What Publishers Need to do to Survive

The Future of Digital Distribution
and eBook Marketing

Tim O’Reilly
www.oreilly.com

Tools of Change for Publishing
February 24, 2010

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Why There Will Always Be Publishers

Tim O’Reilly
www.oreilly.com

February 24, 2010


What Publishers Need To Do To Survive
Tim O’Reilly
www.oreilly.com

February 24, 2010


Create the coolest new enhanced ebooks? NOT.


ΩΩ


You’re betting that you’re going to be smarter, and
faster, and more creative than all the young
developers and entrepreneurs out there.


“The ugly stuff will always need to be done.”

-John Ingram


Your job as a publisher is to do things for authors that
they can’t do for themselves:
– Things that require special expertise
– Things that require scale
– Things that are expensive
– Things that require marketplace leverage
– Things that are boring and time-consuming


Production
Distribution
Pricing
Channel management
Marketing
Sales


Why?


“No place affords a more striking conviction of the
vanity of human hopes than a public library.”

Samuel Johnson, 23 March 1751
Rambler No. 106


“Obscurity is a bigger problem for authors than
piracy.”

Tim O’Reilly, 11 December 2002
Piracy is Progressive Taxation


Does anyone see a problem with this?


Why does new media always display power laws?

Figure #1: 433 weblogs arranged in rank order by number of inbound links.
The data is drawn from N.Z Bear's 2002 work on the blogosphere ecosystem.
The current version of this project can now be found at http://www.myelin.co.nz/ecosystem/.

Clay Shirky, Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, February 8, 2003
http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html


Publishing with the Huffington Post gives authors
more visibility than they can get on their own.


It’s all in the math!


The mathematics of complex social organization

“Relationships between a band of 20 people involve only 190
two-person interactions (20 people times 19 divided by 2), but
a band of 2000 would have 1,999,000 dyads.... In small
societies with few pairs of members, the resulting necessary
transfer of goods can be engaged directly between pairs of
individuals or families, by reciprocal exchanges. But the
same mathematics that makes direct pairwise conflict
resolution difficult in large societies makes pairwise
economic transfers also inefficient. Large societies can
function economically only if they have a redistributive
economy in addition to a reciprocal economy.”

Jared Diamond: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
in Guns, Germs and Steel, pp 286-287


Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get
more visibility and sales for authors than they can get
on their own.


Distribution


O’Reilly eBook revenue sources


“the minimum viable product is that version of a new product
which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of
validated learning about customers with the least effort.”


The capability to create product in new formats, and
sell it into emerging channels.


Marketing


Social Media Marketing


retweetradar


nivi and the @timoreilly bump


This is important!
 In social networks, you gain and bestow status
through those you associate with
 A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal
of status by who and what you pay attention to
 If you only pay attention to yourself, you aren’t as
valuable to your community
– You don’t learn as much from your readers
– You don’t bind them to you by amplifying their voice


Analytics are the heart of SEO.


They are also at the heart of social media marketing.


The PeopleBrowsr Cycle
• Historical and  • Campaigns to Build 
Ongoing Sen9ment  Followers
Analysis

•  Campaigns to Direct 
Message

• Custom Monitoring 
Dashboards

• Repor9ng on ROI for 
tradi9onal and Social 
Media
1


There will be ebook reader analytics tools as well.


Pay attention.


Analytics will help you find what products are working
what channels are working
what prices are working
who is spreading the word about you
what your readers think


The secret of social media is that it's not about you,
your product, or your story. It's about how you can
add value to the communities that happen to include
you. If you want to make a positive impact, forget
about what you can get out of social media, and start
thinking about what you can contribute. Not
surprisingly, the more value you create for your
community, the more value they will create for you.


Create more value than you capture.


What Publishers Need to do to Survive

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