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MARKETING
IN CYBERSPACE
Overview of Web growthIt's my pleasure to be here in the Bay Area -- the most wired city in the country -- you beat out Seattle as most wired, even with the home of Starbucks there! Statistics show that 72% of your people regularly access the Internet. (In Seattle-Tacoma, it's 65%; the national average is 55%, and my own home base of Minneapolis/St. Paul, despite what Garrison Keillor says, is somewhat below average -at 52%). That says a lot of people -- By August 1998, an estimated 72 million Americans had Internet access, according to a report by Media Mark. Should we care? You bet. Consider that in 1995, looking at the percent of households with an income of over $50,000, some 17 % accessed the 'Net; within three years, that had jumped to 57%. Those households with $25-49,000 went from 9 % in 1995 to 35% in 1998. A study done by the Pew Research Center of all Americans showed that Web use jumped from 14% in 1995 to 41% in 1998; and that the number on line daily quadrupled in that same period. Steve Case told a Commonwealth Club audience in a recent radio broadcast that it took 9 years for AOL to get its first 1,000,000 subscribers. It took less than 2 months to get the next million. What's even more enticing about these numbers is that people are buying things over the Internet and the World Wide Web. [ Online Purchasing Doubles] Oct 12 1998:] Almost a quarter of consumers who connected to the Internet in the first six months of 1998 made an online purchase, according to a study by Nielsen Media Research. The study calculated that of the 78 million people that connected to the Net between January and June 1998, 20 million made an online purchase. Books were the most popular item, followed by computer hardware and computer software. 5.6 million people -- one-fourth of those buying -- purchased a book online, representing an increase of 3.3 million. So, having established that good news and mindful of the fact that more and
more businesses likewise are going online, let's look at some particulars of how
to increase that number of book sales. Tools for marketing in cyberspace: A Case StudyDuring my years on the PMA-mailing list, I've been fascinated to watch the marketing activities of an extraordinary single-person publishing house: Bookhaus Publishers,that is, Veltisezar Bautista. Velty is a true phenomenon; he emigrated to this country from the Philippines in 1976. He began his publishing career with selling the booklet he created to answer the demand he was getting from co-workers on how to pass the U. S. Postal Exam. He had created a booklet and by printing up copies as needed at a local print shop, he was able to bootstrap that operation up to the creation of his company which is a lively independent publishing company that now publishes books on education, parenting, career and business, and the Filipino experience in North America. Velty is a highly successful one-person publisher. Last summer he reported that bookstore sales accounted for 90% of his sales (he thanks what he calls his master distributor, Publishers Group West, for his business and parenting books with this); since then, he has reported a rising number of sales that are directly attributable to his Web sites. As he has pointed out, though, quite possibly a significant number of his sales are indirectly attributable to the Web -- people who go to a bookstore to buy the book after reading about it at one of his sites. His first book, The Book of U.S. Postal Exams: How to Score 95-100% and Get a Job!, is now in its 5th edition, revised and expanded. It has successfully beaten back imitators and has won awards. (Named the 1990 Small Press Publisher of the Year award from Quality Books, Inc., Bookhaus is the recipient of six other book publishing awards, including two Benjamin Franklin awards from Publishers Marketing Association. ) The Book of U S Postal Exams has been a consistent high seller through his Master Distributor. Five other titles share space in the Bookhaus catalog, all but one of which were written by Velty. Four of the six are essentially how-to books: How to Build a Successful One-Person Business: A Common-Sense Guide to Starting & Growing a Company; Improve Your Grades: Practical Guide to Academic Excellence; How to Teach Your Child Things to Know From Kindergarten Through Grade 6. These are fairly traditional potentially effective sellers in the conventional, "live" world. His remaining titles are not related to the others at all. Instead, they are objects of his pride and love. One, written by Isabelo T. Chrisostomo, is Filipino Achievers in the USA & Canada, a coffee table book. Then last year he published his history, The Filipino Americans: Their History, Culture and Traditions, a true labor of love. Velty markets his Filipino books (as he refers to them) assiduously to the library market and has succeeded in seeing The Filipino Americans adopted as a text and as a supplemental text for a number of college classes. But our interest here is in how he uses cyberspace to market his books. I've made a list of nine tools for marketing in cyberspace. They are:
We'll see how Velty uses six of them. The focal point of his marketing is a Web site. A Web site is at once the most potentially effective tool for marketing in cyberspace and the most expensive. (We can talk a bit later about how to do some of this on more of a shoestring.) We're talking hundreds of dollars: money for the site hosting, money for the site development and money for site maintenance. An initial way to get a web presence is to use what might be termed "rented space" -- listings in book malls like ReadersNdex or BookZone's Super Catalog (which is how I started, with expanded information on two of my titles). Even now, he has a listing in the book malls ReadersNdex.com and BookZone.com, both of which link to his primary site, bookhaus.com. At one time, Velty had two sites, but later consolidated his efforts into one
with his original domain name, bookhaus.com, and then expanded it. In the
Welcome page of his attractive site, you'll find he has followed common
practice: he's described (briefly) what Bookhaus Publishers does; he mentions
the fact that it's an award-winning press; he links to his catalog; he gives
ordering information; he links with other sites of similar interest, and he
provides a means (actually four ways) to contact his company: by e-mail; by
phone (he also includes a toll-free order number), by fax, and by snail mail,
all of which demonstrate the value expressed in one of my maxims: Make it as
easy as possible for people to do what you want them to do.. All this is pretty
standard in a well-done website. He then picks up a second tool, connections with other sites. On his Links
site, he lists a number of sites of interest, sorted into groups: Career &
Business Links, Education & Home Schooling Links, Filipino Links, Book
Links, and Links For Book Publishers. This is in fact something I do in my Cat's-paw
Press site and my rather funky Tool
Shed. The idea is to make connections with other sites that have information
or services of value or interest to your site visitor (your site's listing
demonstrates value and provides content). An invitation to exchange links with
another site is a good way for both sites to benefit. (It isn't called the World
Wide Web for nothing! As an example, Cat's-paw Press's site has a link to
Canadian and English sites of interest to independent publishers.) An important
point to remember here is to check from time to time to see if the links are all
active and pertinent. A little light housekeeping is always helpful. On this same Welcome page, he directs attention to two other portions of his site: the Career & Government Jobs Center and The Filipino & Filipino American Information & Resource Center . This calls to attention of the Government Jobs Resource Center is repeated at the internal catalog page for The Book of U. S. Postal Exams and reinforces the earlier mention of it by demonstrating a real connection. These two pages (what I would call "rooms" in the Tool Shed) are
notable for two things. Each has its own domain -- evidence of further intended
development and greater ease of finding with search engines-- and each uses
another of the tools, to wit: the Web Ring. A web
ring is a linking of sites with a common interest. An individual who
"owns" a web ring (beauty part-- no fee!) invites owners of other
sites that have this common interest to join in the web ring; others may also
ask the owner to become a part of the network. Creation
of the ring is easy. The difficulty may come in finding and persuading kindred
spirits to join the ring and then maintaining a certain vigilance to see that
these ring members are indeed compatible. The level of interest that can arise
can be seen in the fact that 73 sites are in the Job
Resource Center) ring; 40 are in the Filipino
ring. An icon is placed on the site proclaiming the ring; typically, the visitor
to the site can click icons for visiting the next site on either side of this
spot in the ring, or make a random selection, or review the entire list of ring
members. The usefulness of this tool is that it increases the range of possible
visitors to your site. With his Filipino Resource Center, he has been busy creating a
"community" that entices people to return again and again, another
tool. The site has strong emphasis on Filipino history and culture, with book
resources (guess what two of the books will be?), a music room, a conference
where people can chat, a newsroom to keep one up to date on what's happening in
the Philippines. And for the ultimate, there is the FilipinoWeb.com Singles
Connection. And of course, it has links to articles and a means to talk back to
Bookhaus. (WebPromote Weekly,
an online newsletter, has an
article on building community.) Another way in which Velty markets is through mailing lists (Listservs): I first met him through one of these, the PMA-List, where he was a frequent and beloved contributor. We all loved his optimism, his bounding energy and enthusiasm at being a successful publisher. A subscriptions to an open mailing list such as this can become a powerful marketing tool, but it must be handled carefully. Content-based, or specific area-oriented mailing lists all have their own culture, and depending on who owns the list, their own rules. One general one though is that blatant advertising is severely frowned upon. I'll speak a bit later about how to get around that little obstacle. To find a list that would work for you, see what you can find on The
Liszt Page A newsletter can be a powerful means of promoting your book(s) or your own expertise. Another independent publisher who does this very effectively is Gail Golomb of Four Geez Press. That site, titled "Four Geez Press Health Newsletter," describes the content of the quarterly newsletter, which is available on paper by subscription. In addition, a free item is offered (a kidney stone strainer, with the hopes that after reading the book and newsletter, one won't ever need it), a series of articles from doctors on the subject, and foundations and networks for more information on the subject. Finally, credibility is further enhanced by offering other books (by other publishers) on the subject. Related to this is writing articles for posting in pertinent places. Of
course your .sig is prominently placed. I have been able to further market THE
Prepublishing Handbook by attaching the fact that it is one of my books
to a series of articles I wrote on the Publishing Industry with the underlying
theme of What Writers Should Know About Publishing. The series originally
appeared on AOL's Writers Club and can still be found in the Business of Writing
Library there. Most if not all of the articles are also posted (can we say
published?) in BookZone's Professional
area. E-mail is an integral part of all these tools previously mentioned; but it is
also a very useful tool in marketing. It can be used for correspondence with
others of similar interest, as in the mailing lists just talked about. It can be
used (very carefully) as a direct marketing tool, such as sending news releases,
announcements, special offers and the like, and it is a very inexpensive tool.
The inclusion of a mailto: in your web site is an important means of encouraging
your visitors to respond to you and your offering. (It is also a means of
developing a mailing list for future publications.) There are numerous news groups to be found on the Internet, the alt.pub, etc., groups. These are essentially chat groups, unmoderated, much like the big bulletin boards one finds in a neighborhood mall, where one can post news bits, for sale items, questions, and so for. While some find these valuable as a means of marketing, I have not found them appealing. It can be a time-consuming process to find the ones that would serve me well. Related to these within Internet Service Providers or ISPs, particularly the commercial services, are the forums and chat groups that can be set up. If you publish on a non-fiction topic, you can create awareness of your expertise (gained while researching and writing your book) by creating a presence on forums and mailing lists. Both CompuServe and America On Line like having an individual conduct a forum on particular topics. In fact, participation in an on-line forum in AOL's Writers Club, was what got my feet wet in my initial contact with the Internet back in 1994. One of the forums within the Writers Club was John Kremer's BookMarketing forum. I already knew John, so had considerable faith in what he had to offer there. In addition, there was a self-publishing forum. I made my first personal
contacts there with some of the "cousins" -- Peter Goodman (Stonebridge
Press) was one of those; another was Dick Lutz of the Oregon cousins - the
Northwest Book Publishers Association. Steve Morrill, a Florida writer and
online teacher for several schools, has for several years conducted one on
non-fiction writing in AOL's Writers Club. Lurking and occasionally commenting
in the forum led to my sending him a copy of THE Prepublishing Handbook (as
well as a copy of Roughing It Elegantly-- the man is a fellow
canoeist, albeit in Florida). That led to his asking me to be guest
"speaker" on several of his Thursday night chats with his writing
classes students. In time, that has led to my becoming a part of the Writers
Club University, where I teach a Web class on publishing. Promotion sites can also be valuable tools in marketing. For the sake of the argument here, I'll include the online bookstores, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and Borders.com as promotion sites. My reason for doing so is that all three generally follow certain practices: they list the title, they have an About the Author (may be very brief); they have a location on reviews of the book. I ran a check of the three to see how they dealt with Velty's best seller, the Postal Exam book. (I found that BarnesandNoble.com's search engine is quite specific -- a key words query for "postal exam" did not bring up his book, but "postal exams" did.) Amazon.com had the most extensive listing of reviews and comments about the book (with ratings from readers). Thus it is quite pertinent to keep them informed on such items (but according to reports from many publishers, good luck on getting that info inserted!). Another type of promotion site is to be found at GuestFinder. GuestFinder is
a service with a target audience of radio and television program producers where
they can search for prospective guests. It draws its listings from authors who
would like to appear on radio or television shows. This is another opportunity
for an author to develop a web presence that is highly targeted.
Many of you are already into the business of marketing on the web. But for
those of you who are just getting started, this is for you. One of the first
things to do, if you have not already done so, is create your .sig. A .sig
(short for signature) is that tag you use to sign off a post. Think of it as
your electronic business card. For purposes of marketing on the Internet, it
should of course have your name, your company name, e-mail address, your phone
and fax numbers, and as soon as you have one, your URL. If you are posting in a
variety of places or occasions, or if you, like Shel Horowitz, have several
types of irons in the fire, you may want several .sigs, tailored to the
situation. (Shel has a couple of titles, one originally published by a large
publisher and one he published; but he also does considerable promotional
writing as the heart of his business.) In creating your .sig, remember you are
developing a business card, not a brochure. If you are a subscriber to mailing
lists, you know (or should) that a .sig is considered overlong if it occupies
more than 5 or 6 lines. I toyed with the idea that I needed to develop a web site for a long time, but hesitated because I couldn't decide on what needed to go into it. Some elements are obvious; we've already talked a bit about that. But what can you put into the site that will bring people back? (Put aside the niggling idea that if you have one title only, and someone visits the site and winds up buying the book, what's accomplished by bringing them back?) Keep in mind that in offering your book from your own site, you will in all likelihood be selling at or near the full price for it. What then makes it worthwhile for a surfer to buy from you? One answer is that your site provides value added: additional information that isn't available at say Amazon.com or Borders.com. Velty's Resource Centers clearly offer additional value. It's particularly interesting to note that in the Filipino Resource Center, the value added is an expanded sense of community. A notable detail about the further information on Filipino Achievers in the U S and Canada is that this segment is very content rich. The Menu for the page lists Cover Blurbs, Table of Contents, Foreword, Testimonials, and an About the Author. But it is the Brief Facts section that moves this page into the quite valuable column. It is an interesting and highly enlightening presentation of some facts about Filipinos in their adopted countries. In Pete Masterson's Aeonix Publishing Group site, the object is his consultation services on publishing. I have had for some time a link to it in the Tool Shed, but decided a couple of days prior to this talk to take another look at the site to refresh my recollections. He adds considerable value to his site with a page, among others, on PDF, on printers and printing, and one that really caught my eye, Links for publishers, where he points out in an annotated list resources elsewhere that are important for publishers. Do plenty of homework before you launch into the creation of your site. Just as you look critically over books currently in stores when you start thinking about the design for the cover of your next book, look at sites to see what makes them effective. Look at the structure of them; how are they organized? Are they easy to navigate or get around in? Is the site easy to read? Does it load rapidly, or could you make a sandwich in the time it takes for all the graphics to load? Does it NEED bells and whistles? If it does need extra ornamentation, what kind should it be? How fast will the site load? Use the trick of saving a page for later perusal and then take a peek at the source code. What does it list in the meta tags? Meta tags are the keywords you would use if you were trying to look up your site in the Yellow Pages. For example, back to the Bookhaus home page. There you'll find in the Meta Name Keywords 44 -- books, book, education, career, educational, parenting, parents, family, families, children, child, kids, Phillipines, phillipines, post, office, postal service, U.S., postal, service, United States, Canada, grades, testing, score, scores, exam, exams, civil, Federal, federal, achievement, Bookhaus, bookhaus, bookhouse, Bookhouse, publisher, publishing, discount, educate, tests, united states, canada, Bookhaus.com -- terms; note that some of which are variant spellings or capitalizations of other terms in the list. Remember those tags are not for you (would you have even looked if the question hadn't come up?); they are for the search engines to find and note so that others can find your site. Then when your site's creation is done, work to get your site listed or identified in the major search engines. Infoseek, HotBot, Lycos, NorthernLight, and AltaVista use META Tags to some degree, so they are should be high on your list for getting identified. Meanwhile, surf and seek out potential allies. Look for sites where you can get a link. You'll see lots of good examples of this sort of thing in the Tool Shed and in Pete's site "Links for Publishers" and in the Midwest Book Review's Writers and Publishers section. Uncounted other possibilities are out there. Look for titles by other authors, other publishers. You can list them on your
site; you can form an affiliation with Amazon.com or with BarnesandNoble.com
where titles clicked on from your site will bring you a tiny commission if they
sell the book. You can make arrangements with other publishers to sell their
books from your site. That's part of the beauty of the World Wide Web: it is
amazingly flexible in the opportunities it presents. Find an ISP (Internet Service Provider), get your own domain name; have a
site built. If you're hunting for an ISP and are confused about what all is
involved, a good place to explore the subject is Dawn McGatney's overview
guide to finding an ISP. On any of these options, you'll find it's rather
like buying a car: all cars have certain basic common features; individual
models will vary in features offered and of course, the concomitant price.
Decide what you need and want to accomplish and go from there. Signing on with a commercial site or book mall such as BookZone
or ReadersNdex
offers several services, starting with a home page for the publisher. Yours will
be included in the full listing of others on the site, marketing programs are
available, information on the number of visits to your site, and the like.
Secure ordering is a feature of the package. If you subscribe to a commercial ISP such as AOL or CompuServe, you are already aware of the "free" site space that is available to you. AOL, for example, provides a space of 2 MB for each screen name you have, and you may have up to 5 screen names. It offers several opportunities to market and promote: you can have a personal page; your site can be a commercial one (hometown.aol.com), The Tool Shed is such a site. Or it can be a site for content (home.digitalcity.com), an arrangement appealing to writers. Then several of the Web services also offer free web sites: Earthlink; Geocities.com; Xoom.com (which seems to have had quite a few porn sites take up residence here); Mindspring.com and Teleport Communication Services. With these opportunities, it is quite enticing to have a go at building your site yourself. Several programs are available to enable you to construct your site. Some people say "it's easy." I don't happen to agree, but the project is indeed feasible. The beauty part of these sites is that you can make changes on them as you will, whenever you want. As Velty has said on more than one occasion: "My parting words: The
Internet is the place where we can compete with major publishers. There's a lot
of shelves in Cyberspace. May the best books win!" A talk given by Pat Bell at the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association Seminar, March 20, 1999, Dominican College, San Rafael, California. Copyright ©1999 by Patricia J. Bell
Pat Bell teaches publishing classes at Open U in Minneapolis, MN, --check for her next classes beginning in May (hers begin with 305). She is also a faculty member of the Writers Club University, where she teaches an on-line class on publishing. Don't have time to take a class? You can also arrange for consultations with her. Just drop the Cat a note. Help is close at hand! |
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This
article is a talk given by Pat Bell, owner of the Cat's-paw Press, at the
Bay Area Independent Publishers Association Seminar, March 20, 1999, Dominican
College, San Rafael, California. 
