Direct to Consumer Sales

As book publishers continue to dip their toes in direct-to-consumer sales, they need to learn new skills to fuel new marketing activities like content marketing, lead nurturing, and customer retention. In today's digital and distractable world, publishers cannot take a passive role with their book sales; they must actively pursue new customers and reengage old…

Every publisher represents a storehouse of interesting content that can be used to attract readers, capture email subscribers, and increase book sales. In past articles, I’ve written about these concepts and reasons why publishers should invest in inexpensive digital marketing tactics. Free content attracts readers who become email subscribers. Those email subscribers can be converted…

Art books are niche products: Hardly anyone reads them, you can’t make money with them, and anyway, there’s the Internet. And yet, more and more galleries have begun producing books. Why? A spectacular high point of this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair—the largest international meeting of the industry—came when David Hockney and his publisher Benedikt Taschen…

Every day after school, 4-year-old Nicholai Rose demands that his mother take him first to the park then to the Barnes & Noble in the Baychester neighborhood of the Bronx. There, they snuggle in a corner in the children’s section and, each time, read “I Need My Monster,” his favorite picture book. In a few…

Cashiers at Amazon’s physical bookstores now ask each customer the same question: Are you a Prime member? That’s because Amazon recently implemented a new pricing structure at its bookstores that could signal a broader strategy for the company’s brick-and-mortar retail expansion. At the Amazon bookstore in Seattle’s University Village, Prime members who pay $99 for an annual membership…

Last week Simon & Schuster announced a new podcast created in partnership with CBS Radio's Play.it podcast network. The podcast "Paper Donkey" will feature interviews with famous editors and authors about how books are created and how editors help bring authors' vision to life. “We want to give people the chance to eavesdrop on the…

Amazon’s nascent plan to open physical bookstores is an experiment going well so far, according to Andy Jassy, who heads the company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services. “It’s an experiment for us, something we think could be very useful,” said Jassy, while speaking at the Wall Street Journal D Live conference on Tuesday. “So far,…

On November 3rd Book Business's sister publication Target Marketing will host a webinar on the power of design thinking to improve customer experiences. As book publishers become more consumer-focused, launching newsletters, consumer-facing websites, and ecommerce experiences, it's crucial that they inject design thinking into their marketing and sales efforts. The webinar "Design Thinking: A New…

In April, Leonard Riggio announced that he was stepping away from Barnes & Noble, the business he bought forty-five years ago and transformed into the world’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain. Come September, Riggio, now seventy-five, would happily retire. Or so he claimed. Though he had ceded the title of chief executive in 2002, Riggio remained the…

Over the past few years we’ve reported extensively on two major trends that have reshaped the book publishing landscape: direct-to-consumer marketing and digital book printing. While these topics could not be more different—one is a strategy for audience development and a catalyst for book sales while the other is a method of book production and…