Marketing Books Today

The book publishing business has changed since the advent of the Iinternet, and continues to change as the Internet and technology evolve and people's reading habits change.

This is not just about what they read, but how and when they read. As publishers, we have to understand this and adapt what we do with the new market and the new ways people want to get their reading materials.

This is the first in what will be a series of essays on the book trade from the point of view of Hancock House as a small, targetted publisher. We'll focus on various aspects of the trade as it pertains to both the reader and the resellers that we work with. Some of the articles will be only available to members of our site — our resellers  — and some will be available to you, the reading public.

First, I'd like to introduce myself and let you know why I think I might have some insight into this topic.

I'm Richard C. Pitt, and aside from being a reader of all manner of books since the mid 1950s when I was a child, I've been in and around marketing in general for over 30 years, and been intimately involved in the Internet from the mid 1980s, long before most people knew it existed.

I've also known Hancock House in excess of 20 years and done work with and for the company many times in this period.

Today, I'm working as the promotions manager for Hancock House — not permanently, but as a consultant  — in order to create the infrastructure and documentation necessary for others to step into this position in the future and have it evolve as the publishing industry evolves. In fact, I've taught the previous promotions managers the Internet side of things; however, a problem was that none of them could adapt what they knew about marketing and the publishing industry as it has been, to the marketing environment as it now is.

I don't claim to know the ultimate answer, but in the light of my knowledge of the Internet and its foibles, what I am doing is building new marketing strategies and facilities that will deal with today and will adapt to tomorrow.

Now that you know where I'm coming from, maybe you'll click on Read More and find out where we're going.

What it all comes down to is that despite the wonderful and incredible facilities of the Internet today, there are still topics and opinions that lend themselves to being expressed in the traditional "book" format, and that authors want to be paid for and not disseminate freely on the Internet. Authors need to get their books into the hands of their readers, and there are a couple of ways that this happens.

There are many who "self" publish: publish through an instant printing web site (or provide simply as an e-book) and sell only via the Internet using things like PayPal for recieving payment.

Then there are the more traditional publishers who still cater to that portion of the public that likes their reading materials professionally edited, laid out, formatted and illustrated — aspects of book production that tend to be lacking in self-published books.

This is the arena that Hancock House Publishers is in. We have in-house editing, design and layout people who have been with us for many years.  They know our various niche subjects well enough that they are valuable to the authors every bit as much as they are to the readers of the final product.

We also have some market ties that make getting books into the purchasing public's hands easier and better than just putting up a web site and hoping people come to it.

Our problem is how do we continue to keep you informed about what we are doing, what books are coming, and why you should order them and/or stock them?

Over the years we've used direct mail and email. Today direct mail is expensive enough that we're looking at other ways — but we have not given up on it totally.

Email is all but out because even if you expect it from us, it gets buried in the other 98% of the email that is spam, and we simply don't get through to your desktop. Even if we do, most people are simply inundated with email information and end up deleting much even before its read. We know. We do it ourselves. Frustration.

So, what do we do?

Well, we move into the new marketing era and get you to come to us, and set up your systems so that when we have new and intersting information for you, your system simply tells you and you come when you want to rather than when we tell (ask, implore, beg) you to.

Much of this will revolve around "permission marketing" where you, the purchasing public and trade resellers will have to step up to the plate and give us permission to market to you. We can no longer simply purchase email lists (or snail mail lists) and send out our information in hopes that you will read it and decide to purchase. Today that's called spam and the laws (rightly so) have been put in place to make the practice illegal.

Even if it were not illegal, it simply no longer works effectively since there are so many easy ways to tell your ISP that email from someone well identified (as our is) is not welcome, thereby making it impossible for us to get anything to you no matter how much we send. If our address is blocked, we can't even send you confirmation of an order, so we're being careful not to annoy your ISPs or you.

Instead of (spam) email, we now have to put up pages of information to attract you to them and get you to keep coming back to check if we have new material. Fortunately, there are some new and developing ways for us to get your attention, and once we have it, to have your own systems tell you about new things.

The major of these new Internet facilities is called "Really Simple Syndication" or RSS for short. Our web site will have many such RSS "feeds" and you can select to have your system watch as many or as few as you wish. Whenever there is something new in the particular category you are "watching," your system will tell you and you can visit at your leisure.

We're also looking into using some of the other Internet facilities that are evolving today, including various "social" network systems and facilities. Personally, I'm of the opinion that these will not prove to be very commercially viable since they are far more oriented toward personal contact rather than business contact. Businesses using the facilities don't seem to be attracting enough attention to warrant the cost. That doesn't mean that social networking won't play a part, it just won't be a big part.

This series of articles is one such "attraction" that we're hoping you'll be interested in enough that you'll come and visit. We're going to be putting information here and in our various member-only areas that will be valuable to you in your own marketing and sales tasks.

At this point we have two different Trade areas we'll be doing articles for, and we'll be adding other more specific ones as time progresses: Book Traders General, and Rack Traders (non-book stores with the Hancock House rotary racks).

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