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Enter the Library Market & Drive Sales with Lessons from Patron Profiles #BEA

by David Lee King on June 5, 2012

BEAThis is a presentation all about book research and the library market… could be interesting…

Rebecca Miller, Editor in Chief, School Library Journal

giving an overview/breakdown of public library book budgets

2011 – public libraries carried an average of 4000 ebooks.

ebook budgets spiked in 2011 over 101%

Kelly Gallagher at Bowker Market Research

talking about their Patron Profiles study…

9046 US public library ssytems

16,698 public library buildings

169 million public library users …

Meet the power patron – customers who visit the library at least weekly (physical visits):

  • 61% female, average age – 48
  • average income – $61,000
  • 62% with a college degree or higher
  • 39% with kids under age 18
  • what do they do at the library? 65% borrow books and media. 59% browse shelves. 40% search the catalog. 43% place holds on stuff.
  • clear link between borrowing and buying: 61% – purchased books by an author whose works were previously borrowed from the library. 37% – purchased book previously borrowed fromt he library. 35% – used the library to discover new authors or genres
  • library patrons are also buyers

Ebook users read more.

Ebook users – 67% purchased books by an author whose works were previously borrowed from the library. Wow.

Takeaways – libraries are a win-win system for marketing, sales, and discovery for books and publishers.

Skip Dye (Random House)

wants to encourage discoverability – this research helped them

wants to be format-agnostic

Said it’s up to the consumer how they want to read/listen. However they want to do that, that’s what is important.

future of print – Skip is old-fashioned. Thinks the format will survive, but change.

George something from Baker and Taylor

talking about exploding digital content in libraries

He also said they should be device agnostic

66% of public libraries experienced a “dramatic” increase in ebook requests

average holdes-to-copy ratio target is 6:1, but actual is closer tro 12:1

Hmm – claimed their Access 360 desktop reader is format agnostic. To that I’d say no it’s not. Can you open up a book from Overdrive through it? I’m guessing not.

showed Orange County Library’s Axis 360 ebookstore – an example of buying the book through a library

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What Librarians Wish Publishers Knew: We Build Buzz #BEA

by David Lee King on June 5, 2012

BEAA panel with five people… moderator – from earlyword.com

publishers have been talking about libraries as discovery venues

Why? Brick & mortar stores are disappearing, so libraries are a great place to actually still touch stuff.

Modern public library is designed to display books, library websites are just starting to display books

Michael Colford – their catalog

  • they use Bibliocommons
  • Bibliocommons sites sorta share audiences – if you put up a book trailer, it’s shared across all sites
  • interesting comments about books as our brand. He thinks we should embrace that instead of distance ourselves from it
  • discovery – make the book easy to find, make similar books easy to get as a second option, make a buy it now button easy to find too. Have all of this be a complete library experience, rather than sending someone off to an outside store.
  • Reader’s Advisory – reviews, book trailers, aggregation of book blogs – pull all of those together
  • hook events into the catalog – mentions of, other libraries, live stream these from the catalog, etc
  • de-emphasize the best sellers. We build the reader, and are market-makers for books and authors. Connect people with other books besides the best sellers

Sari Feldman, Cuyahoga County Public Library

  • 40% of their materials budget is for print books, 60% for other things
  • They focus more on best sellers than Boston Public does
  • They consulted with Nancy Pearl to help them re-work their readers advisory focus
  • She said there are no bookstores in Cuyahoga County (then she said there are two independent bookstores). They are The Place for books
  • They use their Facebook Page heavily. Readers advisory – tell us three books you love, we’ll tell you three more you will love. Love this idea!
  • People are looking for recommendations on Facebook – people come there to chat about it, and other people answer (the librarians do too).
  • They want their website and catalog to have that energy too

Lynn Wheeler, Director, Carroll County Public Library

  • They chose a book – The Dressmaker – bought a bunch of them and displayed it in all of their branches, promoted it in all branches, held an author talk, did programs around the event, etc. Made the book a local best seller.
  • you can do partnerships – example was a partnership with schools
  • battle of the books – bought a bunch of books, then had kids vote for books. Gave a set of the books to the schools who were competing. Held a trivia type event in the schools. Gave a huge trophy to the winners.

Virginia Stanley, Director, Library Marketing, HarperCollins

  • library marketing
  • do Skype sessions with the authors

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Goodreads for Publishers, Booksellers & Librarians #BEA

by David Lee King on June 4, 2012

BEASo this morning, I was hopping around between the BEA Bloggers Conference and the BookExpo America (BEA) conference. I will be crazy like that all week – because Blogworld Expo is in the same building. I’ll plan on tagging my posts #BEA, #BEABloggers, and #Blogworld.

First off, I listened to Patrick Brown, Community Manager & Author Program Manager at Goodreads, talk about Goodreads for librarians, publishers, and booksellers. My library uses Goodreads, so this should be interesting!

Goodreads: largest site for readers and book recommendations in the world. Think of it as social networking around a love of books. 9 million readers! It includes recommendations, reviews, shelves, and book clubs.

They get 21 million monthly unique visitors, and 140 million page views a month.

Wow – goodreads users have added 315 million books to their shelves so far.

Goodreads’ mission is Discovery – help people find books they love and share them with friends.

Your goal (publishers, authors): get reviews, especially early in the life of your book.

  • it helps new readers discover your book
  • help readers decide if they want to read it
  • spread beyond Goodreads (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, syndication to Powell’s, Google Books, USA Today)

Publishers can place ad campaigns in Goodreads.

Erica Barmash, Harper Perennial – explanation of an ad campaign for a book.

  • banner ad on the homepage and throughout the site
  • total impressions – 4.7 million, 10,315 actual clicks. Goodreads got them more clicks that People or Entertainment Weekly.
  • Cost per click as about $1.12
  • she felt they got the best ad value with Goodreads – Goodreads gives stats on how many people added the book to their shelves and marked the book “to read.”
  • did a video chat with the author (had hundreds of viewers).

Back to Patrick:

42,000 Goodreads authors. Benefits:

  • build your community online with an author profile
  • find new readers with giveaways and text ads
  • connect with fans

Advance giveaways generate pre-release buzz

  • 35,000 people enter giveaways each day
  • average giveaway gets 850 entries.
  • it shows at least some engagement, and an interesting way to get interest
  • give more books in a giveaway – helps get more reviews (so like 25 books to give away)

You can also purchase text ads (around $50) to drive readers to a giveaway

Goodreads Groups:

  • 20,000+ book clubs on Goodreads
  • create a masthead (use this for branding), add prominent links to videos
  • add your events and invite friends
  • host an author chat in advance of your event

Use your staff picks to good use!

Salt Lake City Public Library (or maybe Salt Lake County Library System – he sorta mixed both libraries up a bit) group case study:

  • librarians act as moderators to control group content
  • use challenges and polls for easy participation (i.e, read 5 short stories in May, then post about it)
  • Some groups use Google Plus hangouts, Skype, etc to get more interaction happening

Tips for a successful group:

  • book clubs around a single title are stifling
  • reading challenges let people choose
  • don’t ignore the long tail reader
  • anticipate conflict and plan ahead (set up ground rules in advance)
  • let all users join in – more fun that way.

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Sign the Petition at ebooksforlibraries.com!

by David Lee King on May 1, 2012

Ebooks in libraries got you down? Feel like you can’t do anything about it, or that you don’t have a voice? My library wants to help!

We have created a petition website – ebooksforlibraries.com. Visit the website, watch the video (also embedded in this post), and more importantly – fill out the petition today!

What’s going on? Pretty simple:

  • Libraries are having trouble getting ebooks from the largest publishing companies. These publishers are adding restrictions and price increases, or simply not selling ebooks to libraries at all.
  • This means that library customers can get a print copy of a book from a library, but can’t get that same book in an ebook format. And that’s just weird.
  • Goal – we need 10,000 e-signatures from readers.
  • Once we hit that magic number, we plan to mail the completed petitions to each of the big six publishers. Why? We want to communicate directly with publishers through this petition process, with the intent of establishing formal and consistent communication between publishers and readers.

One other thing – you can help!

  • Fill out the petition!
  • Share the petition – on your website, in Facebook, in Twitter, etc.
  • Point to the petition in your buildings – put up signs, mention it in your library’s newsletter, etc.

Why do this? Our ultimate goal is to get books, in all formats, to our readers. This helps authors, publishers, libraries … and most importantly, our readers.

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Your ebook rent just went up 300%

by David Lee King on March 2, 2012

One of my colleagues was quoted in “Librarians Feel Sticker Shock as Price for Random House Ebooks Rises as Much as 300 Percent,” an article at The Digital Shift (from the Library Journal). Here’s what Scarlett said:

“They’ve tripled their prices on every title. A book that a week ago we purchased for $28.00 now costs $84.00,” said Scarlett Fisher-Herreman, the technical services & collection development supervisor, at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library in Kansas, whose director, Gina Millsap, is seeking the presidency of the American Library Association. “I looked back at Random House titles we’ve purchased since December and looked up a number of titles, both new and titles they’ve had for years on Overdrive. Everything has tripled in price: kids, YA, adult, fiction, and nonfiction,” she said.

Fisher-Herreman, who had been bracing for an increase in the 50 percent range, said she found the tripling of price frustrating and surprising. For example, The 10 Easter Egg Hunters, a children’s title by Janet Schulman, was affordable at $8.99, but it now costs $26.97.

“We simply can’t afford to pay three times the price for the same titles. I will be working with my collection development team to determine how we move forward now that we know the severity of the price increase,” Fisher-Herreman said.”

Some things to think about with Random House’s recent price change:

  • Your rent just went up 300%. If you get these books through Overdrive, you pay an access fee – not a purchase price. So it’s the rent that just went up astronomically – you pay 300% more, but don’t actually own anything. That’s fair, huh?
  • Random House wants to find out how much they can gouge you before it hurts. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesperson, is quoted as saying “We are going to be reviewing our terms of sales, but not our commitment to the library market … whatever we do, it’s going to be with our library partners in full awareness and understanding of what we are doing and why we are doing it …” My translation = “We are going to increase the cost to see if you’ll actually pay 300%. If you do, that’d be awesome!”
  • Random House is playing an expensive guessing game with your taxpayer’s money. Here’s a quote from the Random House statement sent to LJ: “Random House, Inc. is constantly experimenting, evaluating, and adjusting different retail price points for our e-books. With our price adjustments announced March 1 we are now doing the same for our library e-pricing, albeit with far less definitive, encompassing circulation data than the sell-through information we use to determine our retail pricing for e-titles. We are requesting data that libraries can share about their patrons’ borrowing patterns that over time will better enable us to establish mutually workable pricing levels that will best serve the overall e-book ecosystem.” My translation: “We don’t know how to price ebooks to libraries. So instead of actually asking for input, we thought we’d just jack up the price outrageously high, and see what happens.”
  • Random House can’t tell the difference between different digital book formats. Another quote from Random House’s LJ statement: “As we first said last month, our new e-book pricing framework is to bring our titles in price-point symmetry with our Books on Tape audio book downloads for library lending. These long have carried a considerably higher purchase price point than our digital audio books purchased for individual consumption.” Why in the world would you price an ebook, which you read, with an audiobook, which you listen to? Apples and oranges, guys. Apples and oranges.

What’s that leave us with? A major publisher that’s charging you (and your patrons) 300% more for ebooks, because they admittedly don’t know how much they should be charging. And they are more than willing to experiment with your money and budgets to see what works … while they figure out the difference between a book they pay actors to read and an ebook.

I will guarantee more odd ebook price and format changes in the next five years – hold onto your hats!

Question – How is your library planning to deal with this? I’d  love to know!

More resources:

Gas Price Humor image from Bigstock

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