Fourteen Tips To Increase E-Book Sales

By Peter Hildick-Smith

4 Tips for  Boosting E-books Sales to Libraries

From George Scotti, channel marketing director, Springer Science+Business Media

1. Set your content free.

Publish e-books without digital rights management (DRM), and allow concurrent users to access content. “In a database environment, allowing multiple users to access the content provides a better [user] experience … [and] helps to drive usage. Without DRM, users can also share content freely on multiple devices,” says Scotti.

2. Go mobile. To assist in streamlining e-book production across multiple devices, use a universal format like PDF or .epub. “Also, investing in robust XML allows for easy conversion to alternate formats, if necessary,” Scotti adds.

3. Offer a “critical mass” to reduce cost per unit and increase usage/value proposition. “Libraries often are looking to develop a ‘mass’ of titles in a certain subject area. … So offering a ‘critical mass’ of, [for example], biology titles is very attractive to [them]. This lowers cost per unit, and … ensures that the collection will be used. Large collections are indexed by search engines like Google, and listed in the library catalog. When a library gets a lot of usage on content from a single publisher, then there is perceived value and lower cost per use,” he says.

4. You buy it, you own it. Provide institutions perpetual access and ownership of the content they buy. This will make repeat business more attractive and lower total lifetime costs. “If you pay for the content in year one and have access and usage over time, every year the cost per use of that content goes down,” says Scotti.

With the growth of e-books, e-readers, apps and the new digital distribution channels serving them, the number of unique titles available to consumers has reached 30.8 million on Amazon alone, increasing hourly. With only 40 million U.S. adults (17 percent) regularly buying books, 30.7 million of those titles sell but a few dozen copies a year at best, making book publishing, and specifically e-book publishing, a challenging business.

While e-books are available instantly to anyone, anywhere, with a computer, smartphone or e-reader—unlike selling print books through physical bookstores—online distribution on its own does not provide new-book awareness. As a result, e-book publishers must focus on breaking through the clutter so that shoppers discover their books and are converted from browsers to buyers.

The good news is that digital distribution and marketing analytics give publishers unprecedented information on what's working well, or holding a book back, so they can develop and instantly test new and better approaches during each title's launch to increase e-book success.

Codex-Group, a book audience research firm, has interviewed more than 200,000 book shoppers online to learn how they discover and decide on which new books to buy. Here are 10 tips based on that learning to help e-book publishers take advantage of this exploding new market.

Discovery: "Do shoppers know a new book even exists?"

1. Focus on your intended  audience.

Every book contains unique topics that appeal to specific reading audiences. Publishers must decide which audience to focus on, learn where they hang out, the key words they use for search, and where they indulge their interests—then intercept them there with the book's message and cover, in both online and offline locations. Mass appeal is rarely effective.

2. Create an irresistible title  and cover; then test it.

The role of a book's cover is not to be "beautiful," but to make the book stand out, and captivate shoppers enough to make them, in the case of e-books, "click." Develop multiple title and cover options geared toward the target audience. Before publication, informally ask these readers which option they would "click" (not which one they "like"). If it doesn't captivate them, it won't be discovered or remembered.