Much of the discussion about Steve Jobs’s biography centers on his management style, or lack thereof. But after reading the book, I found information that is relevant to the publishing industry. I will offer my interpretations of Steve Jobs’s philosophies and actions as they could apply to book publishing in two parts.
The most expensive part of publishing is a mistake. If you can avoid the most common traps into which unsuccessful publishers fall, you increase your chance of success significantly. You may be on the right path to publishing success… but heading in the wrong direction. Let these tips be your GPS to becoming more profitable.
- There is no “one way” to market a book. There is no formula for book-publishing success. Learn what works best for you and your circumstances, create your plan and then give it your best effort.
- Understand marketing. Marketing is a process that begins with recognizing the needs of your potential customers, and then moves to developing, pricing distributing and promoting products and services to build profits by creating and expanding demand.
- Know your target reader. No book is saleable to “everybody who likes [your topic].” Use a PAR (Problem-Action-Result) statement to define the typical reader as carefully as possible in terms of gender, income, age, education and shopping preferences. This will help you focus your marketing activities.
At the BISG ninth annual Making Information Pay Conference, held at the McGraw Hill auditorium on May 3, seven expert presenters took the assembled 200 industry professionals through a fast-paced three-and-a-half-hour session slicing Big Data down to manageable bites.
Not for the faint of heart, the event was focused on the message that Angela Bole, BISG Deputy Executive Director opened with. Citing a McKinsey Institute study’s warning of a critical shortage of expert analytical information workers she said that “It’s our belief that, as an industry, we need to harness the awesomeness of ‘deep analytical expertise’ in order to create the kind of book industry that’s truly capable of the innovation necessary to stay relevant over the coming years.”
Big Data, she said, “refers to the act of ‘taming’ the volume, variety and velocity of massive datasets.” It is what takes us to a place where we’re now able to develop holistic approaches to full-scale strategies that are analytical in the deepest sense of the term.”
Maket segmentation is the process of dividing your overall sales opportunity into unique, defined, manageable groups of people. You know this as a fundamental marketing technique, but if you look at it in a new way it is even more likely to increase your sales, revenue and profits.
Locating opportunities that are not immediately visible is what I call “marketing in the white space”—the undefined area surrounding the segments, the places where you can create new sales in uncontested market space where your competition is irrelevant. Here, demand is created rather than fought over, and growth may be profitable and rapid.
I have exhibited or attended each of the last 22 BookExpo America shows, and I served my time as a trade-show manager for Fortune 500 companies. I understand what makes a profitable experience at such an event. My BEA experiences have shown me that book publishers could do a great deal more to improve the results they get from their exhibiting expenditures.
The exhibitors’ focus is on the authors because they are trying to sell their books. And that is where they go wrong. They could sell more books by translating how the content of the books can benefit the customers. Let’s take the focus off of glitz and put it where it belongs: consummating large-quantity sales and making the contacts that can lead to future sales.
An energized Publishing Business Conference and Expo, Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines’ annual event at the Times Square Marriott Marquis, March 19-21, was grounded in optimism and realism, and primed for a promising future in the digital age for book manufacturing and print-based book production.
Addressing the overflow audience at the Marriott's Astor Ballroom, our very own Joan of Arc at the ramparts, Editorial Director Noelle Skodzinski—fully armed with the arguments of comon sense and history to support her—sounded a much-needed balancing and defiant keynote to prevailing “stiff upper lip” scenarios about the decline of the publishing industry. She reminded us, paraphrasing from both Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Encyclopedia Britannica blog’s notice that it had discontinued its venerable print edition, that publishing is not dead, change is okay, and that the future is alive with new opportunities in our pursuit of continued success and excellence in the publishing business.
There is a fairly common marketing concept that can help you write a better press release, perform more successfully on the air, and sell more books in large, non-returnable quantities to corporate buyers. It is called a Customer Value Proposition (CVP) and it is a concise way to clearly and quickly portray to prospective buyers how your content can benefit them.
Recently Barnes & Noble announced that it would not sell books in its brick and mortar store that are published by Amazon’s new print publishing division. Shortly after this, Books-a-Million, Canada’s largest bookseller Indigo Books and Music and the American Booksellers Association also announced that they were joining the boycott.
These are, indeed, interesting times we live in. Have you ever heard of an instance like this? In ANY industry? Competitor B launches a boycott of competitor A, paints it as being for the good of the industry, and gets support from other competitors? Not I.
It’s time to come up with new words for what we’re creating. “Ebooks” just doesn’t cut it anymore.
The past week pretty much covered the gamut of what’s going on in our industry for me. Tuesday I heard a wonderful, impassioned speech about physical books. And then on Thursday… well, perhaps you’ve heard that Apple made an announcement or two.
On Tuesday night, Kevin Spall (CEO of Thomson-Shore, Inc.) gave a speech at the Book Industry Guild of New York meeting. Kevin spoke, not only of his background, but spent some time reminding us what a wonderful thing the printed/bound book is. The history, of course, is rich. I confess that I did not realize that codex binding (basically the same thing we do today) has been around for over 1,700 years. Of course, some will describe that history as “rich” and others as “ancient” (and not in a good way).
Stop selling your books and make more money.
This may sound like an odd notion to a publisher, but you can achieve the most success by not selling your book, but by selling the benefits potential customers will get from your book’s content. In other words, the form in which your content is sold is less important than the content itself—particularly to non-retail buyers (in corporations, associations, etc).
Frank Fochetta, the Vice President and Director of Special Sales and Custom Publishing at Simon and Schuster, agrees.
