BEA Show Notes: Publishers Share Tips For Boosting Direct-to-Consumer Sales

Focusing on digital discoverability in response to retail market shifts was a major theme at Monday's BEA session, "Raise Your Revenue and Increase Your Profit Margins With Direct-to-Consumer Sales."

With Amazon now handling up to 90 percent of some publishers' retail business, there is an understandable desire to diversify sales channels—a challenge requiring book publishers to think about marketing, production and distribution in new ways.

John Oakes, co-publisher of OR Books, a small, general literary trade publisher, founded his company with an emphasis on direct marketing from the outset. "We market directly to people who buy a relevant book. It really is common sense; the radical difference in our approach is that we won't accept returns."

Consumer orders are fulfilled directly from a third-party service provider, BookMobile, allowing OR to maintain zero inventory. In addition to not taking returns, the publisher requires prepayment. "I can honestly tell you its the best publishing experience I've had in over 20 years [in the business]," Oakes said.

OR drives people to its website with giveaway cards handed out at author events, feature stories on the Web (now more important than reviews) and "clever ads" on relevant sites. "The money we save … in inventory and not participating in returns, we have to put into marketing, because if we don't push our books, we know there are no sales reps who are going to do it for us," Oakes said.

Encouraging author-reader connections are key to this strategy, which makes Oakes wonder whether some great talents would have a tough time in today's book publishing environment.

"When we look at the books that have done best, they are almost invariably associated with authors who either bring their own extended audiences or are really adept at developing them," he said. "That makes me think of somebody like a Samuel Beckett or real edgy artist who is not comfortable reaching out to people or interviewing or blogging incessantly. People ask me, 'Would somebody like that have difficulty today?' My answer is, absolutely."