idpf's Digital Book 2012 Monday Recap: DRM, Digital Revenue and Data (oh, my!) - Page 3 of 3

By Brian Howard

In a late morning session titled "Why Publishers Need Data," SourceBooks' Dominique Raccah laid out the case for why "data is better than your gut," discussing many of her data-driven decision processes, from testing titles, covers (they produce as many as 17 per title before they decide), to advance selling using different cover versions.

She explained that data-driven publishing is a new skill for book publishers, but that it's an evolution from the existing agile model of Build, Measure, Learn. She noted that the experiments at SourceBooks don't require on a lot of infrastructure or an expensive CRM system, and that "I regularly try stuff that doesn't work. We believe in experimentation."