Where the Readers Are

This is the Download column from this week's The Big Picture.

I’ve been working with Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer team in developing some industry reports on a variety of book-related issues. And just for the hell of it, I was playing around with some statistics for 2008.

Here’s a breakout of people who read, and the number of hours per week they spend reading books:

So you can see that not a lot of people read more than 20 hours a week. Just 11% of those surveyed.

Now here’s a breakout of time spent online:

 
You can see that 30% of those surveyed spend more than 20 hours per week online.

Now we can’t correlate which readers are spending more time online, but overall it’s clear that people are, in general, spending more time online than they are reading.

What does this mean for publishers?

Well, aside from the obligatory shirt-rending and bemoaning poor reading habits, it means that publishers should invest more time and resources (that means money) in marketing their titles online. Because online is where people are.

Yes, if you want to get people’s attention about something, it does help to go where they are already congregated.

We know that the world of print media is collapsing. Newspapers are failing all over the place. Book review sections are shutting down. All the outlets where publishers used to advertise are suffering.

Except online. In fact, 34% of all books purchased in 2008 were bought online.

And, even more crucially, 12% of book consumers became aware of the books they wanted to buy either through an Internet ad or an online book review – as many consumers as became aware of books through word of mouth (which we all know is the most powerful form of marketing there is).
So what does online marketing really mean for books? It means throwing as much of your books’ information as you can into the online world so people can find them.

It means having clean metadata – so search engines can find the books.

It means having BISAC codes and Library of Congress codes, so the books are categorized properly. If someone is looking for Thai recipes, and you’re a cookbook publisher, you want your books to show up in that search.

It means having a cover image, an annotation, a review or endorsement, and even an excerpt posted online, for each book, so consumers can understand what your books are about.

It means making sure that your books are listed in every available online outlet that sells books – not just and Barnes & Noble, but Ebay, Alibris, Hastings, IndieBound (which supplies book information to independent bookstore websites). It means having your book information listed on price comparison websites like Nextag. It means having your book information listed on library websites. (The most efficient one-shot way to accomplish all of this is to make sure your Books-in-Print data is up to date, because BIP licenses its data to most of these websites.)

It means making sure your books are listed with social networking sites like Goodreads (2.2 million members), Shelfari (owned by Amazon), and LibraryThing (40 million titles). People really DO congregate to these sites to get ideas on what to read next.

It means finding out who the top bloggers are in your areas of expertise, and sending them review copies. Do you know how many food bloggers there are? How many political bloggers (who would also be interested in history titles, or biographies)? As print review publications collapse, bloggers are stepping into the vacuum.

It means knowing which book review websites are worth having a presence on – Bookslut, Beatrice, Follow the Reader, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, among many others.

It means enrolling your books in book-scanning programs. Yes, that means Google Book Search. It also means the Internet Archive. You need to make your books find-able. That means making them searchable. On the web. Where people are already frantically searching for things.
It means making sure your authors have websites. Even a simple Facebook page is better than nothing at all – and Facebook has 200 million active users. One hundred million unique users log on at least once a day.

Notice that I have not mentioned ebooks. Digital marketing is not (necessarily) about ebooks. Ebooks are a format, like paperback or hardcover – and while people may prefer one format over another, they’re not going to have the option of any format if they don’t know that your books exist. Digital marketing is about getting information about your books in as many places as humanly possible – so that the ever-growing number of people who are online can find out about them.