Press Release: Macmillan Publishers Launches Innovative Marketing Dashboard
Macmillan Publishers, in collaboration with Next Big Sound, announced today the development of an innovative business intelligence dashboard called Next Big Book, signifying a monumental step forward for book marketers in the digital era.
The tool draws sales, publicity, events, social media, web traffic, and web trends data together on a daily basis in order to provide a holistic view of a book's trajectory in the marketplace and highlight which factors are most influential, from social signals to book tours. Within the next three months, Macmillan will make data from Next Big Book available to all its authors and agents.
Analytics company Next Big Sound is venturing into new territory by creating a dashboard for the publishing industry. The company has a long-standing reputation of making data useful to the music industry, and now seeks to bring the same level of clarity to the publishing industry in a shifting space.
"We have long recognized that the data sources we track and the fragmented way consumers interact with and purchase media is not unique to the music industry," says Alex White, CEO and co-founder of Next Big Book. "We are excited to be working with such a forward-thinking and innovative publishing house to develop this tool."
Next Big Book provides an all-in-one-place view, updated in real time, of a particular title's activity in the marketplace. The data sets in Next Big Book currently include:
- Daily and weekly physical and e-book sales from all major retailers
- Social media activity (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, Goodreads, etc.)
- E-mail campaigns
- Web traffic data
- Wikipedia
And will soon be expanded to include:
- Marketing and publicity events
- Geographical data on e-book sales
- Information about retailer product pages
A global rollout for Next Big Book is part of Macmillan Publishers' worldwide digital roadmap. Fritz Foy, Executive VP, Digital Publishing and Strategic Technology, says: "Macmillan has struggled for years with a feast of available data but no thorough way of transforming it into actionable events for publishers and marketers. Given their experience with other media companies, Next Big Sound brings to us the ability to turn information into insights."
