Cork University Press

webmarketing

Boris Wertz, COO of Abebooks.com, offered related advice on how to sell books to micro-markets. Like Lightning Source (see Monday's issue), Abebooks is living the Long Tail, Wertz said. The largest superstores offer 100,000 titles; Amazon has nearly 4 million titles; while Abebooks offers as many as 15 million from its 13,500 professional booksellers. (They have some 90 million new, used and out-of-print book listings. Last year sales amounted to $150 million.)

Many of Abebooks.com's booksellers are extremely specialized. For example, Dog Collector Books offers 2,592 titles for . . . dog collectors, and Food Heritage Press has 530 cookbooks. On the other hand, Astro-Logos Books, a POD company, has more than 240,000 titles available.

Echoing Chris Anderson of Wired magazine and author of the forthcoming Long Tail, Wertz emphasized that to connect with buyers, Abebooks.com and other companies working the Long Tail need "to create robust systems with strong search and filtering" mechanisms. To attract customers, he recommended pay-per-click ads on Google and Yahoo and using millions of key words. "Usually it costs 10 cents if someone clicks on an ad," Wertz said, estimating that even with one order, the return on investment can be 10,000%.

Companies "need to get all products into search engines so people who go there will find them." Companies should also partner with other Web sites. (More than 10,000 sites include Abebooks.com banners and product links.) Wertz noted, too, that "more and more people are using search engines to start the shopping process" even if they know the name of a store's Web site.

In one of many ways to retain buyers, Abebooks.com has a service under which a customer gives Abebooks the name of an author, title or keyword of interest to him or her. "We check our database daily," he said, "and if it matches, we send that person information about the new title in our database."

From Shelf Awareness

Making Information Pay: Web Marketing

At last week's Book Industry Study Group's Making Information Pay conference, Carol Fitzgerald, co-founder and president of the Book Report Network, gave tips on marketing on the Web and offered several case histories based on her experience.

The Book Report Network has seven sites about books and authors, has built more than 100 author Web sites and done Internet marketing campaigns for more than 80 books as well as a lot of marketing directly for authors. The company is 10 years old.

Among early Internet campaigns she worked on: Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, a PublicAffairs title about American submarine espionage. "We talked with Navy sub vets who congregated on particular Web sites and found submariners holding reunions," she said. They soon got reunion coordinators to distribute fliers about the book. The title had a 12,000 first printing and has 440,000 copies in print.

For the 2004 book Yiddish With Dick and Jane by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, Little, Brown schlepped the message online with a "really funny" video that cost about $10,000. "Everyone wants to break up the work day by passing along and reading funny e-mails," she said. The book's first printing was 27,500; it now has 175,000 copies in print. Fitzgerald did caution that with viral videos, "sometimes funny falls flat, but it really works when it's fun."

Last November, Bobby Henderson put a petition on his Web site related to his forthcoming The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The day before the book came out in March, Villard did an e-mail blast to the 12,000 people on the list, which was enough to move the title on Amazon. Other Internet elements of the campaign include banners on popular Web sites like facebook.com. The online costs were $5,000; offline were another $5,000. After a 15,000 first printing, 40,000 copies are in print.

Perigee, which has a specialty in autism and special needs titles, has developed online contact lists and regularly sends e-mail releases to them. Now it has created a full-fledged e-mail newsletter whose inaugural issue began in April in conjunction with Autism Awareness Month. Some of its titles, like The Out of Sync Child by Carol Stock Kranowitz, released last month, have "very small initial sales but become backlist staples" and sell well on Amazon.com.

For Delaying the Real World: A Twentysomething's Guide to Seeking Adventure by Colleen Kinder, Running Press created a Delaying the Real World Fellowship that college graduates could join and that offered them prizes. Other Internet promotions for the book have included ads on Google and visibility on college career centers and college oriented sites like Fastweb as well as e-cards. After an initial investment of about $7,000 for the Web site and e-card, the publisher spends about $3,000 a year on Internet promotions, and is able to tap new readers "because there are always new grads coming out."

Among general tips Fitzgerald offered:

• Develop a Web marketing strategy with the original marketing plan; don't think that "after all else has failed," a late Web plan will save the book.
• Do a lot of research into online sites. "There are hundreds of millions of Web sites out there, and many are not useful." Still, Fitzgerald added that compared to the late '90s, "most sites now will stay around. It's not as fly by night as it used to be."
• Think quality over quantity. "Get the one right place; it will grow from there."
• "Think targeted, think wide. Then think even wider and deeper."
• Test and keep results of what works and doesn't work. "With your second campaign, you'll know where to start."
• Above all, "be patient and realistic."

From Shelf Awarness

Self Published Authors now have an excellent Review and Promo source

If you are a new author or a self published author, you have discovered how difficult it is to get a professional respected review. Visit the Allbooks Reviews website today and then contact us and join the hundreds of authors that have discovered how beneficial an Allbooks Review can be to selling your books. We even offer our bookstore where you can post your title, covershot, price and purchase information and sell directly to consumers.

Allbooks Reviews authors are our greatest advertising so visit the site today http://www.allbooksreviews.com and read their comments.Get your book reviewed by the professionals that are well respected in the industry.

Do You Really Understand the 80/20 Rule?

Few rules are more widely quoted in marketing today than the 80/20 Rule (the Pareto's Principle), which states that 80% of your sales come from just 20% of your customer base.

In this age of relationship marketing, this rule has become an often-heard battle cry to focus our efforts on maintaining the loyalty of customers belonging to the golden 20% that drive most of our business, while spending less effort on the trivial other 80%.

Intuitively, it makes sense. But this marketing interpretation of the 80/20 rule is actually flawed.

All About Branding

http://www.allaboutbranding.com

This site is a branding information resource published by New Zealand-based DNA Design, a design and branding firm. Incidentally, this firm understands the power of search engine optimization as it relates to branding, as their site consistently ranked in the top 5 results for 'branding' during our preparatory research. Topics are divided into action verbs -- Creating, Communicating, Living, Measuring, Managing and Extending -- your brand, of course. You are likely to find more cutting-edge and topical articles about current Internet tactics and trends and their impact on brands here, because these people live and breath the business. Of special interest are articles on how blogging builds your brand and the constant struggle to attach ROI to a brand's value.

© 1995-2005 Chase Online Marketing Strategies, All Rights Reserved.

A Marketing Toolkit for Every CEO

CEOs face challenges every day. If you're the CEO of a small or medium-sized business, your challenges not only include prioritizing the numerous demands on your time, balancing short-term opportunities with long term goals, managing cash flow and long sales cycles, solving resource shortages ranging from funds to people, but also wearing a the variety of hats. You are often responsible for closing key deals and serving as the company's primary marketer.

Every toolkit should have six basic items:

A hammer, to use as a lever
A wrench, to turn things
A screwdriver, to attach or close things
Pliers, to bend things or hold on to small stuff
Screws, bolts, duct tape or super glue, to connect things
A measuring tape, to—you guessed it!—take measurements
Let's translate these everyday tools into marketing tools.

The Business of Search Engine Marketing

An excellent new book focuses both on tactics as well as the managerial and organizational tasks required for effective large-scale search marketing campaigns.

Most search marketing books I've seen to date are highly tactical tomes, filled with advice on methods, approaches and techniques for achieving search engine success. While most of these books offer useful advice for individuals wanting to hone their search marketing chops, virtually none of them consider search marketing as a team process.

No surprise there—the pioneers in search marketing were individuals and small companies who wore all of the various hats involved in the process. Even today, the largest search marketing firms are tiny by comparison to companies in more established industries.

But search marketing has become more complex, and the skills required for a comprehensive search marketing campaign often transcend the capabilities of single individuals, especially for major campaigns run by large organizations.

More Pages, Higher Sales

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a rule of thumb that could tell you exactly how to increase your catalog's response rates and sales? Well there is. I call it the rule of "More Pages, Higher Sales." As always, I'll start with a precise definition:

The Rule of More Pages, Higher Sales

If you add pages that sell product to a consumer catalog, you'll get higher response rates and sales in rough proportion to the number of pages added.

"What makes this rule work?"

This rule works because adding pages usually means adding more products.

For example, say you have a 16-page catalog with a product density of five products per page. Excluding the front cover, you're offering 75 products. Now if you add an extra four--page signature (your catalog grows to 20 pages), and if those extra pages have the same product density as the rest of your catalog, then you'll be offering 20 additional products— a 27 percent increase.

These extra products give your readers more opportunities to buy, and that leads to higher sales.

Bibliography of Public Relations Measurement

The Bibliography of Public Relations Measurement provides the reader with a systematic approach to measurement and research in public relations.
By Tina Caroll and Don W. Stacks, Ph.D.

10 minutes guide to Customer Service

Chartered Institute of Marketing has a 10 minutes guide to Customer Service. It covers understanding what customers want, the dialogue with customers, selecting and developing service standards, involving staff, organising, and delivering improved customer service.

Download 10_min_Customer_Service_Progamme.pdf