Discoverability and pricing strategies:
Panelists:
Peter Collingridge, Enhanced Editions, @gunzalis
Michael Bhaskar, Profile Books, @ajaxlogos
Valia Vakili, Small Demons, @sideposts
Jenny Todd, Canongate, @canongatebooks
Peter first.
People talk about discoverability a lot but don't really agree. Definition opaque.
His definition: The problem of how you find stuff. Findability related but not the same. "X has a discoverability problem" actually means 'My marketing has failed.'
Discovery:
1. Physical world: Bookshops. Outcome of trade marketing.
Create demand. Meet demand ("find"). Support loyal customers (browse, recommend, word of mouth.) If you don't have loyal customers you don't have discovery. If it failed, then either blame marketing or trade.
2. Digital world: Discovery is driven by consumer marketing. B2B companies turning into B2C companies. Again.
Create demand, web, social, video, email, content, partners, +PR.
Meet demand, your site or amazon, google, SEO, metadata, content strategy, conversion and measurement, Google, itunes, App Store, Amazon.
Support loyal customers, marketing has worked, experience delighted, created more demand: Need something better than 'people who bought this'.
Discovery is the outcome of great marketing supported by sales activities and fantastic products.
Jenny Todd, Canongate.
A case study (woohoo! Concrete examples are good.)
Canongate.tv was in fact a massive experiment in discoverability. Soft-launched two months ago. A learning experience.
It's an attempt to draw a loyal audience. If you lead with marketing messages, they don't work. Make content meaningful. (Hallelujah, content marketing 101)
Example, deleted scenes from a related hit tv show.
Another: Film produced about Gil Scott Heron. Hard to justify but accrues value over time. Meaningful and has longevity.
Third example: Fun simple video made by and about the fans.
Bridging offline activities online to enhance the digital experience. Give the world around the book some texture. Each channel has everything that's going on around the book. They also add links to other sites let readers click out to other sites (another content marketing 101).
Experimenting with pricing models and multiple formats. Every format you can buy, formats, bundles, all should be available in one place. Should become format agnostic. Lots of people buy multiple formats (that shows me, didn't expect that but it's clearly the consensus across all publishers here). Limited editions.
Meaningful content, followed by more content, and only then do you encounter the book, followed by product details, prices, etc. (Again, a sound content marketing tactic.)
It's about the content however you want to consume it.
Canongate.tv is a platform to experiment and learn. Aiming towards a fully integrated digital consumer experience.
Michael Bhaskar, Profile Books.
Meet Panda. Metadata is all about ordering things. Shows the pagerank algorithm (this algorithm actually isn't used any more by Google, but it is their starting point.) Algorithms dictate how metadata is ordered by computers. (In practice, actually, there is a lot of human editing involved in both Google and Bing.)
Search used to be crap.
(He's explaining pagerank, which, as I said, has been substantially modified since its introduction. The current algorithm is secret and proprietary.)
(Ah, he introduces the tweaks and the gaming problem. He talks about expansion being the root of the problem, but IMO, money's the true root.)
Black hat SEO overview. Malware. Linkbaiting (Was? It continues to be a huge problem. All mainstream outlets and blogs these days are little more than linkbait.)
(I don't think he's talked about the big scale content farms yet.)
(Ah, he introduces the fact that Google now does intense user testing and human involvement. There you go.)
Panic spread through the halls of commerce once the new system took over. content received a huge upgrade. Content oriented websites suddenly gained importance. (True. but only big content oriented websites, smaller sites don't get enough eyeballs to get a blip from the human side of google these days.)
Many companies have been seriously hit by the new algorithm. New era that rewards good websites, just have to be relevant, interesting, etc.
Takeaways: Playing the system probably isn't worth it (very true.)
You aren't writing for a machine.
Little details like subject categories, keynotes, and so on, will be judged by the system.
Valla Vakili, Small Demons
A third option in discovery. 1. Word of mouth. 2. Retail signal. 3. We're about context.
Examples of how readers do it today:
A blog that links to all of the music mentioned in a book
One page that annotates a book in very thorough detail.
A very long annotation of A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Small demons: If you did this across every book you enable new kinds of discovery. They talk about it as Storyverse.
They index books and link to other books that share the same details. They're doing this in partnership with publishing partners. US at first, spreading outwards.
Video: People, places, and things.
(This stuff should be integrated into a reading/retail platform, IMO, like Kobo or Kindle.)
(Also strikes me that it might be somewhat less useful for some genres, like Scifi or Fantasy.)
(This is intertextuality automated and on steroids. I'm not sure what I think about that. Not a fan of overdriven intertextuality, myself.)
They focus on fiction and narrative non-fiction. They don't do textbooks or narrative non-fiction. (Video stalls, but his save isn't bad. Tells us to sign up.)
(Steven Job's bio has been mentioned a lot here today. As if I wasn't tired of hearing about the man before.). US at first, spreading outwards.
Video: People, places, and things.
(This stuff should be integrated into a reading/retail platform, IMO, like Kobo or Kindle.)
(Also strikes me that it might be somewhat less useful for some genres, like Scifi or Fantasy.)
(This is intertextuality automated and on steroids. I'm not sure what I think about that. Not a fan of overdriven intertextuality, myself.)
They focus on fiction and narrative non-fiction. They don't do textbooks or narrative non-fiction. (Video stalls, but his save isn't bad. Tells us to sign up.)
(Steven Job's bio has been mentioned a lot here today. As if I wasn't tired of hearing about the man before.)