But that is rapidly changing. Three relatively recent entrants into the market are the Codex Group, which surveys Borders customers to discover about genre, author, and jacket preferences (see our coverage here, here, and here); Bowker’s PubTrack, which partners with MarketTools, Inc. to conduct surveys; and the latest entrant, Verso Digital, which relies on its access to numerous “deep vertical” sites and is now rolling out a new service, tentatively called Verso Flight Plan.

Flight Plan makes Verso Digital’s survey technology available to publishers on a subscription or à la carte basis. It lets publishers carry out their own title-specific consumer research and pre-publication testing of book jackets, titles, and copy. They can analyze author awareness and audience size, run online focus groups, and delve into various vertical Reader Channels (such as Thought Leaders, Women’s Romance, and Science Fiction and Fantasy). The service will launch by the end of March; for more information, contact Business Development Director Jack McKeown at jack [at] versoadvertising.com.

Recently, Publishing Trends interviewed Bowker Director of Client Development James Howitt about PubTrack Consumer. Howitt, who previously worked at BookScan, said he realized four years ago that Bowker, which at the time was attempting to compete with Nielsen BookScan, should “move away from POS in the trade market and [instead] directly survey the consumer.”

In the past, “it was easier to get a consumer to buy your product,” says Howitt. “All you had to do was get it into Barnes & Noble or Borders. But now, with e-readers, publishers becoming vendors, and search sites becoming publishers, consumers can go anywhere to purchase a book. Traditional tracking of core channels no longer reflects the whole size of the market.” Though Bowker is known primarily for its core product, Books in Print, the company is increasingly becoming known for following the demand chain of the book process—beginning with ISBN registration and ending with PubTrack Consumer, for publishers.

PubTrack Consumer, released in 2007, provides publishers with data regarding consumers’ book purchases, demographic, and behavioral profiles. Some clients include Random House (the charter subscriber), DC Comics, Zondervan, BISG, K-Mart, and Direct Brands. The cost of access to the service varies by client, Howitt says. Some companies, with complete toolset access to the data, can analyze information any way they want. Other companies have to rely on Bowker to come in to present it.

To obtain its data, Bowker works with MarketTools, Inc. (MTI), an online market research firm, using its ZoomPanel tool. MTI has a pool of 10 million active names of people age 13 and up (they receive rewards points for participation). Bowker tracks 3,000 unique individuals each month.

“In the past, companies like this were either doing phone-based or diary-based surveys,” says Howitt. “But if you try to get hold of a 13-year-old, they don’t have a household phone, they have mobile. If you’re doing diary-based surveys, you’re relying on someone with good handwriting, someone who’s able to distinguish Harry Potter #1 from Harry Potter #7.” As for internet access, Howitt says that since nearly nine people out of ten in the U.S. have it, “that bias…doesn’t affect what we’re doing.” (MarketTools weights the sample to eliminate any remaining bias.)

Panel participants answer 65 questions about their book-buying behavior. A participant is first asked to report on all the books she has acquired in the past month, including books bought as gifts. She types in each book’s ISBN (a diagram shows her where to find it; the ISBN ties back to the Books in Print database), which pulls up the book’s format, author, etc. Next, she answers questions about each purchase, such as:

How much did you pay for this book, excluding tax?
How was the book displayed when you first saw it?
What other items did you buy at the same time as this book?

“For the first time, the industry can see a book’s real average selling price,” says Howitt. “One of the things POS is great at telling you is that a book sold 20,000 units last week, but it’s not designed to tell you if that 20,000 is made up of 18 to 29-year-old females.” Kelly Gallagher, VP Publisher Services, notes that Bowker can also go back to previous participants and ask them more in-depth questions. The company also launched a Cover Analysis service last year.

Publishers have always had trouble attracting advertiser interest, and Bowker’s research opens up the opportunity to determine correlations between book buyers and brands. Now publishers just have to sign up for the service and learn how to use it.

2009 will be remembered as the beginning of the digital tipping point for book publishing, the year our industry took its turn as the last of the major media to enter the digital transition, following in the highly challenged footsteps of the music, newspaper, magazine, and network TV industries.

The question is whether we’ve learned the lessons from those media that have gone before us, and are entering a profitable new age of digital growth, or are heading for the perfect storm of a soft market, product devaluation through 60% off e-book discounting, and ineffective digital marketing that combined may put book publishing on the fast track to long tail obscurity. The choice remains ours to make, but not for long.

Digital Marketing’s Limitations

• Break-Out Novels, June 2009: Barnes & Noble selected debut novelist Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (Hyperion) as a “B&N Recommends Main Selection.” In August, Amazon selected 14-year-old debut novelist Cayla Kluver’s Legacy (Forsooth) for the premiere of its new AmazonEncore book break-out program. The bookstore-promoted Physick Book hit #2 on the New York Times bestseller list, not uncommon for a B&N Recommends title, while the digitally promoted Legacy sold only 1,000 units after nearly three months in market.
• Social Network Marketing, November 2009: In an internet survey of fiction book buyers, Facebook was the single largest media outlet of any kind for book shoppers, with 54% having viewed it in the past week (only 14% read the NYT that week). But when these buyers were asked where they first learned about the new novel they had purchased last, only 21 out of 5,173 surveyed (0.4%) said they’d first learned about it from “social networks like Facebook or MySpace.”
• Amazon launched the single largest all-digital marketing campaign in book publishing history with the debut of Kindle in 2007. But after a year of massive on-site advertising and promotion, an online survey of Amazon book shoppers showed that barely half (52%) were aware that Kindle existed. Amazon turned to Oprah’s TV support shortly thereafter, and now, two years later, to the single most expensive network TV advertising campaign in book publishing history to get Kindle on track.

New Fiction Needs Physical Merchandising

• Theatrical Movie Releases: In spite of a wide choice of alternate movie formats and distribution channels (including digital download, online, DVD, cable, and pay-per-view), major movies still release first in theaters where viewers can get the full experience in person at full price. Box office sales are on track to exceed $10 billion for the first time in history in 2009.
• Fiction Releases: New works of fiction, particularly from less known and debut novelists, lack the news value to get media publicity. Fortunately, they can be discovered in the local bookstore, where over 30% of fiction buyers first learned about the novel they just purchased, compared to only 5% at internet booksellers. If publishers don’t protect the bookstore, the industry loses its “theater” where new work is discovered, leaving new novels and novelists nowhere else to break out from the anonymity of the long tail.

Windowing Adds Sales

Trade publishing has benefited from windowing for over 70 years, giving book devotees the chance to get their favorite authors early in hardcover, then allowing them a full year to build word of mouth interest among a far wider audience of paperback buyers. The book’s second release and second marketing campaign then benefit through much bigger audiences and higher unit sales. The movie industry has as many as ten or more format and channel windows offered on sequential release dates, each one another opportunity to re-market and remind the audience to pick the format and timing that’s best for them.

Eliminate windowing and we not only take away the time fans need to build a book’s word of mouth, but jeopardize that second wave of potentially interested buyers attracted by news of the second release. Take it one step further with simultaneous 60% off or greater discounting, and the consumer acceptable price for a newly released book is radically reset in the mind of the book shopper to below its sustainable cost. Just as the consumer acceptable price for new music is now $0.99, and for breaking news near $0, the consumer acceptable price for a newly released book will become $9.99 or lower. Musicians can always go on tour, but what’s left for new authors?

Amazon’s Triple Play

The magic of Kindle is that it is simply the most effective marketing tool ever seen in book retailing. It instantly triples Amazon’s book sales with any book shopper who buys the device, simultaneously taking that market share directly away from all other competitive booksellers.

With such amazing sales growth potential, Amazon’s massive investment in their further triple play of 1) network TV advertising; 2) no window 60% off discounts; and 3) what consumer electronics experts agree is well below cost pricing on the Kindle itself (35% below Sony’s most comparable device) seems like a great long-term investment, with publisher support.

By closing windows, undercutting prices, and preempting vital retail distribution channels, book publishers are placing all bets on a much contracted, digital-only future by default. The result is the very real risk of a fate similar to that of the music industry, or worse.

In 2010, book publishing still has the chance to fight for and protect all channels of book distribution, both digital and physical; add more windows with even more premium formats and pricing options; and support every possible tool to create more new book awareness. Only by actively pushing to expand a healthy mass medium can we ensure a market where bestselling fiction remains viable, and where gifted debut authors still have a chance to break out at #2 on the bestseller list!

Codex’s Early Read Book Preview measures book and author sales potential based on book shopper purchase interest. The company regularly conducts online polls of book consumers across major fiction and nonfiction book categories. The preview measures their spontaneous “shopping response” to 50 books equally divided between current New York Times bestsellers and titles in development. The jacket copy study took place from March 30 through April 4 and surveyed 7,065 book shoppers nationwide, including 2,362 literary fiction and 1,308 women’s fiction buyers.

The job of writing jacket copy shouldn’t be foisted off on editorial assistants—it is the second most important book purchase factor (after favorite author). “I was heartened to see how much emphasis readers seem to place on real information and details about the story itself,” says Mitch Hoffman, Executive Editor at Grand Central Publishing. Hoffman helped Hildick-Smith with this survey, and the jacket copy for Grand Central’s First Family by David Baldacci scored higher than any other title in the study. “Certainly all these other pieces of ephemera, reviews, bestsellers, endorsement information, they always find that helpful, but the story is the thing. That reinforces an idea I always wanted to believe, that even in the middle of everything else we do, the book is the thing.”

Flap copy is especially important for fiction. And title and cover impact are closely related to the impact of jacket copy. If the flap copy defies the expectation created by the cover and title—if, for instance, the cover of the book leads the reader to expect a thriller but the flap copy identifies it as horror—readers are less likely to buy it.

The lede is the most important element of the jacket copy. “We make sure that we’re absolutely clear about our lede, what makes the book special, and we announce that as clearly and concisely as possible right at the top,” says Hoffman. “With so many books screaming for readers’ attention, you might only have that first few seconds to make an impact, so you have to identify what makes a book special early on. Readers might not make it to the second paragraph of your gorgeously crafted copy. It’s something every journalist knows, that’s worth our keeping in mind.”

Survey respondents ranked other common elements of jacket copy as less important. Only 13% of literary fiction readers are most influenced by praise from the New York Times, for instance, and they care even less about praise from publishing industry magazines like Publishers Weekly (10%). Not surprisingly, the influence of reviews decreases further for readers of other genres. The importance of various elements of jacket copy also varies by age. Younger book shoppers are more interested in character detail and brief promotional statements or quotes—31% of readers under 18, for instance, said they’d be most influenced by a statement like “Sometimes what happens in Vegas follows you home.” And even though they might have little else in common, the under-18 crowd shares the preference for a snappy promotional statement with readers over 65, 25% of whom are most influenced by these statements. Younger and older shoppers don’t want to work hard to figure out what a book is about, so flap copy aimed at them should cut to the chase.

Despite all of the above, there’s still no magic formula for writing perfect jacket copy. “I spend a fair amount of time developing jacket copy options for publishers, and we’ve been measuring the impact of jacket copy for over five years,” says Hildick-Smith, “but I’m still not able to consistently tell if a version of jacket copy is going to do well or not! Part of that is the crucial interplay between title/cover and copy, and part of it is the fact that one person can’t perceive another’s intuitive response to a creative message. It keeps this work endlessly fascinating, and humbling, as a result.”

The Codex Group is described by its President, Peter Hildick-Smith, as a “pollster for publishers.” Last summer, Codex undertook a massive author website impact study that surveyed nearly 21,000 book shoppers. Its objective was to understand the relative effectiveness of author sites among shoppers and to determine the elements that will keep them coming back to the site. We spoke with Hildick-Smith and four book-loving Web marketers and designers—John Burke, Vice President of FSB Associates; Carol Fitzgerald, Founder and President of the Book Report Network; Jason Chin; and Jefferson Rabb (who also consulted on the Codex study, along with Columbia University’s Charlotte Blumenfeld)—to find out what makes an author site not only good-looking, but also successful.

“From an author’s perspective, if you are going to invest the time and energy in writing and getting a book published, it’s a big drawback if you can’t then be found online,” says Burke. Furthermore, the Codex report found that visiting an author’s website is the leading way that book readers support and get to know their favorite authors better. And this is true regardless of age. While those under 35 visited websites more often than those over 35, over-35-year-olds still used author websites as their main method of learning about the author. “This isn’t a generational thing,” says Hildick-Smith. Fans are also much more likely to visit the author’s website than the author’s page on the publisher’s website.

The survey found that 7.5% of book shoppers had visited their favorite author’s website in the past week. As a point of comparison, 7% had visited the Wall Street Journal’s site.

And any remaining skeptics out there, take note: Website visits translate directly to the number of books bought. Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site. “Is putting up a website going to make a book a bestseller? No,” says Chin. “Is the website going to help the author build an audience? I believe it can. What you don’t want is for someone to hear about your book, search for it with Google, and find nothing. That’s a potential lost sale.”

Web presence is especially essential in today’s economy. “Websites have become even more important as people are not in stores discovering books,” Fitzgerald says. “We need to get them jazzed about a title and their favorite author and give them reason not just to buy the book, but also to have a relationship with the author and his or her work so they become evangelists for them with fellow readers. These next months, author websites and communications with readers are going to be critical for engendering excitement in readers online, since something as crucial as in-store browsing is not happening.”

The point, of course, is not just to get readers to visit an author site once, but to keep them coming back. How do you make a website sticky?“The saying ‘build it and they will come,’ well, they won’t,” says Burke. He and the other designers we spoke with agreed that flashy design is not a key to success, and the Codex Group research bears that out, with Stephenie Meyer’s website as a case in point. It receives more traffic than any other fiction author site, yet its design is extremely basic, “probably a generic template where you plug in your header graphic,” says Hildick-Smith. “She may only be paying $15 a month for this site on some server system. It’s not elaborately designed at all. But she’s got a daily blog, and more than any other site in our study, she has links to fan sites. Fan site links appear to contribute to loyal audience traffic.”

“Something we’ve always stressed is original, unique content,” says Burke. “The first author site we did was the Sue Grafton site back in 1996. We loaded that up with content, not just info about all her books, but also features and materials that people can’t find anywhere else. Sue Grafton has pictures of her cats up there. You’d think that might be a little crazy, but people love them. You want to put up a lot of information that people can’t find at Amazon, or the publisher site, or any other site.”

“In the beginning, a website just needed basic information,” says Fitzgerald. “Now visiting a website needs to feel like an experience. We work more these days with authors on the voice, tone, and attitude of their sites. In fact, that is as important to me as design.”

“Whenever possible, I try to incorporate the author’s voice into the site,” says Rabb. “If the author is willing to write all of the copy for the site, suddenly the whole thing takes on a bit of their character, which can be great.”

Codex found that giving audiences the ability to engage with other readers is the factor that correlates most with high site engagement. Rabb supports this: “There’s a great deal of interest in using the web to create an active community of an author’s fans,” he says. “This allows the author to have a direct connection with their readers, which can be a very powerful thing. In many cases, [though], it doesn’t make sense to establish such a community from scratch when it can be done through Facebook or MySpace.”

“What I loathe is authors who need to have whatever the flavor of the month is, no matter whether it works for them or not,” says Fitzgerald. “Flavors of the month include trailers, videos, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. These are tools. You need to see if they work for an author before they are adapted for the site. We often suggest that authors try out things like blogging before they commit to doing them on their websites. For the record, former journalists typically are great bloggers. They are used to pushing a story out on a deadline and typically can write on command. We also remind authors that they need to be, um, writing their books besides communicating on the web with readers. Those who chitchat well and love the experience of being with their readers can lose sight of that.”

Codex found that the main thing respondents want on fiction authors’ sites is exclusive, unpublished writing, with 43% saying they’d return for it regularly. “Exclusive content appears to be a missed opportunity on almost all sites,” says Hildick-Smith, and women find it especially appealing. Visitors will also return to authors’ sites regularly for schedules of author tours, book signings, and area appearances (36%); lists of the author’s favorite writers and recommended books; “explainers,” or inside information about the book (36%, with men finding these especially appealing); downloadable extras like icons and sample chapters (33%); and weekly e-mail news bulletins with updates on tours, reviews, and books in progress (33%). And fans under the age of 35 are especially interested in contests, puzzles, and games, with prizes like autographed copies of books. “Give them something fun to come back for,” says Hildick-Smith. Younger fans are also more interested in knowing about their favorite authors’ book, music, and movie recommendations.

Just don’t get too personal. “With Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, you need to think about how much you want readers to know,” says Fitzgerald. “I sometimes think a tad more discretion might be helpful. I have seen authors write on each other’s Facebook walls, pages that are linked from their sites, without realizing fans and author competitors are reading their personal ramblings. You need to think about how much of your personal world is applicable to folks who know you as an author.”

But do naked author Facebook photos lead to increased sales? Well, that’s a question for another survey.