If we lived in the Prairie Home Companion’s village of Lake Wobegon, all of our book titles would have above average sales.  Want to know whether your book’s sales are above average?  The staff at the Southern Review of Books (SRB) have come up with a rough benchmark based on some recent industry sales data.  They have computed that the average book sold 7,608 copies in 2007.  How did they determine this? 

First, they started with data from W.W. Bowker showing the number of books published in the U.S. in 2007.  On May 28, 2008, Bowker released its latest statistics on book production in the U.S. and estimated that 411,422 new titles were published in 2007.  Of those, 276,649 were traditionally manufactured titles (ink on paper), and 134,773 were digitally manufactured titles (toner on paper), also referred to as print on demand (POD) titles.  Bowker derives its book production figures from year-to-date data from over 72,000 U.S. publishers and include traditional print as well as on-demand titles.  Audiobooks and E-books are excluded.  

Next, the Southern Review of Books staff considered unit sales from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), which shows that U.S. publishers produced 3.13 billion copies of their books in 2007. Dividing the BISG unit sales by the Bowker figure of 411,422 new titles, one gets a mean average of 7,608 copies per title.  Thus, any title selling more than 7,608 copies would be defined as “above average,” and any book with fewer copies sold would be “below average.”

Here are some caveats from SRB about the average they computed:

• The mean is an average of low-run POD titles combined with high-run traditional titles.  POD runs typically don’t exceed 1,000 copies, since this is not economically feasible.  This means POD titles are generally below average from the start . 
• Similarly, offset runs for ink-on-paper titles typically become economical above 1,000 copies, so traditionally published books are more likely to be found in the above-average category.
• The average above applies only to titles published in 2007. 
• The numbers from BISG and Bowker are based on reporting systems that use samples and don’t necessarily produce absolutely accurate information.
• It’s unlikely that unit book sales published in 2007 would follow an unskewed normal bell-shaped curve distribution. That’s because roughly two thirds of new titles were conventional ink-on-paper titles with large press runs, while one out of three, or a third of the total, were toner on paper print on demand books that likely had small press runs well below 1,000 copies on average. That would produce a distribution skewed to the right, or positive/traditionally published side of the distribution.

With regard to the last point, here is what we would expect from an unskewed normal distribution.

# of std. dev. from avg.	# of titles	% of titles
1	279,776	68 %
2	111,084	27 %
3	19,336	4.7 %
4 or more	1,236	0.3 %

Unfortunately, we live in a world where such distributions are skewed.  But the 7,608 average is at least a starting point.  So if you want a title to be above average, figure out what it will take to sell 7,608 copies (plus one).  Averages are useful, but here are some suggestions for the future:

• A more interesting average in today’s multimedia, multi-format world might be average IP revneue units sold, which would include copies sold in any format - print, electronic, audio, etc. 
• Compute averages based on a more comprehensive and detailed sales tracking database like BookScan.
• Compute averages for categories.

Perhaps uUsing mulitple averages, will allow all of our titles be above average.

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The July 2008 issue of Wired has a thought provoking article by Chris Anderson entitled The Petabyte Age.  A petabyteis an unimaginably large amount of data - 1,000 terabytes or a quadrillion bytes.  The article catalogs a number of important applications using datasets measured in petabytes; everything from agriculture to politics.  Anderson has asserted that the availability of these huge datasets is lessening our reliance on the predictive value of theory and mathematical / statistical models.  Models have an elegant and convenient compactness, but often a limited predictive ability.  “Big data” closes the predictive gaps if you have the storage and processing power to manipulate and make sense of it.

The Petabyte Age is the natural outcome of three “laws” (ahem, recall those compact models).  These are Moore’s Lawwhich governs the growth in computer processing power; Kryder’s Law which predicts hard disk storage cost per unit of information; and Butter’s Law which measures the capacity of the fiber optic network underpinning the Internet.  These laws are synergistic - processing power can be greatly amplified by hooking servers and PCs together in computing networks; storage can be extended via disk arrays; and huge datasets can be accessed over high speed, high capacity fiber optic networks. 

So all this discussion of “Big Data” got me thinking: The whole bibliosphere could be radically changed.

• Authors could tap into gigantic databases to do incredibly detailed research on people and places.  Novelists could scan the entire body of literature to see where “story gaps” might exist to be exploited. 
• Publishers could track readership trends based on accumulated book sales data and accurately predict the success or failure of any book prior to its publication.   
• Readers could go to their favorite online bookstore get a pinpoint recommendations based upon analyses of buying histories, correlated with with behvaioral, demographic and psychographic profiles. 

But the one thing that probably won’t change is the way we package all the new knowledge that “peta processing” delivers?  We will likely use the same book size packets - whether in print or electronic form - we use today.  Why?

The book is the anti-petabyte.  It is perfectly tuned to the human mind.  Stories are how we make sense of things.  Our brains are confronted by petabytes of raw data during our lives; yet the memories we create out of that torrent can be squeezed into a terabyte or two.  The stories we tell - whether of fact or fiction - represents the imprecise model, the compact and convenient approximations that leave us wanting more.  Biologists tell us that this filtering is the core of our success as a species. 

I can marvel at the power of Big Data and Cloud Computing.  But being human, I will always believe the real power lies in the Little Story.

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Blog networkshave been around for awhile and represent a new form of online publishing - functioning as online magazines or newspapers.  In earlier posts, I have talked in general terms about how blog networks might serve as the foundation for a more open model of book publishing.  Now it’s time to talk specifics.

First, the rationale.  Publishing is risky business.  The biggest risk, and the progenitor of most other risks in publishing, is title selection.  Publishers have experiemented with different modelsin an effort to address this risk.  In the past, publishers have relied on the judgment and experience of editors or agents to act as gatekeepers to the publishing kingdom.  Sometimes celebrity status or previous publishing success serve as good rpoxies for judgment and experience.  And sometimes the title acquisition process is more subjective and opaque.  More often that not the results are less than satisfactory.

Another approach is to substitute voting for gate keeping.  How would this work?  Enter the blook network.  It starts with the premise that anyone might be a successful author; we just don’t know which ones.  So provide anyone who has a story, an idea or a manuscript the opportunity to try and find an audience big enough to be book-worthy.  The tool for this is a blog.  The publisher rents the writer space in a blog network with a style guide for blogging in a manner that makes it relatively easy to go from blog to book.  The rental also includes an appropriate set of metrics to track how the writer’s audience building efforts are doing.

Blogs on related topics are linked.  In this way, stronger established blogs help direct traffic to newer blogs.  Blog statistics are tracked by the publisher to determine which blooks are developing an audience.  When pre-established audience targets are met, the publisher is alerted and may decide to publish the writer’s work.  The publisher correlates audience statistics with sales data for books in the category (e.g. from Book Scan) to make the final publishing determination.  In this way, analytics guide the decision to make the publishing investment.  Since the blog has been structured to be easily converted to a book, time to market is faster.  Editors use metrics to identify the best content in the final manuscript, thus helping to ensure a more marketable product.

The blook network helps the publisher find authors who can build an audience sufficient to warrant publication.  And the discovery engine pays for itself (or even earns a profit).  Even writers who are not successful in terms of getting published will have useful information (in the form of metrics, reader comments, etc.) that they can use to refine or retarget their efforts.

The process can be summarized as:

• Replace manuscripts with blogs
• Replace the slush pile with a publisher’s blog network
• Structure network blogs so their content can be readily converted into books
• Combine blog metrics and book sales data to determine when and who to publish
• Reinforce traffic to new writer blogs with links from high traffic network blogs

The benefits to publishers of using this approach are that it:

• Creates added capacity for publishers to take on new writers without expense
• Generates service revenue while the writer is developing an audience
• Provides detailed knowledge of the market before the book is published
• Provides a speedier path to market

The blook network is a potentially powerful tool for helping publishers better manage the risk of title acquisition and provide a firmer rationalization of their investments in editing, production and marketing.

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Book Vid Lit

by Sheila Clover-English

Sheila Clover English, the CEO of Circle of Seven Productions, has been a pioneer in book video production, marketing and distribution for authors and publishers.

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Nielsen ratings systems did away with using view counts to measure website success and instead switched over to time spent as a way to rate. This way of measuring success is far more indicative of real life engagement by a viewer. You can have 100,000 hits, but if the viewer isn’t there long enough to at least absorb the message of the video those hits are meaningless.

Matt Cutler, Vice President of Visible Measures, a company that tracks online behavior, estimates that more than 30 per cent of consumers abandon an online video within the first 10 per cent of its stream. He goes on to give an example saying that for every 100 viewers you will have 30 that will click away within the first 10% of the video. This is called “Initial Attention Abandonment.”

Some of the reasons for Initial Attention Abandonment have to do with trust, transparency, engagement and entertainment.

Trust - This has more to do with branding. Is this a brand viewers know they will have a good experience with? Will they get the kind of content they’re promised by tags and titles?

Transparency - Is the video in a place where the person can tell what they’re going to get? Do they realize they’re getting an ad or are you trying to trick them into thinking it’s something else? Not only can you lose a viewer once they realize they’ve been tricked, but this is a quick way to damage your brand.

Engagement - Does the video give them something to do? Be it physical or mental or even emotional, does the first 10% of your video offer them a way to engage the video? Some videos can be a talking head that just delivers a message, but with every viewer sitting there with their finger on the mouse just waiting to go on to the next thing, there aren’t going to be a lot of videos that can be just an ad message delivery system that will be successful.

Entertainment - Give your most gripping, most powerful, most complete message about your story or product that conveys to viewers that they are being, or about to be, entertained within that first 10% of your video. People have so much to choose from to keep them entertained. Why should they watch YOUR video as a source of entertainment? You need to have something that conveys how entertaining your video is going to be for them right away or you will lose them. You can’t “build” your story or message to a climactic end unless that initial “building” is a sensational opening.

What should I include in the first 10% of my video?

You should have visuals or text that immediately convey all of the above elements. Not an easy task. Let’s take a look at a successful book video that includes all of these elements, Dark Possession by author Christine Feehan. You can watch the video yourself at Dark Possession - Christine Feehan - TV Version.  I chose the MySpace site specifically because MySpace requires a viewer to watch just over half the video before the view is counted. If you watch less than half, the view won’t count. This video has been viewed nearly 20,000 times.

Trust- The title and description let people know what the video is. It is a book video. It is about the novel by Christine Feehan.

Transparency- From the start we let people know it is a book video by stating it is from Bestselling Author Christine Feehan.

Engagement- The engagement here is emotional. You see the couple running for their lives. You’re told two worlds are colliding, the living and the dead. Now your viewer wants to know what’s happening to the couple. What are they running from? Who are they? What are they? You have engaged them by making them want to know more and by putting an attractive couple in a dangerous environment.

Entertainment- The viewer is given a sense of romance, danger and adventure within a short period of time. They get special effects and at the end, “the tease” that leaves them wondering what happened.

People are more likely to share a video like this. There are several elements that are worth having a conversation about. The video, through text and visuals, poses questions while bringing the viewer into the action.

How can you keep people from clicking away? Well, if I knew that I’d be making the big bucks! But, I can speculate just as well as any major media goliath can. Part of what keeps them from clicking away is the video itself. Part of it is where the video is located. Is it where people who like paranormal romance reside? Part of it is timing. Your video may end up having something in common with a current news topic. There may not be a whole lot of new content out at that time. Part of it is the topic of the storyline. There are so many factors that go into what will make people stay and watch the video that you really have to concentrate on the things you CAN control.

Make a great book video. Make sure the first 10% of your video offers enough to keep them watching. Give it a good title, tags and descriptions. Distribute it to the right online destinations. Instruct your client/author/publisher to utilize it. And then, just like CBS, HBO, NBC or any other media giant…hope it goes viral.

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Could our books be spying on us? 

While this might sound like the ravings of a paranoid delusional, marketers, supplied by willing service vendors, and armed with plenty of computing power, are able to extract a fair amount of information about our daily lives from the copious electronic records we leave behind in every transaction.   Consider some of the recent press (e.g. BusinessWeek) about “reality mining.”  Reality mining is the process of extracting information from the usage patterns from cell phones and other wireless devices.  This process is detailed in an article by two leading MIT reality mining researchers, entitled “Reality Mining: Sensing Complex Social Systems.”

Reality mining is a sophisticated new type of data mining that is enabled by copious bread crumbs of data generated when we use wireless devices.  When these devices are equipped with GPS chips, the data offers a geographical component to the behavior pattern being monitored.  Reality mining has been used for modeling how people might respond to terrorist attacks, help cities ease traffic congestion and help planners determine the best location for schools and hospitals.  In the future it might be used to track the spread of infectious diseases, according to an article in Technology Review.

Theis leads one to wonder whether - as we move more of our reading to portable electronic devices - someone might be combing through the electronic footprints we leave to try and tease our some information we might rather keep private.  As more book reading takes place online - whether as text on cell phones, e-book readers like Kindle, or simply as snippets delivered in your Blackberry’s e-mail - one can imagine that soon publishers and retailers might start collecting information about our e-reading habits such frequency, duration and even where / when (if the device is GPS enabled).  Combine this with the type of sales information already available and it provides a pretty powerful peek into what was once our private literary domain.

There are plenty of concerns about privacy.  Not only about the collection and sharing of data without consent, but also the interpretation of that data.  A year ago, the public was shocked by a story in the Washington Post and other newspapers about the existence and extent of a program of profiling of average Americans by the Department of Homeloand Security.  Concerns may shift now to the way in which commercial enterprises might attempt to use reality mining to tease out the nuances of our economic and social behavior.

Perhaps our best hope for defending our privacy in an “always on” society, is that human behavior is fickle and unpredictable.  Computer programs, however powerful, and data archive, however vast, represent past knowledge.  And, as every social scientist knows, the past does not necessarily predict the future.

But just in case, you may want to unplug your Kindle and simply curl up with your cozy - and silent - paper based book.

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Should we prepare for significantly higher book prices?  The signals from the commodities markets seem to be saying an emphatic “yes!”  Commodity prices are rising to new heights driven by a number of factors, including:  increased competition from rapidly industrializing economies like India and China; soaring energy costs; and, paradoxically from dislocations caused by the boom in biofuels.

Books require a host of input commodities for their production including:  paper, inks , chemicals used for coatings.  Here are a couple of examples. 

• As reported in PrintWeek, paper suppliers told printers earlier this year to expect price hikes of 8% or more.  In addition to increased manufacturing expenses, sky high energy costs are raising distributino costs. 
• Another commodity used in the production of paper is sulfuric acid.  This chemical is also used in the production of fertilizers.  The boom in corn planting, driven by the biofuels boom, is causing major shortages.  The price of the compound has shot a whopping 266% over the past 5 months according to a recent article in BusinessWeek. 

To date, producer price increases have been running ahead of price increases at the consumer level.  But as our current unpleasant experience with retail food and energy prices demonstrates, this won’t last long.  Unless there is a major cooling of economic growth, on a global scale, this commodities price surge may be longer lasting than previous cycles.  If real incomes continue to stagnate or decline, books may become a one of those discretionary expenditures that is the first to go when belts are tightened.

Many pundits have opined about the imminent demise of the printed book at the hands of technology - whether the Internet or e-books or books read on iPhones.  But, if, as author Richard Heinberg has suggested, we are witnessing “peak everything,” the real threat to the printed book might be ever increasing commodities prices, driven by scenarios outlined over three decades ago in Limits to Growth.

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First consider the size and structure of the blogosphere.  The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years.  There are now over 100 million blogs tracked by Technorati, which doesn’t even include the more than 70 million Chinese blogs.  According to recent demographic surveys by the Pew Internet Study and the New York Times / CBS News, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area. 

Blogs focused on a given topic tend to link to similar blogs.  What this means is you can use blogs to:

• Develop an audience for your work while you write
• Promote your book effectively and at low cost once it is written

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically 300-500 words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog? Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area. The more you blog, the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results, and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can:

• Feature your book on a special blog page, with your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials; thus your blog can double as a book website.
• Promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.  A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work. 

The blogosphere is not the only place to market your work, but it can one of the best. 

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.  This is, in essence, the new author book pitch.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work, and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

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Don’t underestimate the power of customer reviews to influence buyer behavior and impact product sales.  New studies are confirming this message to online vendors, including book publishers.  As reported on e-Marketer, recent studies conducted by PowerReviews, the e-tailing group and Avenue A / Razorfish found that most online buyers seek out one or more user reviews before making a purchase.

Here are some of the interesting findings:

• Over 43% of respondents said that they read product reviews prior to making a purchase
• Over 46% said they read 4-7 reviews  <show graph> 
• The use of user reviews trounced both comparison charts and expert reviews 55% to 22% and 21 %, respectively. 

In the world of consumer e-commerce, consumer generated media, in the form of reviews, clearly are more influential than expert opinion. 

Dave Chaffey, an Internet marketing specialist, underscored the power of reviews on page views, sales conversion rates, total sales value and for online customers.  (His site also provides some useful tips on how to best utilize customer ratings and reviews.)  Another good source of advice on how to use the reviews your product gets can be found in a post by Bryan Eisenberg, How to Use Customer Reviews to Increase Conversion.

In fact, BazaarVoice, quoting a study from comScore / Kelsey in October, 2007, indicated that Consumers were willing to pay between 20 to 99% more for a 5-star rated product than for a 4-star rated product, depending on the product category.  This can translate into greater customer satisfaction.  According to another, Foresee Results, reviews drive 21% higher purchase satisfaction and 18% higher loyalty.

Of course there are now citizen book reviewers who make a career (unpaid) out of reviewing books.  In some respects, they are becoming the new expert reviewers, gatekeepers to consumer wallets.  Awhile back, Lisa Ede shared here thoghts about the motivations and techniques of these new inflencers in an interesting interview with Paul Bausch.  A more detailed examination of the citizen reviewer is available on her blog, The Writing Way.

Ultimately, a customer’s purchase decision is based on trust.  The long tail of e-commerce has put more choices in front of customers.  As advertising, expert reviews and even the testimonials of experts printed on book covers, have become ubiquitous, tiresome and suspect, the advice and guidance of anonymous peers has assumed a greater standing in the buyer’s trust hierarchy. 

Caveat vendor!

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Movie producers have developed many different channels to help offset the high cost of films.  These include theatre distribution, TV, DVD sales and rentals, and movie merchandise tie-ins (e.g. see Movie Money).  Book publishers don’t generally have seven or eight figure production costs to contend with, but they have a highly fragmented audience.  They must consider which channels are most appropriate to reach their target audience.  Managing channel risk is one key to success.  For example, retail bookstore channels offer wide exposure for a title, but sales are contingent.  Returns of up to 30% are the norm and can swamp the profitability of smaller publishers. 

In addition to the traditional retail and online bookstores, new channels are now opening up to publishers.   These include:

• Retail bookstores
• Online booksellers
• Libraries
• Educational channels
• Catalog sales
• Non-bookstore retail 
• Non-traditional channels - e.g. gift and corporate channels
• Book rentals
• Serialized delivery to e-mail or mobile devices
• Direct sales

But how should a publisher judge which channels will be most effective for the finite marketing resouces he or she has to invest?  The book channel mix should be weighted according to risk and then ranked according to reward.  In this sense, it is like constructing an investment portffolio.  Here is one suggested technique. 

For the risk factors consider:

• Access and service costs- This factor is based on the selling and marketing costs required to establish and maintain a presence in a given channel.  Part of the cost is related to the length of the sales cycle.  For example, corporate sales often have a lengthy sales cycle with multiple decision makers invovled.
• Contingency - This factor concerns the degree of risk associated with returns.  Retailers typically can return unsold merchandise to the publisher at the publisher’s expense.  Often the returned books are not in salable condition.
• Commitment- This factor takes into account such things as the level of inventory reqired to service the channel and the degree to which the inventory is covered by prepayment.

The rewards for selecting a certain channel are determined by its effectiveness - the ability to reach and sell to customers who are the target audience for the title, as well as the profitablity of each sale.  A channel may provide broad exposure but to the wrong set of customers. 

• Audience coverage - This measures the number of customers appropriate for your offerings that are served by the channel.
• Conversion - How well similar offerings sell in this channel.
• Per sale profitability - This is the amount you, the publisher, receives from a sale through this channel.
• Payment - This indicates how quickly the publisher gets paid by the channel.  Time is money, and cash flow dynamics are critically important to publishers.

Rank each of these factors on a scale of 1 to 3 for your title where 3 is the most favorable and 1 the least favorable.  Divide each risk score by the sum of all the maximum risk scores.  Divide each reward score by the sum of all the maximum reward scores.  This normalizes the risk and reward values.  Compare the resulting risk and reward values to see how well they balance out.  A score heavy tilted toward more risk is means the channel is probably not a good bet for the publisher. 

Creating a portfolio with channels that show high reward to risk will be more likely to yield good results.  

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Blog to book stories are becoming more commonplace.  We have chronicled a number of such examples, and you can find a virtual library of blog to book stories on Blooking Central.  Some of these were serendipitous, but more and more writers, especially new authors, are being more intentional about converting their blogs into a printed title.   There is more than one way to execute a blog to book strategy.  Here is my attempt at a blook typology:

• indie blook - This is the type of blook where an author independently publishes and markets a title based on their blog.  Low cost self publishing and inexpensive Internet marketing techniques are making this an attractive option for new authors who are not shy about self promotion.
• traditional blook - This is the form of blook that you read about in the newspapers.  A publisher discovers a high traffic blog and offers the blog owner a book deal.  Tjhe rationale is that the blog has an established audience and a topic in line with the publisher’s market focus.
• podiobook - This is more of an audio blook.  Here the author serialize his or her book into podcasts and uses a blog for audience feedback and book marketing.  It is especially effective for fiction writers.  Two of the best know podiobook authors are Scott Sigler and JC Hutchins. 
• crowdsourced blook - This is a rare blook, but every author’s dream come true.  Here, the blog is so popular that a community emerges and contributes content which eventually winds up being part of the publishing or marketing strategy for a title.  In other words - build a community that helps you generates content and then publish it.  The best known example is Frank Warren’s Post Secret.
• reverse blook - In this scenario, an author blogs the content from an existing book to build an audience for the current or a new edition.  This may be a good way to revitalize a book whose sales are fading.

We believe that these - and other - blog to book strategies will replace the traditional (and mostly ineffective) approach to getting a book published which involves submitting a manuscript to agents or publishers in hopes of getting it read and eventually published.  Publishing is a risky business.  Of the many risks, the first and biggest is signing an unkown author who may or may not be able to attract an audience for their title.  An author who has a blog with an established audience is an attractive proposition.  Publishers can assess the quality and appeal of the writing.  The popularity of blog posts can be measured and ranked.  We can see how the audience reacts to the content long before it is edited into book form.   In the case of a popular blog, the audience can be larger than the circulation of many magazines or newspapers 

Blooks are not just a publishing sideshow - interesting examples of pluck and luck.  They represent the future of publishing in a world of consumer generated media.

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