-supported media prefer experts who provide "strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted."

The article describes rodents outfoxing Yale undergrads, hedgehogs vs. foxes, and clinical psychologists and their secretaries.

Jon Stewart's going to have a field day with this.

Why Amazon Is Beating Up Bookstores

The Seattle-based blog "Journey from Yuppie to Triathlete" offers a perfect example of how Amazon is beating bookstores:

"I was hoping to find Going Long by Joe Friel at Barnes and Noble but was disappointed...twice. I ended up purchasing it on Amazon along with The Triathlete's Training Bible also by Joe Friel."

Wanted: Marketing Manager/Martial Artist

Paladin Press is hiring for a "hands-on Marketing Manager for fast-paced sales/marketing department." This merits a closer inspection... A quick review of Paladin's product line reveals:




What do you think this interview would be like? I'm picturing Dwight Shrute but perhaps more competent.

Naturally, Paladin Press is based just up the street in Gunbarrel.

Print Media Drowning in Red Ink (re-re-update)

UPDATE 3/13: The New York Times updates the roll call of newspapers in such trouble that their home towns might soon become one-paper or zero-paper cities. Joel Kramer of MinnPost.com is interviewed and offers this summary of the scenario: "It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting. [Websites] like us would spring up, but they wouldn't be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them."

UPDATE 2/28: The Washington Post offers up a roll call of newspapers in trouble and their myriad attempts to staunch the outflow of cash and staff.

U.S. News & World Report To Shift Operations to Web
"U.S. News & World Report is getting out of the newsmagazine business and going all digital. The financially struggling magazine, which cut back to biweekly publication earlier this year, now plans to reinvent itself on the Web. While it will publish one print edition each month, according to staffers briefed on the decision, these will be entirely devoted to consumer guides -- such as its annual rankings of colleges and hospitals -- and contain no other news."

PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version
"Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only. It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises."

Christian Science Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy
"In 2009, the Monitor will become the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website; the 100 year-old news organization will also offer subscribers weekly print and daily e-mail editions."

Condé Nast Cuts Focus on 2 Magazines
"Men’s Vogue will all but disappear as a separate operation. It will be folded into Vogue and will be published twice a year instead of 10 times, the company said...Through the first nine months of the year, ad pages in all United States magazines were down 9.5 percent from the same period in 2007..."

Publishing's "Last-Man-Standing" Strategy

The New York Times reported on itself earlier this month. The publicly-owned company's CEO laid out plans to weather the recession during a conference call:

"As other newspapers cut back on international and national coverage, or cease operations, we believe there will be opportunities for The Times to fill that void,” she said, for both readers and advertisers."

Janet Robinson couldn't be more right. The same scenario is playing out over several two-paper regional metro areas. In Denver, for example, The Denver Post just outlasted The Rocky Mountain News, which today announced that it will publish its last edition tomorrow.

When times are tough, it pays to be bigger, responsibly financed, and better branded. In fact, tough times offer the opportunity to improve all three conditions.

Reality check: Are your expenses in line with your revenues? Are there business functions or products that are not justifying their level of resources? A down economy offers companies a great excuse to bring expenses back into line. Or, as TechCrunch puts it, to preemptively cut costs or eliminate deadweight. Creative destruction destroys many companies, but a little internal destruction can bring your company back down to fighting weight. When the economy comes back, you're already in great shape.

Advertise now! During a recession is the best time to advertise. Ad-supported media like magazines and newspapers are economic bellwethers; ad sales drop soon after retail sales drop. Well financed companies must take advantage of desperate publishers and ad reps to get better placement, better rates, and more runs. Particularly useful is the long-term ad buy. If you signal that you are looking to make a six-month or yearlong advertising commitment, an ad rep will be much more willing to offer a below-rate-card discount. Assuming your competition doesn't undertake the same strategy, your product will be the only one advertising. You can take market share during the recession and invest in your brand while waiting for the economy to rebound. If you are fortunate enough that the economy rebounds before the end of your ad contract, so much the better.

Smell blood? Price like a predator. Is your competition burdened with debt? Do you see any competitors who are relatively weak? A down economy is the best time to put the hurt on your competition. Offer promotional pricing or bundle products in creative ways. Do anything you can to deny revenue to your competitors. Burn cash reserves, knowing that your competitors don't have them.

Any responsibly financed company can undertake the New York Times last-man-standing strategy. Depending on your market, you might be the only one left to serve customers in 2010.

Trends in Reading

Turning Page, E-Books Start to Take Hold
"For a decade, consumers mostly ignored electronic book devices, which were often hard to use and offered few popular items to read. But this year, in part because of the popularity of Amazon.com’s wireless Kindle device, the e-book has started to take hold." Click to continue.

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults
"After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed." (I can't wait to see how the publishing industry puts a negative spin on this story. Publishing loves nothing more than moaning about the business of making books!) Click to continue.

Check out the summary report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy".

ForeWord Magazine Begs for Your Advertising Dollars

I got an unconventional email pitch from an ad rep yesterday: a "shame on you". It was a form letter which, in some ways, makes it even more offensive. Taken alone, the email is galling. Here's an excerpt from the 600-word email (the boldface is my addition):

"I pay the (below industry standard) salaries to editors, art/design, reviewers, salespersons and web tech personnel out of advertising revenue. I pay the printer, for paper, for postage and shipping to chain bookstores out of advertising revenues. I pay our rent, office supply, computer, internet and utility bills out of advertising revenues. I pay for trade show participation at BEA, ALA and some regionals out of our advertising revenues. I pay for ten years worth of your reviews archived at our website out of advertising revenues. As you work hard at putting out beautiful books for the marketplace, we try just as hard putting out a beautiful magazine..."

"Quite frankly, ForeWord Magazine has never really been supported fully by the independent press community we most prominently feature in our review pages. As I look through issues over the last ten years, I feel frustrated by the continued coverage of so many presses with nary a dollar of ad support in our ten year history. You can quickly check to see the amount of coverage your press has received by doing a search at our website. In the past, I could overlook this unfairness because we had ample advertising from small presses who were so thrilled to have an affordable means to reach such a valuable audience. Those days seem to have gone. And as entrepreneurs, (perhaps like you are/once were) we don't have a corporate parent to make sure we stay flush."

"I am actively engaged in exploring other options for our efforts. As a business person, I'm sure you would agree that it does not make sense to support a community of great book publishers when they appear to have no interest in supporting us. However, the possibility remains that I am overlooking some significant reason that is preventing you from supporting us. If we can improve our offering and it would mean your help in keeping us in print, I hope you will feel free to share. You grow thick skin in this business."

I guess the takeaway messages here are:
1. ForeWord is a business that has expenses.
2. ForeWord is sick of you moochers.
3. ForeWord deserves your money.
4. ForeWord is really kind of pissed at you for not giving it your money.
5. ForeWord is probably going to stop supporting small publishers.
6. Hey, maybe you have a good reason for not giving us your money?

Like, say, the worst recession in decades? Or Borders's near bankruptcy and stock adjustments? Or perhaps the loss of three months of revenue from the AMS/PGW bankrupcty two years ago?

Considering that I have given a few thousand dollars to ForeWord over the past few years, I thought the tone of this email was inconsiderate. I prefer the approach of my old ad rep, Pete Chamliss, who often sent chummy reminders to support our books with advertising in one of the most affordable of the widely-read publishing magazines.

This ad rep's approach is a little more entitled. Maybe that's why I've barely advertised with ForeWord since Pete got canned?