Direct to Consumer Sales
March 14, 2016 at 2:23 pm
Amazon will see how customers respond to its Seattle bricks and mortar store before considering opening any in the UK, its vice president of global public policy has said. Paul Misener gave evidence at the department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ (BS) Digital Economy enquiry on 8th March, in which he was called to speak…
March 9, 2016 at 2:09 pm
Since Amazon opened its first brick and mortar bookstore in November, rumors have swirled about the Seattle online retailer's plans for more bookstores across the nation, with numbers between 10 and 400 outlets bandied about. Over the weekend Amazon confirmed it plans to open a second bookstore in San Diego sometime this summer, making its…
March 8, 2016 at 2:09 pm
One of the sessions I was most excited to attend at this year’s Digital Book World Conference & Expo was Rand Fishkin’s talk on search engine optimization (SEO) and book discovery. Fishkin is the CEO and founder of Moz, a leading SEO and content marketing software company. I anticipated this session would be filled with…
March 3, 2016 at 2:28 pm
This week Hachette Book Group (HBG) quietly updated its website in an effort to better align it with HBG’s direct-to-consumer marketing strategy. The upgraded site include a responsive design that improves mobile experience, original audio and video content, and sharable online book excerpts. Currently the site features an audio excerpt from the Jordanna Max Brodsky’s…
March 2, 2016 at 11:52 am
In the age of mobile, digital, social, and online shopping, brand and marketing messages are increasingly interpreted and catalogued by computers. As a result, metadata is taking on a new and important role for authors and publishers. It is becoming a crucial foundation for successful direct-to-consumer marketing and discoverability. We all know that content consumption…
February 19, 2016 at 3:24 pm
Trade publishers launched a number of new direct-to-consumer marketing initiatives this winter, all of which are efforts to make books more discoverable online and grow captive audiences. Recently three programs caught my attention: Crave, a romance fiction app launched in December by Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books; Signature, a consumer-facing site launched by Penguin Random…
February 18, 2016 at 1:37 pm
More than ever before, publishers are attempting to sell books directly to consumers. But, what if this trend plays right into Amazon’s hands? What if the effort to shift sales away from Amazon actually gives them more power? Could the direct-to-consumer (D2C) movement backfire and create a worse dynamic in the industry? We live in…
February 17, 2016 at 2:53 pm
As one of the smallest but also one of the more successful independent houses operating in New York City today, Soho Press has been publishing award-winning literary fiction from its Manhattan headquarters for some 30 years. The publisher's international crime imprint, meanwhile, for which Soho Press is perhaps best known, is currently celebrating its 25th…
February 16, 2016 at 9:39 am
Let’s pretend for a moment that there are no bookstores and as publishers we still need to sell books. How are we going to do that? For starters, let’s take a look at the recent trends for physical bookstore sales. There was welcome relief this year that sales at physical stores have stabilized, although I…
February 10, 2016 at 3:52 pm
First published in 2014, the second edition of the controversial “Author Earnings Report” was released this week. Written by the mysterious “Data Guy,” the report claims that traditional publishers, particularly the Big 5, have experienced a significant slump in ebook sales on Amazon in 2015 while indie-published authors surged ahead. According to Data Guy, “The…
