How to Market Books

This chapter covers marketing online: the creation of an online presence or digital identity in order to prompt interest and sales. We will look at strategy and marketing effectiveness rather than the mechanics of how to establish and support associated systems, as these are beyond the scope of this book and are well covered elsewhere (notably in Reed 2013).

The establishment of a presence online is often talked about as establishing a ‘platform’ and each different method of communicating online can be similarly described. If we are going to use this terminology, then the initial image of the diving board – or jumping-off point – provides a helpful visual metaphor. There are various different ways of communicating online – for example, through websites, the effective use of email, blogs and social networking – and these can be thought of as the range of diving boards, at different heights, all leading into a single pool of water. Given the extent of the internet’s reach, and the possibilities for messages spreading, this is perhaps best thought of as an infinity pool; but wherever they are in the water, the splash created by others can affect everyone else. For organisations active online, the aim is generally to have all the various entry points and associated activities reinforcing, rather than detracting from, each other – and all benefitting from the associated wider ripples.

Having an online presence is increasingly important, as access to online information is sought by those considering any form of involvement with your organisation and its products. Whether they are thinking about buying from you, working for you, inviting you or an author to an event, they will check out your organisational presence online before taking the relationship any further.

The advantages of online marketing are many. In theory it’s an effective and good value way of reaching a worldwide audience, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with live information on your product and service range – and keeping the names and contact details of those who want to hear from you again. You have the opportunity to acquire big data and ongoing market research, your observations of their interests and habits online, and more individual feedback on how customers respond to marketing campaigns and ideas for new content.

There are other, more subtle advantages to promoting online. When well handled, online marketing feels personal and can build trust; given that people prefer to do business with people they know, online marketing enables you to spread information on what kind of organisation you are. It also offers the ability to start a conversation with your customers, to manage and develop a two-way communication and create confidence, offering a place where your customers can return, feel listened to and reassured. In the process communities of interdependence are built.

When an organisation is active online, it’s difficult to tell their physical size from the extent of their social media presence.1 Smaller organisations can be particularly well placed to compete, with fewer levels of management to work through to get approval and less reliance on external suppliers whose various presentations and language have to be patrolled in order to ensure a joined-up approach. When difficult situations arise, online presentation through a website can offer an opportunity to make an effective presentation, without being interrupted. In short, there are many reasons why online marketing is now rightly established as a firm part of most organisations’ official strategy – not least because it is increasingly how customers like to buy.

But it’s not as simple as this may sound. There are associated challenges in being able to interrogate and use the data you gain and qualitative feedback obtained in the process can be hard to store and action. Beware too of overestimating the cost advantages as, although you don’t have to pay for print, paper or physical despatch, in practice employing an online team with real experience and giving them proper tools, such as good analytic tools and training, isn’t necessarily cheap.

Longer term, however, the possibilities are huge. With recent improvements in technology and the wide availability of superfast wireless broadband, content can be downloaded very quickly. At the same time, the enormous amount of information available, and hence choices on offer, means that customers increasingly feel time-pressured, and have less space to consider marketing messages (which is why brand awareness needs to be promoted less through organisational information and more through consumer buy-in, interesting conversations and contributions from experts). As a society we seem to want ever-quicker access to ideas, and images are a particularly effective shortcut to attracting our attention. Smartphones have been the primary access point to the internet for a while now, and as customers read on the move they also update their Twitter and Facebook statuses at the same time. ‘Hand-selling’ in retail outlets is being replaced by social engagement via personal online communication.

The wider implications of this for marketers are significant. Online activity is demonstrating a shift from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ marketing, as rather than presenting wares to those potentially interested (so-called ‘megaphone marketing’) organisations seeking to make available engaging, interesting, valuable content that attracts their customers’ attention draw them nearer and involve them in a conversation. It’s also becoming increasingly mainstream; ‘online marketing’ and ‘marketing’ are becoming the same thing and together they should be viewed as part of overall marketing, not as separate areas of activity.

In this chapter we will begin with some general principles for online marketing, and then move to thinking about how to get the best out of specific online media – primarily those used by publishers and their customers.

Core principles for marketing online

Making information available online can be achieved within minutes. But doing so effectively and pragmatically takes planning, practice and dedication; as Leonardo da Vinci is often assumed to have said ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’. Remember too that this is not the first time that new technology has expanded the options open to the communicator. The invention of printing with moveable type was accompanied by a similar need for thought before action:

When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He [Thomas Cromwell] feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall 2009

Those already involved with social media in a personal capacity will have an initial understanding of how to go about being active online – posting holiday photos on Facebook is marketing your lifestyle to your friends and taking part in an online discussion about an issue you care about is virtual networking – and you could start by thinking about the different motivations, behaviours and profile characteristics that lie behind these various forms of activity (sharing/informing/communicating/boasting). But while being active online in a professional context is a natural next step, it’s vital to achieve an appropriate tone and to offer information commensurate with your business aims.

1 Online activity needs to be strategic not random

Just because marketing online can be achieved more quickly than through other methods, and its usage permits the enticing prospect of saving money on the physical costs of other forms of marketing (notably print and postage), it needs just us much careful consideration. Arguably it needs more, as the outcomes can be much more widely spread, with enduring consequences and a potentially damaged reputation.

Online marketing activity needs to be strategic and pragmatic, based on the same criteria that should underpin any marketing campaign. It should fit with overall organisational objectives, different target audiences and their media consumption in order to build a brand presence and not be guilt-driven or prompted by an awareness that others are involved and so you should be too. Sending out a few random tweets or setting up a blog you don’t have time to service is not an online marketing policy.

Nor is online marketing a standardised process or set of techniques, rather it is changing all the time. If you are going to get involved, it is important to be up to date with how it is being more generally used – there are fashions and trends to learn from, and the community you are trying to reach will be influenced by what else they are observing.

The key issue is brand management; publishers aren’t often brands, but books and authors are. As a publisher with lots of different products and services on offer you may need to spread various forms of information relating to different aims, but it’s really important to think about where you direct each campaign and to what end. For example, does divergent use of different social media around the same brand cause confusion (and hence prove counterproductive) – and might too much free content give the market enough information to take part in an associated discussion and hence reduce their need to buy the product or service being promoted? There is a big difference between gaining attention and approval, and the organisation’s overall marketing aims and branding need to be considered before online activity is undertaken.

2 How to establish a strategy for online marketing

Effective online marketing requires a logical sequence of planning: identifying your customers, considering your objectives, thinking about how you can communicate with them most effectively, integrating your activities with non-virtual methods to ensure a joined-up approach and then measuring the outcomes of your activity.

• Begin with your customers. What are their difficulties right now and what are they looking for? What is the nature of their relationship with you, and how could it be improved? Ensure that when they search for the product or service you offer, they can find you. You need to be sure that you have researched the keywords that ensure your product/service be found and that these are embedded in the HTML of all pages of your website and used in all your online communication, on an ongoing basis. Without keyword focus, no one will find you. So think about what keywords your competitors are using to achieve ranking and try to build a mixture of frequently searched-for and less frequently searched-for terms (so that you show up in obvious searches but also extend your reach).

• Consider what you will try to achieve. You might decide that you will target a specific group online with a view to increasing the size of the community of customers involved and boost their levels of engagement, to build an author profile to get online pre-orders established, to have a ‘retweet and follow’ campaign to boost your presence – or to build a relationship with a key retailer.

• By when. Once you have established your strategic goal for the audience intended, try to establish some timed markers (e.g., what do you hope to have achieved within the next month, 3 months or year). These should be SMART objectives (see Chapter 6) that the organisation is capable of working towards.

• Think about where to find your market. Where do your customers spend time online and how can you create a conversation with them through their customer journey that will lead long term to a sustained relationship and sales? Think about what the customer cares about and the best way of tapping into their lifestyle in order to plan all the different touch-points in the customer’s contact with you and how they fit together.

• And then where best to concentrate your efforts. You don’t need to engage in every form of social media available. Rather research and learn about the makeup of the audience that populates each social network so you can work out where you should focus (e.g., professional publishers may be active on LinkedIn whereas self-published writers may congregate more often on Facebook or Twitter). Match the information you have to make a strategic selection, using a combination of content tools (e.g., websites and blogs) and outreach tools (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram), optimising the messages to each individual social network rather than doing a cut and paste and assuming the same content can be delivered through a variety of forums.

• Think about the resources you need. Your strategic selection should be linked to an appreciation of the resources needed to maintain what is established, and a determination to be consistent in effecting what you have established.

• Decide who is doing what. There needs to be a policy on who is updating social media, how often and what level of information is shared – to ensure maintenance of the organisational brand and that those involved know what each person is doing. The burden of managing your online presence can be shared out between colleagues in a logical schedule; tasks can be broken down and teams deployed. Offers and other marketing approaches need to be coordinated and sequenced so that the customer hears from the organisation in a logical manner; it’s irritating to receive different alerts from the same organisation with contradictory promotions. Sharing the workload through multi-author logins allows several people to update and schedule messages ahead; encouraging others to comment on your online activity or volunteer a guest blog can extend your reach. Similarly, by aggregating your activity – linking your various involvements or sites so they update each other automatically – you gain added impact. This means you need to allocate less time but retain control of what is said about your brand. Although it is possible to delegate such communication to freelance or virtual support, the key to effective communication online is authenticity, and this is best managed by those really involved.

• Strategise your starting point. Rather than committing fully, you can similarly strategise your start in online marketing, perhaps by experimenting as a guest, blogging on a website belonging to someone else before establishing your own, or deciding to establish a presence on Twitter and observe before taking part yourself, in the process allowing confidence to grow.

• Involvement in online marketing needs to be part of your marketing outreach rather than being seen purely as a method of selling. Earlier chapters of this book discussed the meaning of marketing in some detail. It’s generally a multistaged process that boosts the visibility of your business, reaches out to potential clients, pulls prospects in towards a relationship that prompts sales, and hopefully repeat business. In the case of the publishing industry, marketing often has to work through many intermediaries before the buying point is reached. Marketing online, and in particular social media, offers you the tempting prospect of direct contact with your customers, and it can be equally tempting to take a shortcut through the stages and ask for the order straight away. Slow down. Marketing online needs to be managed with care, used to build your brand, reputation and relationship – rather than immediately ask for money.

Stop talking about your products and services. People don’t care about products and services; they care about themselves.

David Meerman Scott, marketing and sales strategist and the bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR2

There is a range of different social media available to you and it is used in different ways, and while nearly all businesses are using social media to sell things, the tone of voice used on each medium needs to be slightly different. Thus while a more direct approach may be acceptable on email and Skype, in phone calls and in face-to-face meetings, a more subtle approach will be needed on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Knowing which tone to use in which medium is best achieved by knowing your community.

3 Build a strategy for long-term involvement

Although using social media for marketing can be one of the quickest means of getting a message out to your potential market, it works best when managed with long-term interests in mind. So build a sustained relationship that seeks to convey your understanding of the potential customer’s possible desire or difficulty, and what you as an organisation or individual can do to help or provide the next step. Clients want to be involved with you because you can solve their problems. It might be that you have products they want to buy, or they’re a self-publisher who needs some guidance or you have particular skills that they need. Whatever the reason, online marketing offers you the possibility of a low-cost long-term relationship as you work together towards achieving mutual satisfaction.

4 Build a culture of precision

Lord Leverhulme’s famous comment about ‘Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half’ is potentially overturned by online marketing, as the metrics gained in the process can provide a precise indication of what is working and what is not.

There are opportunities to experiment: with different offers, copy and design approaches, times of despatch – to see which produce the most beneficial outcomes for the goals you initially set (e.g., sales, click-throughs to a website or referrals to other people). You can also make use of general information about online media to give you a competitive advantage:

According to research by sumall.com, each network has a different optimal time during which posts receive their highest engagement. For Twitter it’s 1–3pm, Facebook 1–4pm, Google+ 9–11am, Pinterest 8–11pm, and Instagram 5–6pm. Reasons for these optimal times could be everything from the work day slowing down in the afternoon, to checking your phone before bed.3

But while there are many possibilities, there are also real associated challenges that come with them. For example, rewriting information for each social medium, for each author and each book, can lead to the need to manage countless bits of content and numerous campaigns, and managing this across various staff involved can be tricky.

Along similar lines, there are huge constraints on both the completeness of the statistics available and their full and effective interpretation. Getting exact online statistics and metrics is very difficult, and in general one tends to build a picture through combined feedback: from unique users and looking at how they explored the site, the ‘bounce rate’ of those who clicked through to the website but went no further, and some related social statistics that together build a picture of what is going on. Skill is required in interpreting the information that is held and deciding what to do next. For example, increasing a Twitter following overnight does not necessarily bring more customers, and certain information will not be available (you may know how many ‘click-throughs’ you get, but not how many order from the organisation arranging fulfilment – which will need cross-checking with reorder rates and stock levels). Analysing data and making precise recommendations on the outcomes requires time and analytic skills, and there is a deficit of both within large parts of the industry. Third-party software (e.g., Bitly⁴ and Hootsuite⁵) can be of considerable help.

5 Make it two-way

Be authentic and genuine; create a two-way relationship. Effective marketing online relies on effective communicating and sharing, not pretending to be something you are not.

Conversations where people say the same thing repeatedly get boring. So, despite all the software that helps you post the same content everywhere, offer different information in different places, so the potential customer engages with you more deeply – rather than thinking that they have read this before and are switching off. Brands that push the same content across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter do not create a genuine dialogue and consequently find it difficult to create rapport online.

Forward links likely to be useful to your market, even if they did not originate with you. Others will appreciate your generosity and do likewise when you offer content worth sharing. Everything should, however, pass the ‘so what’ test; in other words, what benefits will your customers gain from the service/relationship/information you are offering? Value can be variously quantified, for example by making your customers feel they are valued, or the receivers of privileged information, by expressing empathy for the difficult market conditions they are experiencing, or by including them in a story you think they might appreciate:

It’s not about how many people are following you or how many people you follow. It’s about helping and solving people’s challenges and offering useful insights without necessarily asking for anything back.

Matthew Hunt 6

Encourage people to remain in touch. Having taken the trouble to find people online, it makes sense to keep in touch with them and there a variety of options for encouraging them to do so. You could encourage them to:

• sign up for an email newsletter (saying how often you will send one and perhaps the benefits of them doing so – ensuring they are up to date with your research, hearing about new offers);

• visit a website;

• read a sample of your material;

• look at your Pinterest selection;

• become a fan on Facebook or follow you on Twitter;

• buy something from you or trial a subscription;

• enter a competition;

• ask a question or make a comment, receive an answer and use this information.

Make the sign-up simple, encourage potential customers to get involved with your material through trial or a free sample – asking too many questions will put them off. Pareto’s Law⁷ about 80 per cent of business coming from 20 per cent of customers is relevant here; aim for 80 per cent of your communication to be information they value and 20 per cent commercial offerings.

6 How to ensure your online marketing is joined up

You need to control access over who is using social media on behalf of your organisation. Things can go viral for the wrong reasons and attract unpleasant ‘trolling’ where individuals protected by anonymity use online media to criticise or abuse points of view they disagree with. Some other advice on effective online marketing campaigns follows.

Some key elements of good online marketing campaigns

Writer and online strategist Mark Thwaite – Head of Online at Quercus Books, and founder and managing editor of www.ReadySteadyBook.com – offers the following advice. You can find him on Twitter @readysteadybook.

There are some key elements of all good (online) marketing campaigns. What are they? A useful acronym is: COPE. How will you cope with a good campaign and how will you get it right … ?

Coherence: a good marketing plan – online or offline, online and offline – is always coherent. These days, there is no discrete online and offline marketing – or there certainly shouldn’t be: you always need both aspects for a good, rounded plan. For sure, different ratios, different mixes of those elements will be needed for different campaigns. But all campaigns will need both elements. What is particularly important is for the offline and the online elements to cohere properly (to join up), and to make sense: e.g., if you’ve got a #hashtag to use, have you checked it is viable? Not previously in use by something you wouldn’t want to associate your brand/product with? Have you printed the (correct) #hashtag/website address/Facebook link on all your associated offline materials? Online and offline solutions each have their own strengths, each need to be used properly and combined – you need to know your tools, and know the right tool for the job; you need to know your platforms and where your audience/consumers hang out; you need to know your consumers/(potential) community and what approaches do and no not fit with them. Some online tools are easily trackable and provide great analytics, some do not. It is good to have an idea of what success looks like, and how it can be tracked and measured. Some tools are good for that and some are not.

Objectives: a good marketing plan knows how to specify success. It has clear and measurable (and realistically achievable) goals. For this to happen you need to know your market and know your product. And you need to know how to measure success. What does success look like? More followers for your author? More pre-orders on Amazon? How will you measure that success and – crucially – show how your campaign has made (some of) that happen?

Planning: a good marketing plan is well planned. What is your strategy? How are you going to achieve your goals? What are your timelines? Are they realistic? Can you really source all the materials you need, co-opt other team members, get the kind of content written for exactly when you need it? Use natural advantages: know your team members’ skill sets; does your author/brand/product already have a good online/offline presence? Do your research.

Execution: no point having a great plan if you can’t implement it. And for your campaign to be successful you’re going to need great material: eye-catching; appropriate; clever; funny; relevant; irreverent … Perhaps you could crowd-source (some of) it for further buy-in? Perhaps you’ll have the chance to test (some of) it with a focus group of some kind. Perhaps you’ll have been able to work with a retail/brand partner or with a community to extend the reach/make more relevant/more authentic? And execution goes through and beyond the end of the campaign. Part of the campaign must include the autopsy of that same campaign. A campaign isn’t over until you’ve learned all the lessons it can teach you.

Specific advice for particular online media

We will start with content media (websites, blogs and email) and then move on to other online forums. Bear in mind that the best effects will be achieved where these overlap and work together.

Websites

A website is an (if not the) most essential marketing tool for your business. First, it gives credibility by showing you exist, offering an initial port of call for anyone with an interest in your organisation, at any time of day. It is a shop window that is always open and anyone thinking of involving themselves with an organisation tends to head for their website first. In addition to often functioning as the hub of your wider involvement with online marketing – your blog, Twitter presence, activity on Facebook, etc. – it should also offer a route for customers responding to offline communications to engage more with your organisation.

The options for what kind of website to establish are varied. You could set up a largely static website that functions as an online organisational brochure, available 24 hours a day. Alternatively it could be more informal and interactive by operating a blog (short for weblog), which can be updated with regular posts. Or you could have a fully functioning ecommerce site that takes payments, with links to online selling mechanisms such as PayPal, eBay and Amazon. And of course there are many stages in between.

For publishers, given the huge amount of products and services being offered, it is important to think about your target audience and what kind of website is needed. For example, it may not be necessary to have one for each author or each book, but rather to organise by imprint or launch date. You need to think about what your audience needs to know and hence wants your website to do, in the context of what other online content/activity is going to be most useful at the level of individual products.

How websites get created is varied. You might decide to construct it yourself, or to use a web designer – website design is also increasingly offered by graphic designers. Whatever route gets taken towards creation, some thinking will need to be done about what kind of website is needed, by when and what you need it to do for you. Drawing up the specifications of what you are looking for will act as a mind-focusing exercise, perhaps encouraging you to start creating your own – or making it clear to you that it’s a task beyond you and external support is needed. Bear in mind that this is not a one-stop process, like the creation of a printed catalogue that is finished when passed for press and will be used until a new version is created. A website is always a work in progress, with new information being added to refresh and update it, information from how customers use it being used to inform how it is developed in future.

Elements to be considered before planning a website

• Choose and register a domain name. It’s a good idea to secure a domain name for your planned website, particularly if it is a word that is key to your ethos, subject matter or ambitions. If you are not yet ready to create a website, a domain name, once secured, can be used to host your email, although you may find customers start looking for the associated website. There are various companies selling domain names and web hosting, and it makes life easier if you get the two from the same place.

• What do you want your website to do for you? How complex do you want it to be? Will it be a simple outline brochure, a blog to connect with your customers or a fully functioning ecommerce site? Or will it be a combination of these things? A static website can have links to a blog and an ecommerce site that make the customer/reader feel they’re still on the same site, when in fact they’ve gone somewhere else.

• What kind of budget are you willing to allocate?

• Are there any time constraints on you? Do you want your website to be up and running by a particular date? Is this reasonable or achievable?

• Who is your target audience? What do you know of it and can you be sure that you are right? If you understand its values, buying signals, gender and age you might be able to create something specific – without hopefully alienating other types of enquirer. Are you selling business to business or to consumers? If both, who is more important to you, both now and in the future?

• How are you going to direct people to your website? Off- and online routes need to be considered, and how a synergistic approach can be created.

• What kind of look and feel are you after? How do you want your customers and enquirers to feel about your organisation and its brand? Can you gather some physical brochures and named sites that create the sort of look you seek? What colour palette and typeface do you find attractive and best represent the effects you are trying to create?

• What do you want people to do having seen your website? What is the main call to action? This will affect how the site is structured.

• What pictures do you have available? What images will you use to illustrate your website and are these already available to you? Do you have the right to use them or is permission needed?

What information to offer on a website

A website consists of a range of pages that interconnect and enable the user to navigate with ease. It can be helpful to think of it as a series of curtains on a stage, as each one rises, there is a link to more information behind. Many options exist, but visitors to your site will inevitably use their previous experience of navigating websites to understand how yours works. So there will be expectations in the market to find most of the following:

• Home page

This is the landing page for all those who arrive on your site – and is therefore very important. It is a permanently open doorway. It should make an initial impression on the visitor, and one that illustrates how you want your organisation to be seen. Many customers will get no further, so the homepage should provide both a clear sense of what else is available on the site and information on what has changed since the last visit.

• Your story/About us/Who we are and what we do

This is your opportunity to share information on the organisation, its history and your vision; customers are in general interested in these things. A helpful starting point is to think of this page as a permanently available opportunity for journalists to find out about how you started and what you seek to do. This is a great place to offer information about your inspiration and ethos, particularly when this is as yet unsupported by any physical experience of the customer.

• Contact us/Get in touch

Providing you are willing to accept and deal with customer enquiries (and not all websites are set up to do this, which of course carries a strong message) potential customers need an opportunity to find out more. You can put contact information (email, location and telephone) at the foot of each page but given that most websites offer a direct route to finding out more, a separate page is also a good idea. If spam is a problem, it’s helpful to offer those who want to get in touch a contact form rather than an email address, and to make sure you use a ‘captcha’ to ensure responses are from genuine individuals rather than computers. If you put up an unprotected email address you can end up being inundated with spam – and as spammers steal your email address and use it to spam others, you can then find yourself blocked.

Figure 9.1 BookMachine website. Courtesy of BookMachine.

This is also a good place to put frequently asked questions (and the associated answers) and to share information on who works for the organisation. This can move the burden of thinking about who should answer a query on to the customer, in the process encouraging a greater degree of familiarity with how your organisation is structured.

Staff profiles can be displayed here, with individual contact details and a photograph. Some organisations then offer ‘day in the life of’ information for a sample range of staff – so that those who are looking at the website in order to decide whether they might like to work there, or with an interview coming up, can learn more.

• Information on your products, services and what you offer

You could offer a summary page, with links to more detailed information elsewhere, and perhaps a call to action ‘Order now’ for those who wish to place an order straight away.

• Search facility

A search facility is useful for customers who want a specific detail from you – say to find out when a particular author is appearing at a literary festival without the bother of having to work their way through the entire programme.

• A shop

Where items get bought and paid for and where offers made elsewhere are fulfilled. Maybe incentivised so the customer buys direct rather than hunting for information on your site and paying elsewhere.

• Feedback/What our customers say about us

A section offering feedback from customers may be reassuring to new arrivals who have not ordered from you before. Press coverage might be made available here too, or on a separate page, perhaps along with copies of your most recent organisational press releases.

• Latest news/Find out what’s going on section

If you have not put this on your homepage, you could have a separate page that offers updates on activities – perhaps a copy of your most recent newsletter or access to your blog.

• Free materials

Many websites engage the interest of their potential customers, and impress them with the quality of the service/advice/product range on offer, by making available content that can be downloaded or accessed free. Publishers have a wealth of material that could benefit their customers – information on new titles, sample chapters from existing materials, interviews with authors, question and answer sessions on how to get published. The key skill is to provide sufficient free content so that customers engage with your organisation and get a flavour of what they would pay for should they decide to get further involved, without giving them so much that there is no need to monetise the relationship.

• Legal information

When establishing and maintaining websites there are specific (and often regional) legalities that need to be attended to. If you decide to have a page devoted to this, it’s also a good place to make it clear, and offer reassurance regarding, how you will use the customer information you acquire.

Finding out how your website is working

Web analytics help you measure the effectiveness of your website. This service is available from various suppliers and you sign up for an account, receive codes to add to specific locations within your site, and in return get access to statistics on site usage. Using an analytics service is likely to involve the use of ‘cookies’ and, if you are based in the EU, you will need to gain consent for this from your site visitors.

In addition to building a website, it is vital to have a strategy for driving traffic to it. Users access search engines to find the information they seek, and the decision-making algorithms that decide which web pages are recommended first are based on the relevance and authority of the content they find. How can you affect the ranking of your site? A site’s relevance is based on the vocabulary used within it, hence the importance of search engine optimisation, which can be used to influence how closely your vocabulary aligns with key terminology in the sector in which you are operating. You can also improve your positioning by using paid word placements (e.g., using Google or AdWords) or attracting inbound links to your site, by commenting on other people’s blogs, offering guest blogs and contributing within chat rooms – linking the content you provide back to your own home base online.

Case study

The central role played by our website in promoting what we do, by Laura Summers of BookMachine8

BookMachine is an event organisation and online hub for the publishing community, formed by a group of publishing professionals keen to keep in touch as they progressed in their careers and navigated through various publishing houses. At the time, there was a lack of informal, affordable gatherings in London for publishers to meet and learn from others. BookMachine quickly filled that gap and built a network of face-to-face events in a number of cities, with London, Oxford, Barcelona and New York hosting the largest crowds.

Publishers use the BookMachine website to find jobs, read about latest events and catch up on publishing news and opinion. There are a number of marketing techniques employed by the BookMachine team on both a periodic and a frequent basis, to drive readership of the site.

We have developed a mix of offline and online marketing strategies, all with little or no budget. Our regular events act as offline PR and promotion for our burgeoning digital platform; hundreds of publishing professionals attend them and then head back to the office the following day to spread the word.

Marketing a brand or an idea requires consistency. Research shows that people need to see a message at least seven times⁹ before taking action or even recognising a brand. In an online world where we are bombarded with messages on every screen, a constant and frequent delivery of a message is much more effective than just one blast of content.

We have learned that keeping communication short, and make sure it is regular, works best. Potential buyers will decide to take action or to buy at a time that suits them; the aim of marketing is to be right in front of them when they do require your services.

Without Twitter, BookMachine would never have happened. From the outset, Twitter has been an invaluable tool for promoting our events and driving traffic to the BookMachine website and more than 50 per cent of our new website traffic is sourced from here.

Twitter has worked for us in part because the publishing industry has an active and vocal Twitter community. We have tried Pinterest, which can work well for sites with very visual content to share, but as we have lacked such content this has never become a primary generator of traffic for us. For a business-to-consumer (B2C) sale, then Facebook might be the best social media channel to use.

Our advice is to pick one or two online channels and use them well. If you are working for a large publisher, someone can be dedicated to each of the social media channels and, providing they are coordinating their efforts, this can work effectively. In a small company you need to use your time wisely, and dedicating yourself to growing your customer base on one platform is more effective than using all platforms ineffectively. Track where most of your website traffic comes from, and as soon as you find a winning formula then stick with it.

How people will engage with social media in the future is unclear. Over recent months Facebook have made changes to the way brands can promote themselves on the platform, and now companies need to pay to reach even their own fans. Twitter is likely to follow this trend, as investors demand higher returns. This is one of the reasons that BookMachine also built BookMachine.me. This is the team’s own platform, which not only enables us to keep in touch with the audience directly, but will also ride any seismic changes in social media trends. This strategy is particularly relevant in a community-based business, but even for a B2C product it’s always useful to have a back-up plan and to cultivate a direct relationship with your customers.

One of the best tools for gathering data and growing traffic to your site is also one of the most tried and tested: email. Everyone has an email address, and needs it as a starting point to all communication online. There are certain demographics that are less email responsive than others, but by getting permission to use someone’s email address you have a big chance of being able to continue communicating with them. An individual makes a bigger commitment in giving their email address to an organisation than following a brand on social media, so respect that and make sure the communication is as personalised and relevant as you are able to achieve.

The website is the centre of most marketing decisions. By analysing the data from traffic-measuring services such as Google Analytics and Mixpanel, insights can be gained into what people are interested in and how best to focus. For example, a recent blog post on XML tips gathered one of the highest traffic volumes yet on BookMachine. It led the team to understand that digital training is of top priority and we are using that knowledge to influence new content on BookMachine.

Most importantly the website needs to feel right for your audience. This might mean researching your competitors and getting a sense of what the marketplace is used to. From there a design and format can be established that resonate with your target market, or this can be used as a starting point to make sure that your brand stands out among the competition.

Establishing the credibility of your site is also important. Poor loading times and out of date design won’t inspire even the most enthusiastic customer. Most users will stay on a web page for just 10–20 seconds unless there is a compelling reason for them to hang around.

Finally, we have worked hard to ensure that the BookMachine website is mobile-optimised. With mobile devices driving 30 per cent of website traffic,10 it is important to always consider how prospective customers will access the site on the go.

Case study

The integration of online and offline in effective selling: an interview with Philip Downer, MD of Calliope Gifts, Dorking and Alton, UK

Philip Downer began his career as a sales assistant with music retailer Our Price in 1980. He progressed into store and regional management and finally into board-level positions, staying with the firm as it moved from being a feisty independent to a division of the much larger predominantly stationery retailer WH Smith. He spent 2 years in the US (1994–6) working with the Waterstones brand, competing head-on with local book retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Borders. He returned to the UK and then from 1997 to 2009 was involved in a reverse development, setting up and developing the Borders brand of book retailing in the UK. In order to have an immediate critical mass in the market, rather than build from scratch, Borders began by purchasing the UK chain Books Etc., and Downer worked for them as operations director, managing director and later CEO, until Borders closed in the UK in 2009. In short, he has a lot of experience in retailing books.

After Borders closed he did some consultancy within the trade but found the combination of offering advice and seeing some of it implemented was less satisfying if you were not also involved in the longer-term management of the outcomes. With a former Borders colleague, Andy Adamson, who had long experience of logistics, inventory systems and managing supplier relationships, he planned a return to retailing on a much more local level. Together they aimed to offer a new kind of store on the high street that could draw on their vast shared experience and offer what they had observed to be the most profitable parts of the Borders experience (stock for children and the cross-selling of related merchandise under a single roof – notably music, stationery and refreshments) but for which they would be responsible.

There are three guiding principles behind Calliope Gifts,11 established in the market towns of Dorking (2013) and Alton (2014). First, that it should be an attractive environment where people want to spend time – although market research shows that gifts are predominantly bought by women, many gift shops feel overtly feminine environments and they wanted the full range of their customers to feel comfortable. Second, customers should be able to find, or be helped towards, a gift for anyone: men, women, children – and for the full range of ‘special occasions’. Third, they wanted to use their shared experience of retailing and offer the kind of product range that is disappearing from the high street: books, music and the many other items required to service an ongoing human need – to buy presents for other people, and particularly those we love. Stock is broadly themed and changes all the time, being moved around and supplemented with new additions and stock lines so regular visitors have new things to look at. They try hard not to replicate what else is available locally – they don’t want to get involved in price wars – so they don’t sell the books that are available in WH Smith and have different suppliers for lines such as jewellery and scarves. They do, however, feel very loyal to the community they are part of, see themselves as contributing to the attractiveness of the local retail environment and get involved with its management by local government.

Their website is an extension of their service, complementing what is available in store as a 24-hours-a-day shop window. Significantly it requires little additional management time or space. Every stock item that comes into the shop is loaded on to the inventory database, photographed and given a few words of descriptive copy and this then serves as both a stockholding guide for the shop and website copy. Customer orders placed online are packed in the shop, giving those in store something else to do when business is slow, and then taken along to the local post office – ‘I bet that’s what Amazon did when they started’. Philip Downer continues:

We ask customers if they want to go on our mailing list when they are in the shop and then anyone who orders online gets added too, having ticked the ‘opt in’ box. We have approached local groups and made relevant special offers, and this is an area ripe for development. I then do an email newsletter every couple of weeks, more often towards Christmas, making special offers and inviting them to call in – perhaps to our second store in Alton now. I have a particular tone of voice when writing these communications which is upbeat and enthusiastic – which is partly a reflection of the customer base but also how I feel. I want to create an environment where they think a spare 15 minutes could be pleasantly spent in our shop.

We get to know our customers well – they’re in their ‘family years’ but this can be from their mid-20s to their mid-60s, with opportunities to buy presents occurring throughout that period, from presents for their children to those bought for the new grandchildren of their friends. They are intelligent, aware of the world and like good design – but are also busy and have lots to think about.

People like to buy locally and feel a connection with a shop and it’s interesting that we are seeing quite a lot of ‘reverse show-rooming’. Show-rooming is the practice of looking in local shops and then buying online, but we are regularly finding instances of the process working the other way for us. Customers browse our website on their tablet at home, often while doing something else such as watching television or eating, and then come in to see what we have in person before making a choice – enabling them to do a quality check or see the actual size before committing themselves, and perhaps buying a card and wrapping paper at the same time.

Retailing is about understanding the local market and getting the detail right. There is a thrill in seeing merchandise you have chosen for your customers come into the store, putting it in the window straightaway, and then seeing the first person come in and buy – and commenting on their choice. I get satisfaction from the immediacy of the process. The combination of strategic and operational processes at the same time feels purposeful as we seek to understand our customers, meet their needs and develop the relationship.

Gloomy predictions are consistently made about the future of the high street, and it’s likely we will see the further automation of ‘functional shopping’ – with groceries and items that are heavy to carry home helpfully delivered to the door. But people are social creatures and like to get out, mingle and meet with others as the continued rise of coffee shops has shown. And as they are short of time, a retailer who understands their needs and can present a relevant selection of stock for them to browse and choose between is able to offer a really valuable service. We feel up-beat and positive about our new venture, and the recent award of the prestigious ‘Best newcomer’ by the trade magazine Progressive Gift and Home has confirmed our confidence.

Blogging

‘Blog’ is short for a weblog, an online diary that allows the regular posting of contributions. For example you could offer interesting and timely comment on current issues, suggest solutions to problems that are generally perceived, offer a list of top tips within a particular area, share more information about how you came to set up your business or the story behind the product and service range you offer. If you provide the opportunity for readers to comment on your blog, and then give feedback on what they say, you further increase engagement.

Running a blog can be an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise within a particular sector, increase your visibility on the web and your position in online rankings. Not only does a blog create more pages to be indexed, if you use plenty of keywords relating to your business area, focus each blog on a single topic or relevance, make links to others involved in the area, and drive traffic towards it through mentioning it on other platforms (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) you will prompt more links and hence a spurt in your influence online.

The mechanics for establishing a blog are fairly straightforward. If you already own some web space and have your own domain name, a blog can be hosted on your own server. If you don’t yet have a domain, there are platforms such as Blogger and WordPress that offer different ‘template’ options that can be linked to your website. You can start off with a hosted blog and then pay to upgrade your account, so that your domain name can be used once that is up and running.

If you are thinking of establishing a blog, bear in mind that it’s much easier to start one than keep it going. So before you begin, it’s a good idea to read as many as possible, consider how much maintenance they require and what kind of response they get, before proceeding. You need to think about:

• What could a blog do for you (attract interest and attention, give you a means of sharing content, demonstrate your expertise within a specific market)?

• What’s going on in your specific area of expertise or in the markets you want to communicate with? Blogs are in a state of constant change, and you do need to remain up to date in how the medium is being used (short/long contributions? Short blogging via Tumblr?).

• What ground rules you will set for its operation? How often you will blog, how long your contributions will be – they need not be extensive – what kind of information you will offer, will you allow other people to take part?

• How much time can you devote to this? Bear in mind that blogs can be short and also created in batches for subsequent delivery (you can program a series of sequential contributions). So instead of writing long pieces, consider dividing them into a series of useful comments.

• How personal should it be? Keep in mind that once information is out there, it’s there.

Top tips for writing an effective blog

• A blog is a conversation not a lecture, don’t use it to hector, rather explain your thinking processes and chat around your area of expertise.

• Decide who is going to write the blog(s). Internal or external contributions? Who else might be asked for endorsement or occasional contributions? Who is going to check for consistency or manage the loading?

• Have a sample reader in your mind as you write – talk to them as you go.

• Take your time. Identify the issues you cover and handle them one at a time – giving your readers something to come back for. Don’t use all your material in the first column you write.

• Allow yourself to build trust, show expertise.

• Connect with what your market finds interesting and feed back when they respond. Look at the statistics to see what keeps people reading – and where they go next.

• Create connections with other related sites and individuals and build the associated community. Comment on other people’s blogs and involve people in yours; consider organising a blog tour. By creating networking opportunities for all you encourage readers to help you reach a wider market.

• When a blog (a website) is set up, whichever platform you are using (Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, etc.) sets up a feed for you, so readers can opt to be alerted when new additions are made. Ensure your responses (and responses to responses) keep the conversation going.

• Include plenty of keywords relating to your business.

• Be topical, offer advice on how to do something. Offer fresh content or an innovative interpretation of information that is widely available.

• Integrate with your other social media, e.g., drive links to your blog from Twitter.

Figure 9.2 Kingston University Publishing blog. Courtesy of Kingston University.

Case study

The role of a blogger

Ayo Onatade has a day job working as an administrator within the British Courts of Justice. Her second life is as a blogger, writing about thrillers and crime fiction. The website is http://shotsmag.co.uk and the blog is at wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.co.uk.

She started neither website nor blog herself. The website began as a magazine, set up by crime fiction enthusiast Mike Stotter and it ran in this format from June 1994 until January 2001, was briefly an e-zine until autumn 2004, when it became a fully fledged website. The blog started in 2007. Through her own love of the genre she met Mike and was persuaded to write initially for the magazine and then for the blog as well, and gradually ended up writing so much of the content for the blog that those previously managing it suggested she take over. The Shots website and blog belongs to the Shots collective, of which Mike is the overall editor, but he is fully consulted and all feel involved.

The expectations from the audience are high. The blog gets over 10,049 hits a month (December 2013; 410,601 in its lifetime) but readers will only keep coming back if there is interesting new material to read, and Ayo contributes at least three new posts a week. To give her something to write about she has to keep up to date with news from the sector (who has been signed up, who has a new book coming out, who has won which prize) as well as finding time to read the crime titles publishers send her for review. The scale of this endeavour may be judged by the fact that she has now persuaded her postman to deliver all the packages from publishers at the weekend rather than during the week, when they will not fit through the letterbox. Most weeks this amounts to at least ten packages and Royal Mail now sends a van on a Saturday.

But while her influence is high, and growing, this is a role for which she is not paid. Arguably this is the significance of her position: she is free to say what she does and does not like and her readers appreciate her honesty and follow her suggestions. They tend to buy the titles she recommends and avoid those she feels do not work and her influence on the market is huge. She is currently chair of the CWA Short Story Dagger judging panel.

The books that are sent to bloggers and reviewers are theirs to keep, and some use this as a handy income stream, selling them on to second-hand bookshops – even sometimes before publication day. This, however, is not encouraged. Ayo gives away titles she has no room for – to family, friends, colleagues at work, local libraries and schools as well as to other enthusiasts – including her postman.

How to work well with a blogger

Read their blog. Before you get in touch with them. Starting your email with ‘I love reading your blog and find it so interesting’ and then sending them material that is not relevant/they have shown they dislike shows that you are starting your relationship by lying. Unlikely to be well received.

• Respect their influence. They are communicating directly and authoritatively with your market in a way that, as a producer with something to sell, you will never be believed. The history of selling books through retailers has meant that publishers have long been isolated from their purchasers. Although they are now building up mechanisms for direct communication (websites offering reading group support materials and guidance on reading journeys, email alerts and direct buying mechanisms) the unbiased blogger who understands and respects the time of readers in search of recommendations and offers third-party endorsement, will be more believable. With the decline of book reviews in the broadsheets, the knowledge of the genre blogger is becoming even more important to authors and publishers.

• Respect their time. Understand that however much commitment they put into this role, it is generally not their day job. Be realistic in what you send them. Ayo tends to hear from publishers by email (with an occasional DM on Twitter) rather than phone calls – which she cannot take during the day (and does not have time to return). Along similar lines, Ayo is regularly contacted by (often first-time) authors who want feedback on their work. With generosity she tends to give it, but it should be noted that this is an assessment by a sector expert on the merits of the writing, not a longer-term tutoring opportunity! Longer-term correspondence is not invited.

• Understand that most do this job for love, because they like being at the centre of things and knowing what is being published and they have been involved in the genre for a long time. They like the feedback they receive from readers and authors, the sense of heavy involvement with a community they are part of – and the accompanying sense of worth that comes from being listened to and value placed on their judgement. Acknowledging this passion-funded expertise, rather than marvelling at how much time it must all take, is a good start.

• Let them get to know your organisation and its plans. Involve them in treats, parties, meetings with authors, new commissioning decisions (e.g., send the latest catalogue promptly) and ‘cover reveals’ (the first availability of the jacket image for a new title). Provide new information each time you are in touch with them, not just repeated rehashing of the jacket blurb. For bloggers who are particularly important to your list, consider offering an ‘exclusive’ – perhaps access to an author or information that you won’t be making generally available, or signed copies of books that they can use for competitions. Bloggers get satisfaction from making their blog the ‘go to’ destination, so anything that helps them maintain this position is likely to boost your relationship.

• Understand that bloggers tend to communicate. Whereas rivalry among authors can be intense, the atmosphere within the crime-writing community is remarkably mutually supportive – one author commented that they had no need to stick the dagger in each other as they could do this to their characters. The same feeling apparently applies to the associated blogging community, and those writing for other crime fiction sites communicate with Ayo and meet at the events they get asked to. They read each other’s posts and will comment on their various reactions. Some authors handily capitalise on this wider information network by offering to guest blog or to do a blog tour, but offering various sites the same information in the hope it will be posted widely is not a good idea. Ayo insists that while she welcomes guest contributions (500 words for a blog; 1,000 for a website contribution), they must be original and not about to be posted elsewhere.

When marketing became increasingly common through social networking, many thought that email would be killed off. But email marketing is still very important. There are several reasons why it works particularly well for marketing in business.

First, you own the data. Social networks are hosted on third-party sites and this means that, should your social media platform be withdrawn or fail, you could suddenly lose your carefully constructed connectedness. This does happen, both through technological failures and litigation; for example, when an individual leaves employment a discussion often arises about whether their Twitter following is their property or that of their employer. Your email responders have, however, given you permission to communicate with you in future and the information on how to contact them belongs to you.

Second, email is an effective means of direct marketing and a more appropriate sales channel than social media – which people generally feel is for recreation and talking about themselves. While you still need to take care over how your message is presented, and the constant repeating of ‘buy from me’ messages can get tedious, in general those who have provided their email addresses expect, at least on occasion, to be sold to in this way.

Third, email ensures deliverability and gives you the associated data. Not everyone uses a social networking site, and those who do are not necessarily active all day, every day. Email collection is generally much more frequent (and part of the working day) and all emails require action on the recipient’s part. You also get to find out how long they read it for and whether they clicked on any links. Whether the response is to delete on sight or engage with the content, emails sit in the recipient’s inbox until they decide what to do with them. Being spotted on Facebook or Twitter is harder. Unless an individual is specifically copied in (for example by naming them within a tweet, e.g., @alisonbav) or they are looking out for items with a particular #hashtag, there is a danger that comments will be missed and then disappear down an individual’s timeline.

Finally there are the inbuilt advantages of the medium. Email is a relatively straightforward medium to use, which enables the user to monitor the relationship created in a structured way. It’s quick and convenient for the recipient to respond to; quicker than a physical mailing piece, and non-intrusive (unlike telemarketing). It also offers much lower costs of delivery than other direct marketing methods (although this needs to be compared with responsiveness; as the number of emails sent rises, a common customer response is to delete incoming marketing messages). Bear in mind however that it can be expensive – even ‘freemium’ services can become costly in terms of time, support and the associated training required for effective management.

How to gather an audience for your email

• Don’t use your own email account to send out a mass mailing. It takes only a low percentage of people to classify your mail as ‘junk’ to risk the suspension of your account.

• Rather use a professional email service provider (or ESP). This not only enables you to comply with the law, it also offers supporting statistical analysis. Multi-emailing facility software packages offer a contact database as a storage solution for collecting email addresses and maintaining lists. This allows you to mail lots of people individually at the same time (without the entire circulation list appearing at the top of the message).

• Build your own list. It is possible to buy or rent lists of email addresses but organisations that rent data often insist on managing the mail-out for you, so you don’t see the number of generic emails (e.g., ‘sales@’ as opposed to individuals) or the number of ‘goneaways’ received after it has gone out, and in the process appreciate how up to date (or not) it is. Those who come back to you direct can be asked to sign up to your newsletter. Increasingly publishing companies are growing their own lists. Email is permission-based marketing, not spam, and it’s a good idea to build lists of people who want to hear from you.

• Create a sign-up form – a standard feature of all email marketing services – and put this on your website or blog: ‘Sign up to our newsletter.’ Encourage people to do this before they look at anything else on your site and provide an example of what they will receive if they do – a link to the last newsletter you sent out. You can also incentivise sign-up by offering free items or early access to new material.

• Ask in person, as part of your overall communications strategy. So whether you are communicating on- or offline, emailing them or accepting a business card, ask if you can add them to your newsletter.

• Use social networks to gather names by promoting the chance to join your mailing list on the forums you use. Tweet a link to your newsletter or mention it on Facebook.

Deciding on the objectives of your email campaign

What are you trying to do – provide news, build a relationship, prompt a more considered change of attitudes, promote trial usage or achieve sales? Probably the most common form of email marketing is a regular newsletter to all those on an email list, but you can also use the process to carry out market research, make specific offers, announce news and offer them case studies of how products and services have worked with other customers.

Make your email campaigns opportunities to learn

Always send yourself a test email before you send to your entire list to ensure your message looks as you intended, the links work and there are no obvious errors. Spelling and grammatical errors can destroy your credibility and are very damaging if you are making claims for the excellence of your content (essential for publishers). Then (unless your timing is particularly crucial, e.g., you are responding to news events) leave it overnight before finally despatching to ensure you have a double-check on the tone of voice deployed. What seems pleasingly ironic in the early evening may sound smug – or incomprehensible – the next morning. You don’t know at what time of day your recipients are going to open your mail – or in what mood.

Post-despatch, ESP services offer the metrics of your campaigns, so you can see how many people opened what you sent and how long they spent perusing its constituent parts. In this way you can find out more about your customers and how they respond to your communications. In the same way that some stand-up comedians record audience reactions and how long applause or laughter lasts, you can learn from the first-hand response to the message you sent – and improve your future performance. Along similar lines, follow good direct marketing practice and change the variables to see which combination produces the best results, however you have defined them (e.g., most clicks through to the website, most orders, most new followers on Twitter). You could also experiment by sending out messages on different days of the week and different times (Friday afternoon is said to be a particularly good time as people wind down for the weekend). Direct marketers using the mail often keep very specific records, even noting the weather or news agenda when their mailshots were both despatched and received.

How to write an enticing email

Begin by thinking about the recipient rather than the act of writing. Consider whether they will read it and, if so, in what order, and what you are hoping they will do next. Think how you can use the space to develop the relationship rather than just announce that something is available.

An effective email should be targeted to the appropriate audience, be short and entice a reply. The goal should be to start or develop a relationship with a recipient that can be sustained through mutually beneficial activity (e.g., sales, feedback on products and services that enables their improvement, recommendation to other potential purchasers).

• Send it from and to a real person – rather than a generic title (sales@ etc.). It is far more likely to get opened if it seems like a real approach from a genuine individual rather than a department.

• The subject line is vital – this is what recipients see before they decide on whether to open the accompanying email. Ensure it is short (definitely no more than 55 characters) and interesting or it may get deleted on sight. ESPs will allow you to do a split test on subject lines used in campaigns, so you can see which one produced the best results.

• Your ESP should take care of the formatting of your message, and ensure the text can be read comfortably. But in general keep the information short, in manageable chunks of different lengths.

• Aim for visual variety – it is the space in a document that draws people in, not the words – so have paragraphs of different lengths and use some typographic colour (bold, underlining, etc.) to draw attention to key parts of your message.

• Offer a single – or very limited number of – call(s) to action to suggest they do something – sign up for a newsletter, visit your website, download a sample.

• Think about what you have to offer them that could further develop the relationship – an exclusive offer, a sample chapter, author information, a press release or early announcement of an event, the opportunity to ask a question. If these are posted on your website, they may browse to learn more about you. In general it’s best not to include attachments.

• Ensure ‘unsubscribe’ information is clear – to reduce accusations of spam.

• Put all your contact information in a footer so that you can be both found and meet statutory requirements. In the UK, for example, businesses are required to include their registered address and number on websites and emails as well as on their printed stationery. This information can also be reassuring to individuals who are often more protective of their email address than their terrestrial one. For example, you can cover who the message is meant for and the use to which you plan to put the data by saying: ‘We will keep your details on file to keep you up to date with our publishing programme but will never pass your email address on to a third party.’

• Use your signature block as another place to offer interesting information. In the same way that the PS is a highly noted place on a sales letter (see Chapter 8 on direct marketing), people often move to the bottom of an email to see who has sent it. Play with the information you present: provide links to your website or online coverage, add colour – and change it on a regular basis so it continues to be seen. We generally don’t read information if we think we have read it before, and if you never change your signature block regular recipients will become used to its formatting – and continue not to read it.

• Bury links to other sites within your text rather than spelling out the full website address – or use abbreviation sites such as www.bitly.com, which allow you a shortened format. Don’t include too many external links – you want to keep your customers focused on your message and the outcome you had intended.

Case study

How to use email to promote yourself: Jessica Palmer, cover artist

Jessica Palmer is an artist and illustrator who works with paper to design intricate paper cuts, collages and paper sculptures. Her artwork is used on book and record covers, in design and decoration, on websites, in magazines and even as wearable art jewellery. She does not have a specialised background in marketing, so using email for marketing has been a voyage of exploration and discovery. Jessica says:

My use of email evolved over time, as did the development strategy for my career as an artist and illustrator. In the early stages, I used email to target individual publishers and other potential art buyers, drawing email addresses from websites, from meetings and personal recommendations. While this had some success, the process of identifying individuals and relevant organisations and then finding their contact details was time-consuming.

So next I bought into a company called Bikini Lists 12 that provides a mass-mailing mechanism for visual artists to reach a much greater volume – potentially thousands – of publishers, PR companies, design companies and similar across the world. The key to maximising the value of this facility is the follow-up after the bulk mailing. In practice, a relatively small proportion (in my experience 10–20 per cent) of recipients will open the initial mailing and an even smaller proportion (5–10 per cent) will then click on the link to my website. The important thing is to then make direct contact with these ‘clickers’ – ideally by phoning them. Your portfolio is online these days so it’s harder to offer to bring it in to show them. However, it is the case that you make yourself more memorable if you have personal contact, even if it is by telephone, and it gives you an opportunity to try to discover upcoming opportunities.

Alongside the Bikini List approach to emailing the corporate contacts I also maintain my own private mailing list from my business. I started to develop this list as a consequence of my first Open Studio when, over the course of one weekend, we received several hundred visitors. Many of these people were asking to be kept informed about future events and any workshops I would be running. So I noted down email addresses from everyone who was willing to share. Since then I have added to this list the email addresses offered by people coming to each event I lead, along with those obtained from other contacts. I’m now at a point where, within the space of a couple of years, I have around a thousand named individuals on my list.

I promise everyone that I won’t inundate them with emails and the main way that I use the list is by issuing a monthly Art Newsletter. Normally this focuses on three main items, for example if my work is being displayed in a forthcoming exhibition or event, or news of upcoming workshops. Just occasionally I may augment this with an additional in-month mailing, for example to remind people a few days before the start of an Open Studio.

In terms of process, my husband Keith and I work as a team to produce these newsletters. We agree between us the items that should be covered in each issue and I then draw together a first draft, using a Toddle¹³ template. Toddle is an email marketing tool for non-geeks. Keith then goes through the draft in the mode of a subscriber. Sometimes this results in quite a few changes – not least in the early days when I was more burdened by a sense of not ‘being worthy’ and would, in his view, understate what I was doing!

Our overall aim is to keep the initial information as brief and chatty as possible, so we provide buttons to click through to the full detail (for example, the booking details for workshops). The frequent cry I hear from potential clients is ‘If only I had known about you doing this or that!’ so I try to tell myself that I am providing a useful source of information rather than an irritating piece of marketing. Our recipe is to design something with eye appeal, several images and minimal text. The feedback I receive about these newsletters is invariably positive and I get, at most, a handful of ‘unsubscribe’ requests each month.

This DIY approach has been a useful introduction to the business of online marketing. However, it has been pretty laborious in that we have to load up segments of our mailing list one at a time as blind copies to a series of emails to circulate the newsletter. It also means that it takes several days to get each newsletter out to my complete mailing list because of the daily limits imposed by our email provider (Outlook). I’m therefore thinking about using a mass mailing system such as MailChimp 14 in the future to streamline the process.

Looking more broadly, as you begin to market yourself, you start to understand that you are becoming a brand. You have to think of your professional self impersonally as a separate entity from your private self. This means finding pictures of yourself to represent not just what you do but also what you are like, always trying to select the best images of your work. This is not necessarily easy and requires careful thought about the impression you want to present to the world. One of the hardest things to do is to exercise a critical eye and choose only your best work for display.

The more information products you offer up to public scrutiny, the more you begin to realise that they must also be of the best possible quality you can muster. For instance, I work with paper in much of my art work. Therefore, the leaflet that I have designed to tell people something about what I do – commissions, design and illustration, workshops and events – needs to be on extremely good paper with a fine texture. It seems an obvious thing on reflection but is an important detail in the marketing mix.

Once you embark on email marketing you become aware that you are nothing without an extremely good website. This is especially crucial in a visual field like mine. I need to be able to feel proud of it and unashamed to promote it widely. It took us a long time and a lot of trial and error to find a way to do this that was both affordable and beautiful. The site is like a garden. It must be constantly tended and added to and refreshed. It must work fluidly and smoothly, and be simple to navigate. But it is worth all the time, effort and money as it is my shop window to the world. It is also the destination that we send people to from our leaflets, emails and mailshots. It’s our opportunity to show the range of my work and my ultimate marketing tool to generate the next great job!

Jessica Palmer can be found at www.jessicapalmerart.com. You can subscribe to her monthly art newsletter by emailing palmerk@outlook.com or by going to http://jessicapalmerart.com/wordpress/index.php/contact-me/.

Figure 9.3 Sample from Jessica Palmer’s email newsletter. Courtesy of Jessica Palmer.

Social media: Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social networking opportunity. Material is organised into timelines where participants post photographs, messages and updates on what they are doing. It’s a closed network, meaning that individual friend requests must be approved before people can interact and it’s possible to set up additional specific groups for private discussions or events.

Although Facebook began as a social network it is now also one of the most widely used online marketing tools for business, simply because it is so large, and its age profile is also rising. With such a significant number of members, you can find specific communities likely to be interested in your particular passions.

For those new to Facebook, begin by creating a profile. Write it in a friendly way, and include a mention of your business and your website. Include photographs and consider customising your page with illustrations or a background photograph. You can then use other online marketing and social media (e.g., blogging, email or Twitter) to drive traffic to your Facebook page.

You can measure your results by the number of ‘likes’ you receive, the number of friends or fans you have and the extent to which others talk about your content (those who have created a story about it) as well as through your weekly total reach.

The best advice is to post regularly, remember to respond promptly to the comments you receive back, include photographs as often as possible and avoid direct appeals – posts requesting comments or likes will not get much traction. But users also need to remain aware of how this online format is developing, and how best to manage associated communication as a result.

Case study

How a publishing house run by a university uses Facebook as part of its outreach, and how that use has changed over time: Ooligan Press, assistant professor Per Henningsgaard, Portland State University

Ooligan Press¹⁵ is a publishing house staffed by students enrolled in the Master’s degree in Book Publishing at Portland State University, US. Publishing three books a year and selling them in bookstores across the nation as well as online, Ooligan Press provides a hands-on experience that is not replicated in any other Master’s degree in the US. Students participate in every step of the publishing process – from manuscript acquisition to editing, from design and production to marketing and sales – with guidance and supervision provided by expert faculty staff. Students take lessons from the classroom and apply them to real-world publishing challenges, resulting in numerous award-winning and bestselling books that span every genre. Participation in Ooligan Press is required of all students in the Master’s degree in Book Publishing.

Like most publishing houses that publish books for the general trade, Ooligan Press has an active social media presence: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Goodreads. At the start of each academic year, one student is appointed to manage all of these social media properties. For a student who hopes to graduate with a Master’s degree in Book Publishing, and go on to work in the marketing department of a publishing house, this experience is invaluable. Notably, the student is not responsible for creating all the content for these social media properties (although the student will do a fair bit of this, as well) but rather managing and coordinating the creation of content by individuals across the publishing house. It is important that the student appointed to this position maintains open lines of communication with others in the publishing house so that updates are not overlooked. It is also important that this person enforces a consistent tone across all updates. Fortunately, however, it is not required that Ooligan Press coordinates this tone with the university and departmental branding since this would be a cumbersome task.

In 2009, 8 years after the founding of Ooligan Press, its first Facebook account was established. A couple of years later, Facebook added a new type of page that allowed users to subscribe to public postings by another user and follow them without needing to add them as a friend. Consequently, Ooligan Press, like most other businesses at the time, made the shift from a Facebook profile to a Facebook page. There were two key benefits driving this shift. First, there is a limit to the number of friends users are allowed on a Facebook profile, but there is no limit on a Facebook page. Second, Facebook pages offer analytics so that users can see statistics on the success of individual status updates.

For the first few years during which Ooligan Press used Facebook, it was the lynchpin of Ooligan Press’s social media marketing efforts. Facebook is, of course, the most popular social media property, so it only makes sense that Ooligan Press devoted a significant amount of time and energy to this forum. Since 2013, however, Facebook has implemented various measures designed to encourage businesses with Facebook pages to pay for their outreach. It used to be that if someone chose to ‘follow’ Ooligan Press on Facebook, then they would receive all of Ooligan Press’s status updates. But now individuals who choose to ‘follow’ Ooligan Press receive only a small number of Ooligan Press’s status updates. In other words, the organic reach of a business’s Facebook status updates has been significantly reduced. Only if a particular status update begins to attract attention in the form of likes, comments and shares, will that status update begin to appear in the news feeds of a larger number of individuals who chose to ‘follow’ the business on Facebook. Alternatively, businesses are encouraged to ‘boost your post’ by paying so that more people will see it in their news feeds.

For these reasons, the effectiveness of Facebook as a marketing tool for Ooligan Press has become more limited over time. Beginning in 2013, Ooligan Press has focused on developing its presence in other social media properties. Nonetheless, Facebook remains a valuable part of Ooligan Press’s overall marketing strategy. In particular, Ooligan Press has found that status updates highlighting the extraordinary accomplishments of an individual (whether an author or a staff member) continue to attract large numbers of likes, comments and shares, thus increasing their overall reach. Event announcements, on the other hand, seem to have a very small reach. Ooligan Press also uses Facebook as a forum for driving traffic to other sites, including the Ooligan Press blog and the social media properties of Ooligan Press authors. Despite its limitations, Facebook still merits one or two status updates each and every day.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network, and it works as if you are handing out your business card in cyberspace. Again this is a closed network that users learn to navigate. You can leave specific content for those who look for you – or use your home page, profile, network and interests to try to drive those interested to your information.

LinkedIn has an older demographic profile than Facebook, and this makes it a useful forum for those looking for business connectedness. The language you use should be matched accordingly. It’s a good place to present yourself as an expert or promote your business – and also works for recruitment. Again you can create a LinkedIn group to service a particular need or event.

Top tips for LinkedIn

• Connect with everyone you come across professionally – you never know how useful they will be.

• If you are contacted by unfamiliar people and asked to connect, look to see if there is an overlap between their contacts and yours. Bear in mind that there are people you ‘know’ on social media that you have never physically met, and this may be sufficient recommendation.

• Research different companies to find out which are a good fit for the services and products you offer and the markets you approach.

• Start and join groups and conversations; when you answer a question or share expertise, you are building your reputation as an expert or thought leader. Participate strategically in your client area, e.g., science groups for science editors; construction or sustainability groups for those specialising in the built environment.

• Work your network: you may be closely connected to some key decision-makers.

• Consider premium membership if you’re going to use it a lot. LinkedIn has some very powerful tools like InMail (which allows you to send an internal LinkedIn email to anyone on the site, for a price) and other features that are available if you upgrade. Depending on the amount of communication and access that you want to have on LinkedIn, these memberships can be good value for money.

Case study

Using Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as part of an integrated social media campaign to promote CompletelyNovel, a publishing and reading community, by Sarah Juckes of CompletelyNovel www.completelynovel.com

The nature of self-publishing means that indie authors can often feel as if they are ‘going it alone’. Although CompletelyNovel exists primarily as a publishing platform, we wanted to ensure that authors had a space where they felt like they had people on their side. As a result, there is a strong focus on community on CompletelyNovel, and much of our time is spent engaging with new and existing customers on a more personal level. Facebook plays a significant part in this: it offers a nice way for us to connect with users by sharing things we think will be interesting to them more generally as writers and readers, alongside our offers and updates.

It’s fair to say that our engagement on Facebook has stepped up considerably in the last year. Prior to that we did have a presence, but were much quieter. Our increase in activity has tied in with a shift in Facebook’s strategy towards a larger presence for brands and sharing external content. We felt this gave us a better opportunity to contribute with content that fitted in with the Facebook environment, rather than risk people seeing it as an unwelcome intrusion into a space they felt was reserved for family and friends.

As a small, fairly new company, we have also made use of Facebook’s feature to ‘watch’ other pages to compare our progress with that of our competitors. By doing this for a range of pages with a similar target audience to our own, we hope to be able to pinpoint what type of post and schedule works best to increase engagement.

We have a very active Twitter account. Twitter is fantastic for alerting potential new customers to CompletelyNovel, but not necessarily to convert them to becoming a user. We therefore regularly link to Facebook from Twitter in the hope of generating new ‘likes’. By encouraging our customers to ‘like’ our Facebook page, we hope to be able to communicate with them on a more personal level.

With this in mind, our tone on Facebook is usually much more informal than with, say, our LinkedIn page. On LinkedIn we are targeting either potential or existing partners, or perhaps customers who are interested in producing professional books for their business. On Facebook, we are sharing images or links relating to writing – some targeted to motivate entrepreneurial indie authors, others capturing the ‘romance’ of writing, others just for fun (because we are strong believers that publishing should be enjoyable!). We also regularly link to CompletelyNovel articles and keep users up to date with what we are up to. We almost always encourage people to act on the post with a call to action, to encourage engagement.

In the past, we’ve found the following posts have generated the most engagement:

• Adding photos from The One Big Book Launch event, where ten authors launched their book on the same night. The authors involved shared these images with family and friends, and we got plenty of likes as a result. Each photo was also linked to CompletelyNovel, to capitalise on any conversions as a result.

• A ‘limited time offer’ that we pinned to the top of our Facebook page to maximise conversions. This was a good way to maximise the engagement of a post that was important for converting ‘likes’, to CompletelyNovel users, without ‘spamming’ the news feed of existing customers.

• Announcing partnerships with established firms. Our recent collaboration with Greene & Heaton literary agency received a great deal of interest from existing and potential customers. Customers recognised the brand of Greene & Heaton and were more likely to engage as a result.

• Sharing fun pictures on the theme of writing or books. These are important to build up a level of engagement with our network, so they are also aware of our ‘conversion’ posts later on. They are often light or funny – the kind of thing you would share with friends.

As a general rule, we always post with either a link or an image, as these posts are physically larger onscreen and more likely to be engaged with. We also add text to accompany each of these posts. We’ve found the following three-tier format works well for this text:

hook;

summary;

call to action.

For example:

BREAKING NEWS!

We are very pleased to announce our collaboration with Greene & Heaton literary agency.

Read the full announcement below! #selfpublishing #agents?

Figure 9.4 CompletelyNovel Facebook page. Courtesy of CompletelyNovel.

We’ve found that Facebook doesn’t always work the way we are expecting it to, and so much of what we post is trial and error. For example, we created a #WednesdayBookSnack hashtag, mirroring the campaign run by the Tate art gallery, where they shared an image of a painting that provided a weather forecast for the week. We shared an image of a book cover every Wednesday that included or featured food, asking users to share what books they are snacking on that week. Despite sharing popular books from across publishing, these posts received few impressions or engagement, and it was discontinued.

Although it was a neat idea, on reflection we thought it was perhaps a little too far removed from the core interest of writing for our followers. And although people like to contribute, our call to action may have demanded a little more thought than most users are willing to put in when they are just scanning through their newsfeed.

By pinpointing the posts that don’t do so well and thinking about why this might be, we can continue refining a Facebook marketing strategy that maximises engagement and conversions from ‘like’ to ‘customer’.

Twitter

Twitter allows the sharing of news and status updates in an ever-updating timeline. It offers an excellent medium for sharing links, which makes it an effective outreach tool for most forms of social media content, especially blogs.

Twitter works well for businesses because it can reach niche audiences who are interested in what you have to say; it creates an online community. It also allows you to show your personality; in the case of the publishing industry, many of the most interesting accounts are from individuals working for specific houses rather than the official house Twitter account.

Getting involved in Twitter allows you to build a strategic connectedness with a wide range of people – including the highly influential. In terms of the message you deliver, Twitter requires it to be succinct (only 140 characters) but memorable, and as more and more content is available, a picture or a link to another piece of information can be effective.

Twitter accounts are easily set up at http.//twitter.com. Choose a username with care so people can find you easily, and the addition of a profile picture is very important (those without them have little credibility). The 160-character biography that has to be provided can include links, hashtags and @usernames. You can also customise your design to convey colours that match your branding or display a background image. Hashtags are clickable keywords and adding them to your tweet means the line can be found by all those following. Twitter will record your interactions and allow you to see whenever anyone includes your @username, retweets or favourites your tweets, or begins to follow you. You also have a status page (‘Me’), which offers your biography and your last few tweets. Bear in mind, however, that Twitter is a very public medium, all your previous tweets will be visible to anyone who follows you – as are your responses. You can ‘direct message’ those you follow who also follow you, but security is not complete. Prosecutions have occurred over the sharing of inappropriate information.

What to tweet:

• News;

• Opinions;

• Funny stories;

• Links you think others will find interesting;

• A daily tip;

• A link to your blog where new content is available;

• Links to competitions.

Top tips for making effective business use of Twitter

• Be part of the community; offer free help and advice; share useful links and others will do this for you. Remember to respond to @mentions.

• Be authentic and accessible: people engage with people they like. Don’t auto-DM every new follower or schedule tweets in an obvious way. Be polite and informal but be yourself.

• Include a #hashtag theme in your tweet to make your ideas visible to all those following the relevant thread (although there is some discussion currently about removing hashtags).

• Upload pictures and make links with other web content you want to share. Twitter has become very visual over the past year, and is learning a lot in this respect from Pinterest.

• Practise strategic following. Follow people in your industry, people who use certain keywords in their biography, or even people who follow the people you follow. Some of these will follow you back. If they retweet you, it will introduce you to their followers.

In terms of how successful you are on Twitter, the number of followers is an obvious start, as well as notifications which tell you who has retweeted or favourited any of your content. You can also use metrics available to refine how you communicate further. For example, you can use www.twocation.com to find out where your followers are geographically, and this may give you indications as to what time zone you should be tweeting in (to find your followers awake) and in what currency to invoice. Look at your links (via Bitly) and look up your ranking.

Case study

Use of Twitter by an academic publishing house: Alastair Horne, social media and communities manager, Cambridge University Press

In the English language teaching (ELT) department of Cambridge University Press, the social media team is responsible for running the publisher’s global social media accounts, and also works with the organisation’s many local branches, offering support, guidance and content for the accounts they run in their own markets.

The Cambridge team views social media as a means of building a long-term relationship with their audience that goes far beyond marketing to include market research and customer support, with the ultimate aim of becoming part of that community’s lives: it’s about getting to know the audience (mostly teachers) better, establishing and maintaining a sense of trust in the Cambridge brand, and finding out what that audience wants and needs. Cambridge does this primarily by providing free content daily through its various social channels, from webinars with well-respected authors and educators, and thought-provoking blogposts, to excerpts from its many textbooks and guides to methodology.

Cambridge divides its social activity between third-party social platforms – principally Facebook and Twitter – and its own platforms, including Cambridge English Teacher, a professional development community for teachers, with its own blog and series of webinars. Third-party platforms offer considerable advantages – most notably that they already exist, and so don’t require building at great expense; and as people already have accounts, they don’t need to be persuaded to join up. However, they also make publishers heavily dependent on other businesses for their ability to reach their audience, which can create its own problems. Like most brands, Cambridge has seen a marked decline in its Facebook views over the past six months as Facebook increasingly encourages companies to pay for promoted posts to reach their fans. Increasingly, therefore, social media activity is focused on directing the audience towards platforms where interaction is not mediated through third parties: Cambridge’s website, blog and webinar series.

Twitter plays an important part in Cambridge’s social media activity. New blogposts and forthcoming webinars, for instance, are promoted regularly with tweets scheduled for different times of day to reach different audiences, and highlighting different aspects of the content, to interest different types of people. Customer queries are answered as swiftly as possible, and passed on where appropriate to the customer services department or relevant editor.

One of the most popular features of Cambridge’s use of Twitter has been its live tweeting of events including webinars and conferences, offering those unable to attend in person an opportunity to keep up with what they’re missing. These 140 character summaries of key points from talks are often among Cambridge’s most retweeted and favourited tweets, and lead to a noticeable rise in followers.

In addition to sharing its own content, Cambridge also adds value to its Twitter feed by curating the best ELT content it finds online, and particularly from the accounts it follows back. Making sure to credit these discoveries to the original finders is not only best practice, but also emphasises that the relationship between the Press and its audience works both ways.

Like Facebook, Twitter is increasingly seeking to persuade companies to pay for premium access to potential customers, with options including promoted tweets and Twitter cards, and a recent Cambridge campaign around the launch of a new mobile app for Cambridge’s bestselling self-study title English Grammar in Use marked the team’s first use of these options. Timed to coincide with a two-day price promotion, the tweets targeted mobile users, pointing them towards a page that would send them to Apple’s App Store, if they were using an Apple device. Android users were sent to a page where they could register their interest for that version of the app, to be launched a month later. The campaign not only prompted thousands of app purchases, but also saw the Press’s Twitter account gain nearly 1,500 followers in 48 hours, an increase of almost 20 per cent.

Although Cambridge carefully monitors analytics to measure the success of posts and campaigns, not everything is easily explicable. Last year, the team took over responsibility for the publisher’s Cambridge Dictionaries Online accounts, and immediately saw follower numbers rise on the Dictionaries’ Facebook page from 60,000 to more than 1.5 million in under a year. Very little had changed when the team took over the account – most posts still comprised a ‘Word of the Day’ for students keen to extend their vocabulary, with an example sentence and link to an extended definition on the Dictionaries site. The page had simply hit critical mass in terms of its popularity, with each new follower increasing the likelihood of further followers signing up.

Case study

Using Twitter for a major marketing campaign: Katie Sadler of HarperCollins

Katie Sadler is digital marketing manager for Voyager (HarperCollins’ science fiction list). She recently ran a second campaign for George R.R. Martin’s fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire series (1996 onwards) published to coincide with its televised version as Game of Thrones. Twitter described it as ‘the most engaging campaign they had ever seen’, quoting an exceptionally high engagement rate of 18 per cent. How did she and her team do it?

We publish the five books (split into seven volumes) on which the Game of Thrones television series is based. So our market is anyone who loves Game of Thrones but has not yet read the books (or wants to recommend or share them with others). We know, both from our market research and from following conversations on Twitter, that the depth of characterisation and plots offered by the books really enhance an appreciation of the television series. Fans who have read the books tend to get quite irritated with those who lack this wider understanding of what is going on.

It’s hard to generalise about the market, but the research carried out by our in-house consumer insight team has told us that viewers tend to be 25–30+ in age, and the audience for fantasy fiction is more weighted towards females than males.

This is the second year we have run a marketing campaign around the series. Last year we used a combination of Facebook, Google advertisements and Twitter, but this year we are running exclusively on Twitter, as we found this produced by far the best levels of engagement.

In the US, Game of Thrones airs on a Sunday night and so we both benefit from the energy created around the programme there, and feed this into the marketing that surrounds its airing in the UK the next evening. For example, we watch what’s going on Twitter in the US, see what are the main quotes to emerge from each programme, and then commission a series of Tweet ‘quote images’ that show the quote in full, who said it and from which book it comes. These are then tweeted to the UK audience in the run-up to the Monday evening, shown during it, and then while the debate is going on afterwards. Given that the images are essentially pictures of text, in a designed and branded format that viewers find easy to spot, they enable us to share far more content than can be delivered in the 140 characters officially allowed – and because they take up more space in the Twitter timeline and are branded, they are easy to spot and hence are both responded to and retweeted. Conversations follow.

Conversation is also the way many fans respond to the series. As one fan commented:

[My friends and I] talk about it constantly, face to face, but also via WhatsApp – mostly after the programme has finished. I started off watching the series but am now catching up with the books, and my friends have all read them.

A big fan of the show herself, Katie manages the message content herself, as she is concerned that the quality of all the associated communications should reflect the epic nature of the books.

HarperCollins has several imprint Twitter accounts – another is Harper Impulse for their romance list – and this does enable a consistent voice and relationship with the audience to be developed. If you are tweeting about a range of titles, from children’s books to gory horror titles it would be difficult to build consistent conversations.

But the despatch of her tweets, as well as the design and despatch of the ‘quote images’, are managed by the social media marketing and technology PR agency 33 Seconds, who also organise a digital spend to support the tweeting. Payment covers the tweeting of the ‘quote images’ to anyone who is currently following #gameofthrones or anyone who has used that hashtag in the past week. The campaign began a couple of weeks before the programmes went out and will continue until a week after it finishes, and offers a very directed spend reaching a market that is highly engaged.

The HarperCollins publicity team support their efforts by blogging on the main Game of Thrones website (www.westeros.org) from which smaller fan sites tend to take information, so one blog can cascade into a much larger online presence. Many enthusiasts buy in a linear fashion, moving from blog to online purchase, but the titles also sell well through conventional bookstores, and particularly well in airports. Associated sales figures won’t be available until after the campaign finishes, but the company is certainly well satisfied with the results. Katie again:

Considering the television series is in its fourth year, and the programmes are based on the first seven books, we are very happy with the sales.

And as the author’s productivity shows no sign of slowing down (there are two more series titles in the pipeline) and as devotees his work tend to share their enthusiasm with great passion, future demand looks very healthy.

Figure 9.5 HarperCollins Game of Thrones tweet. Courtesy of HarperCollins.

Author involvement online

Given the complexities of involvement online, some publishing houses manage the online presence of their authors, creating web pages for them within the organisational site and even organising social media involvement on their behalf. There are, however, many writers who now incorporate online activity within their creative process, and are active in online marketing – and involvement in these areas is increasingly significant in the commissioning decisions made by publishers.

All the opportunities itemised above apply to author marketing in the same way as they do to publishers, but it’s worth isolating the particular risks and consequences of author involvement – and considering the most appropriate ways and times in which to be active to the cumulative benefit of work to be made available.

Having a presence online, and in particular using social media, can allow a writer to share information with their audience, to talk without being interrupted, to warm up for writing, to try out new ideas and get feedback – often very quickly. Having a blog can help writers avoid what is often suspected to be the over-mediation, assumptions or even elitism of the traditional industry, and offer the opportunity to gain a sense of the wider community potentially interested in their work.

But as the artist Jane Watt said: ‘Just because the medium of a blog is accessible, unmediated and immediate, doesn’t mean it is an easy thing to write.’¹⁶ Writers need to take care with presentation, bearing in mind that writing material is a different skill from editing it, and the responsibility for what ultimately appears lies with the contributor:

My website has an inbuilt fault that all websites have; it is edited only by me. I have always been at my best as a writer when I was edited by someone else. Newspapers do that. Newspaper editors have this awkward habit of asking you what you mean, checking up to see whether you have got it right and they bring the whole force of the publication to bear on helping you to be better.

Clive James, writer and broadcaster speaking on Radio 4 17

In addition to demanding support from a different bit of your brain (the ability to edit and create are quite different skills) – or perhaps the involvement of someone else in helping you finalise what appears – there are wider associated dangers. Blogging can result in sharing work at the wrong stage in writing development, airing ideas before you are ready to receive feedback or the associated product for sale is ready for distribution. It can also drain the energy from the writing you want to make available in the longer term; the activity is not only unpaid, it also risks reducing the audience’s need to buy an associated product – the market may feel they know enough about you already. Blogging can also be too quick (the law still applies to what you write online) and as the writer is in sole charge, ‘unmediated’ can mean ‘incomprehensible’, inadvisable or illegal.

Why it might be a good idea to spend less time on social media

Not everyone sees being active online as a permanent and useful requirement. Disengaging from screens and forcing the brain to make its own synaptic links can yield great creativity and writers have often found physical activity to be a key part of their creative process. In the acknowledgements for her most recent novel, NW, author Zadie Smith paid credit to two internet applications that allow individuals to block online access other than at controlled and pre-agreed times and hence ‘creating the time’ in which to write.¹⁸

Sitting at a computer may not promote creativity. It’s known that walking stimulates creative values and promotes cognitive function. Researchers at Stanford University have been conducting experiments that confirm the differences between those who walk versus those who sit, showing that the former are definitely more creative. And there are options other than online ones for gaining stimulus – author Carol Shields talked about how much she enjoyed being part of a ‘Literary Theory Group’ that met regularly for lunch. They never discussed what was in their title but found it an excellent stimulus for their shared writing goals – and a lot of fun. Alternatively you could encourage others to blog about your work or review the work online, or contribute to other edited formats such as newsletters and house journals.

I conclude this section with an interview with a writer who has decided to limit the time he spends online in order to promote his creative process, re-engaging at a time when messages can be usefully spread in promotion of a product to which his publishers and he commit together. In a world sated with online information and opportunities to share, and where publishers need to think about their role in supporting material that is both esteemed worthy and will last, it’s a useful model for consideration.

Case study

An interview with author Chris Cleave

Chris Cleave is a writer. His debut novel Incendiary won the Somerset Maugham Award. His second, the Costa-shortlisted The Other Hand (known as Little Bee in the USA and Canada) was a Sunday Times bestseller and a New York Times #1 bestseller, with 3 million copies in print. His third, Gold, was a global bestseller and his new novel is due out in 2014.

An early adopter of social media, he initially maintained that while his publisher promoted his novels, his presence online was to keep the relationship with his readers going in between books. He established and managed a thoughtful website from which he ran a regular blog, sent engaged replies to those who emailed him about his work and was active on Twitter. The past year has seen a complete change. While he dropped out of Facebook a while ago, over the past 12 months he has completely ceased using other social media: the Twitter account has been dormant; the website untended; emails batched and responded to – but often long after receipt.

The result? A new book of which he is by his own admission ‘pretty proud’ that has taken him a year to write (a third of the time taken to write the previous one); a tighter writing style that more often feels ‘right first time’; a strong awareness that his approach to writing feels more focused; a personal life that feels calmer and happy. This interview explores how this happened, and why other writers too might decide to spend less time and energy on social media.

By his own admission, Chris had always been an ‘accommodating author’, willing to support his publishers through engaging with readers and taking part in planned activities. For each book he went on a series of long promotional tours (the last book resulted cumulatively in 9 months away), the rigours of the schedule permitting no down or writing time. His publishers similarly encouraged his habit of replying to readers and maintaining a general presence through social media.

Facebook was the first thing to go. He had experimented but eventually found that ‘if you get a measure of success it’s very difficult to post anything you care about without it attracting stalking responses’. Increasingly he found he couldn’t use Facebook for its intended purpose – that of having an extended circle of friends – and having to separate himself from the person he presented, by only posting contributions that were devoid of any material he genuinely cared about, seemed false.

He did, however, continue to update his website each day with his location and a brief summary of activity (‘Today I am writing’), adding short journalistic pieces as blogs for wider comment. Plans to offer space to guest bloggers were never activated due to shortage of time and it became too easy for involvement with the website to promote the erosion of his writing time, ‘allowing friends to become part of the working day’.

Twitter he got on well with. ‘The medium promotes short pithy expression and this initially aligns well with the role of the writer; you can be yourself. But there is a big difference between crafting 140 characters and 100,000 words for a novel’, and the drain of energy and attention for the former did not improve the latter. In any case he was not sure in the long term that it was needed. ‘My readers don’t need to hear from me daily, what they want is the best book I can produce when it is ready.’

Overall, as these various commitments online grew, he was finding his time consistently under pressure; the personal administration of life plus maintaining the constant commitment that social media required was draining both his energy and time for writing. With his long-term preference for only taking on what he can do really well, he felt spread too thinly. Increasingly he wanted to push at the limits of his writing, to be free to imagine and develop characters, and that heavy involvement in social media was not helping him to get better. He came to the conclusion that ‘it’s the writer’s job to do the best possible work they can’, and that social media was a blockage.

The growing realisation that something had to give to make room for him to produce his best work he could was translated into action from a hotel bedroom in San Francisco. ‘I could not drop my commitment to my writing, my family or my publisher, so something had to go.’ The response was radical. He physically disabled the Wi-Fi on his laptop, restoring a more appropriate hierarchy of control, with technology supporting his writing rather than barking instructions. He also gave up alcohol, obsessive exercise and mindfully began to rework himself to be better able to address the very difficult task of crafting fine writing.

It’s perhaps not insignificant that this repurposing was accompanied by his fortieth birthday – and an awareness that writing was as important to him now as when he started. Now, however, it was time to be the best writer he could be, not just as good as possible, and taking control of his time meant the best part of the day could be preserved for writing.

The website remains as a space for reactivation in future, for the promoting part of the writing life he accepts still exists, and to which he will return to support the efforts of his publishers when the time is right. Given that it already has an associated community, it can also be offered in future as a space for guest blogging, to help nascent writers whose work he appreciates, and he admires other writers who find the time to do that. He has not blogged during the period of writing his latest book but the construct remains for use later on – particularly valuable now that he no longer works as a journalist.

Wider involvement online he avoids. He used to be a regular contributor to Goodreads, but stopped participating after it was bought by Amazon, finding an ethical difficulty in a corporation buying a community – an ‘intellectual land-grab’.

Looking wider, he questions the ethos of social media as it ‘promotes an inevitable regression towards the mean’. The process of submitting both self and ideas to an internet consensus is not thought-provoking; rather it is ‘dissipating energy and preventing non-canonical thought in a profound way’.

Challenging the traditional notion that the internet is broadening to the mind, he suspects it rather closes it down, blocking the writer’s ability to think new thoughts, ‘submitting yourself to a low level consensus; the highly opinionated views of others on fragments of work or passing ideas that in no way represent the whole person or work that is being developed’. He claims that the writer who wants to be producing work worth reading needs to concentrate ‘not on the high-frequency, low-intensity communication, but rather on low-frequency, high-intensity work’. He wants to be free to push his work in whatever direction he feels appropriate, to make it as weird as he chooses it to be and available when he feels it is ready, unencumbered by group opinions on what he should write next from the community active on social media, which is not – in any case – his entire readership. He feels the writer has to be a solitary individual, a lone wolf, engaging with the collective when the book is ready for wider sharing, but the decision on when at their sole disposal.

He remains convinced that thought needs to be deeply developed and no longer has the desire to be involved in short and intense dialogues during the working day. He also questions the honesty of social media that encourages the appearance of friendship to many; the promotion of a false loyalty, when it is impossible to be a friend to everyone. He feels he can contribute more honestly by plying his trade, writing and producing the best work he can.

He has stopped doing many of the things that had become expected of him: accepting every interview offered; offering pithy quotes to journalists who require an urgent range of opinions; blogging about his life and work; the ‘low level administration that could take all day if you let it’. Rather he thought carefully about how other writers had put themselves in a position whereby they could develop their craft and make proper time for their writing. ‘It’s a problem for writers that we are embedded in civilian life’ and you need to find a method of getting away to concentrate on the writing: ‘If you were trying to climb an 8,000-foot mountain without oxygen people would understand that you couldn’t carry additional baggage.’

Email he remains alert to, noting when the tone of voice changes from polite alerts to urgent reminders with consequences, but in general he now batches it up for block responses rather than feeling he must respond immediately. Each day he gets about 100 emails that divide into spam, things that need routine responses and can be dealt with quickly and emails that require engaged feedback. He found those contacting him quickly got used to the changed situation and now know that he will respond, just not with as rapid a reply as they may originally have expected.

He questions the way publishing houses have begun to measure the success of their marketing operations. Judging their contribution through metrics such as the extent to which they are successful in persuading authors like him to participate in social media and to extend author/publisher branding promotes short-term attention rather than necessarily enhancing long-term appreciation for a writer’s work.

Finally he questioned the idea of ‘the writing career’, rather viewing each book as a separate entity prompted by particular circumstances and created by an individual during a specific period of time. But while resisting the notion of his own writing career, the rededication to his craft feels similarly single-minded. His routine is now to rise early for a couple of hours’ writing, to manage five to six hours once his three children have gone to school and then to finish around 3pm for a restorative potter – in preparation for the following day.

Henceforth he affirms the solitude of the writer and wants to avoid collective comment. He rejects the bullying consensus of new media, ‘the forces that weigh you down rather than liberate you to think and write’, and seeks to concentrate on developing a dialogue with readers in a different way – ‘through a beautiful novel that is as good as it can be’ rather than sharing random thoughts on Twitter. From now on he (and his longstanding agents, Peter Straus and Jennifer Joel) will decide whether his work is any good or not, and when it is ready for sharing.

In short, Cleave is using a ruthless re-examination of his allocation of time as an opportunity to make himself into the best writer he can be – and at the same time to consciously pursue a more thoughtful and honest way of living. From our long and fascinating discussion, I would say there is strong evidence that this is working.

Concluding case study

The future of online marketing, by Jon Reed

Jon Reed writes about and teaches social media marketing. He is the author of Get Up to Speed with Online Marketing (www.getuptospeed.biz) and runs the blog Publishing Talk (www.publishingtalk.eu). He previously worked in publishing for 10 years, including as publishing director for McGraw-Hill.

We’ve come a long way in a short space of time. When I started in publishing (20 years ago, at Routledge, the publishers of this book), the internet was new and many of us didn’t even have email. Now online marketing is a routine part of any marketing strategy – and social media has become the way we do that. Social media as we know it has only been around since 2006 – the year Facebook opened to the public, Google bought YouTube, and Twitter launched. These services are now a part of daily life for many people. All media is becoming social, and all our social lives are becoming mediated, on the go, with Instagramed selfies and a running commentary on Twitter. The trends that led to this explosion in social media – in both technology and culture – look set to continue.

The global online population is now around two billion people – and more than half of them are on Facebook. Twitter is catching up fast.19 More people will come online in the coming years, as online access becomes seen more as an essential utility than a technological luxury. These people will join the global conversations taking place on social media. More people, more users – more readers.

The way people access the internet is also changing. Outside the US and UK, 60 per cent of internet access is now mostly mobile.²⁰ Widespread use of smartphones has led not only to wider internet access but is a major driver of the adoption of social media, as we post status updates and images on the go using apps.

Hand-in-hand with mobile access to social media is the growth of the visual web, facilitated by speedy connections and a camera in every pocket. Now that we can take decent quality pictures from our phones and upload the images to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with a few taps, we’re doing so. It is notable that two of the most successful newer platforms – Instagram (2010) and Pinterest (2011) – are visual tools. There’s a lot of noise to cut through online, and images help you to stand out – including on the more established platforms Facebook and Twitter, where images are now far more prominent than they once were.

Pinterest has quickly become the most successful social bookmarking site because it is a visual one. Used by writers to create mood boards, and publishers to create themed promotions, is it is a virtual pin-board that promotes a visual lifestyle that others want to ‘re-pin’ on to their own boards. It is used particularly well by Penguin Books, for example (www.pinterest.com/penguinbooksusa). But even if you don’t want to use Pinterest, you can benefit from it simply by including images on your web pages and blog posts. Images make it possible for people to ‘pin’ your content on their own boards, which others can click through from, like and share. And it’s not all glossy lifestyle images: if you publish academic texts, infographics created around your content are popular and pinnable.

Video is also becoming easier, thanks to smartphones and cheap handheld video cameras. Short, six-second looping videos are shared on Vine,²¹ and up to 15-second ones on Instagram.²² While you currently still need a higher-end video camera, and to learn to use video editing software, if you want to create anything professional-looking, these barriers will continue to reduce.

We will see more hashtag campaigns, as these now apply not only to Twitter but across social networks, including Facebook, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram. At the time of writing, HarperCollins is running a month-long campaign (throughout June 2014) to promote its new imprint Borough Press, with the hashtag #bookaday.23 With a different nominated theme each day, my Twitter and Instagram timelines are filling up with pictures of my friends’ favourite books, from ‘Best bargain’ to ‘One with a blue cover’ to ‘The one I always give as a gift’.

The growth in social media is not just due to technology: it is also about culture. Today we trust ‘people like me’ rather than companies and institutions. Just as a cover quote is worth more than a publisher’s blurb, word-of-mouth peer recommendations are more powerful than anything you could say yourself. The advent of social media is a revolution in the way content is produced, shared and consumed. Bottom-up rather than top-down, in the laptops of the many rather than the printing presses of the few, and inextricably bound up with the future of publishing. The growing reach of social media has coincided with the boom in digital publishing and, more recently, self-publishing – the biggest trend in publishing to date. This heady mix of digitisation, democratisation and disintermediation cannot be ignored.

I’ve seen publishing from all sides: as a print book publisher, as an author with a traditional publishing house, and as a digital self-published author. The future of online marketing is bright, visual, mobile – and growing. But it is also open to authors as well as publishers. And the online tools available to them are not just marketing tools but self-publishing tools too.

Publishers therefore need to think carefully about where they can add value to the process. This can include help with social media, from setting up author blogs and websites, help with the more challenging forms of content creation such as video, or social media training.

Social media is mainstream and part of your readers’ daily lives. But it’s not just about which tools you use: it’s how you use them. Coming up with smart, imaginative marketing campaigns that engage your target audience and make them want to share your content is just as important. Connecting with readers where they are already spending their time is how the successful marketing campaigns of the future will be built.

Notes

1 Hence insistence in many organisations that before setting up an arrangement to do business in future, a physical relationship must be established between the potential partners – to check they are capable of delivering what is advertised online.

2 Blog at www.webinknow.com. The associated book – The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly – has a clever title. Itemising the variety of different methods of communicating online means it is likely to score highly in SEO and be picked up in a variety of customer word searches.

3 Evan Le Page, http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-tips-to-enhance-your-content-marketing.

4 www.bitly.com.

5 www.hootsuite.com.

6 www.PoweredBySearch.com.

7 The principle is named after the Italian economist who pointed out in 1806 that in Italy, 80 per cent of the land was owned by 20 per cent of the population and developed the principle further. Today this is also known as the 80–20 rule, or law of the vital few, on the basis that roughly 80 per cent of effects come from 20 per cent of causes.

8 www.bookmachine.co.uk.

9 www.tutorialspoint.com/management_concepts/the_rule_of_seven.htm.

10 http://marketingland.com/mobile-devices-generate-30-pct-traffic-15-pct-e-sales-75498.

11 www.calliopegifts.co.uk.

12 www.bikinilists.com.

13 www.toddle.com.

14 www.mailchimp.com.

15 http://ooligan.pdx.edu.

16 Projects Unedited www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking.

17 BBC Radio 4, Heresy, 2009.

18 www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2196718/Zadie-Smith-pays-tribute-software-BLOCKS-internet-sites-allowing-write-new-book-distractions.html#ixzz35iGy6MHJ.

19 www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics.

20 http://marketingland.com/outside-us-60-percent-internet-access-mostly-mobile-74498.

21 http://vine.co/

22 http://instagram.com

23 www.boroughpress.co.uk/blog/bookaday.