Future Think: BookBub
BookBub works with big publishers, as well as with indie publishers and individual authors. With big houses, "they'll contact us and let us know their price promotions for the next month, then we tell them which would work best with our audience," says Schanker. "Then we go back and forth on a plan." Smaller publishers and authors tend to work with BookBub on a per-promotion basis.
Schanker, who's got a background in digital media entrepreneurship but started his career as a bookseller for Walden Books, sees BookBub's daily emails as falling in that fuzzy area where advertising and editorial, content marketing and merchandising all meet.
BookBub is presently experimenting with providing analytics to its publisher partners, tracking things like member click-throughs, how many additional reader reviews books received, and how many other books in the same series as a promoted title were sold.
"Our goal is to put together the best possible daily email," says Schanker. "We think of ourselves as advertorial. That's fundamentally what it is. It isn't an e-saver type of thing. They're listings for books that are paid promotions from publishing houses, but we curate which of those listings we accept. We turn down more than half of the ones submitted to us every day. We could have a lot more business if we wanted to lower our standards."
For more on working with BookBub, visit bookbub.com/advertise.
