Three of the most important components of digital book marketing. - Metadata (including retail algorithms) - Online Communities of Readers - Vertical Markets

1. Marketing a Digital-First
Imprint
Anne Treasure
@annetreasure

2. • Office Assistant
• Sales Coordinator
• Sales and Operations Support
• Trade Sales Representative
• Digital Marketing Executive

3. - 2011, Tom Gilliatt (then non-fiction publisher at Pan Mac) and Joel Naoum (then editor)
- Experimental, digital-only imprint run as a start-up
- Separate from Pan Mac, physically and intellectually
o globally-available
o low-cost
o reader-led
o higher royalties
o no advance
- New and backlist titles, from a variety of sources – literary agents, slush pile, Pan Macmillan out of print
titles, even a book commissioned on the strength of a popular blog (How to Write Badly Well)

5. Information about a book like ISBN, price, category, blurb, availability and author
information –essential to making a book discoverable in an online retail
environment.
If there is insufficient metadata for a digital book, consumers simply will not find it –
without metadata, ebooks are invisible.

6. The Link Between Metadata and Sales
A book with a cover image is 8 times more likely to
sell than one without
A clear relationship between the completeness of basic
metadata and sales
Neilsen White Paper, 2012
“As the internet becomes the consumer’s primary source of information, it’s likely that customers will increasingly discover and
learn about books via the information they can find about that book, rather than the physical product itself.”

7. BIC and BISAC codes

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

9. Community
Engagement
(ie „talking to
readers‟)
• Go to where the readers are
• Communities of interest online around genres,
and subgenres
• Social reading sites like Goodreads, ReadSocial
and Library Thing are a good start

10. Genre-based readerships
• Romance – biggest and most engaged community of
readers online
• US-based Heroes and Heartbreakers
• Review blogs like Smart Bitches Trashy Books, and Dear
Author
• Pan Macmillan’s Momentum Moonlight
• Harper Collins’ Escape Publishing (Kate Cuthbert)
• Science Fiction – a huge readership but more disparate
• Tor.com
• io9

13. Vertical Marketing
• Identifying a target audience and
publishing books specifically to meet their
interests
• Verticals are segments of the market that
have similar reading proclivities
• Observing and interacting with already-
established audiences provides a greater
understanding of what they want
• Marketing a literary book by appealing to
book snobs on tumblr versus a romance
novel appealing to the ARRA community

15. Kylie Scott – from slush pile to bestseller
• Apocalyptic Erotic Romance submission –
Momentum Monday
• Two books – Flesh and Skin
• Gained a following
• Rockstar Romance, New Adult
• Popularity led to a print publishing deal

16. Practical – Vertical Markets
• Identify an audience (try narrowing it down to a genre first)
• Start with social reading sites, then blogs, social media (Tumblr,
Twitter, Facebook)
• Propose a project – could be a series of books, an author or a single
title that fits into a larger imprint