Marketing a Digital-First Imprint

Anne Treasure@annetreasure

• Office Assistant• Sales Coordinator • Sales and Operations Support• Trade Sales Representative

• Digital Marketing Executive

- 2011, Tom Gilliatt (then non-fiction publisher at Pan Mac) and Joel Naoum (then editor) - Experimental, digital-only imprint run as a start-up- Separate from Pan Mac, physically and intellectually

o globally-availableo low-costo reader-led o higher royalties o no advance

- New and backlist titles, from a variety of sources – literary agents, slush pile, Pan Macmillan out of print titles, even a book commissioned on the strength of a popular blog (How to Write Badly Well)

http://momentumbooks.com.au/

Information about a book like ISBN, price, category, blurb, availability and author information –essential to making a book discoverable in an online retail environment.

If there is insufficient metadata for a digital book, consumers simply will not find it – without metadata, ebooks are invisible.

The Link Between Metadata and Sales

A book with a cover image is 8 times more likely to sell than one without

A clear relationship between the completeness of basic metadata and sales

Neilsen White Paper, 2012

“As the internet becomes the consumer’s primary source of information, it’s likely that customers will increasingly discover andlearn about books via the information they can find about that book, rather than the physical product itself.”

BIC and BISAC codes

Discovery and Algorithms“When it comes to the really important decisions, data trumps intuition every time.” –Jeff Bezos

CommunityEngagement(ie ‘talking to readers’)

• Go to where the readers are• Communities of interest online around

genres, and subgenres• Social reading sites like Goodreads,

ReadSocial and Library Thing are a good start

Genre-based readerships

• Romance – biggest and most engaged community of readers online

• US-based Heroes and Heartbreakers • Review blogs like Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and

Dear Author• Pan Macmillan’s Momentum Moonlight• Harper Collins’ Escape Publishing (Kate Cuthbert)

• Science Fiction – a huge readership but more disparate • Tor.com • io9

Vertical Marketing

• Identifying a target audience and publishing books specifically to meet their interests

• Verticals are segments of the market that have similar reading proclivities

• Observing and interacting with already-established audiences provides a greater understanding of what they want

• Marketing a literary book by appealing to book snobs on tumblr versus a romance novel appealing to the ARRA community

https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/53121

Kylie Scott – from slush pile to bestseller

• Apocalyptic Erotic Romance submission – Momentum Monday

• Two books – Flesh and Skin• Gained a following• Rockstar Romance, New Adult • Popularity led to a print publishing deal

Practical – Vertical Markets

• Identify an audience (try narrowing it down to a genre first)• Start with social reading sites, then blogs, social media (Tumblr,

Twitter, Facebook) • Propose a project – could be a series of books, an author or a single

title that fits into a larger imprint