The Bookseller.com

28th August 2008

GAYLE FELDMAN

Gayle Feldman is The Bookseller's US correspondent.

Making content pay

14.05.08

"From Experimentation to Innovation in the Digital Age" was the theme of this year's Making Information Pay conference organized by the Book Industry Study Group. More than 300 people – a record number - attended. With the IdeaLogical Company, BISG had commissioned a survey and case studies from companies like Harlequin, Wiley, Hachette, and the Random House imprint Spiegel & Grau beforehand.

Michael Raynor, a Deloitte consultant and author of The Strategy Paradox, urged adopting "an experimental approach to everything." Yet "successful strategies require not experiments, but strategic options. If you asked Jeff Bezos, he'd say that the Kindle is a strategic option." It gets Amazon into the device and service business and creates a different way of monetizing assets. Over time, Amazon could end up competing in a fundamentally different way.

Raynor was the first, but by no means the last speaker to reference Amazon's founder. Harper svp for Global Marketing Strategy Carolyn Pittis also evoked Bezos's words: "What's not going to change over the next ten years is incredibly important." Take, for example, readers. They aren't going to change their need to immerse themselves in stories. Pittis pointed to the firm's new consumer-directed UK initiatives Lolasland.com and Authonomy as examples of Harper's approach.

"Publishers tend to be distant from consumers. How can a more proactive embrace of consumer analytics drive us forward?" Other recommendations from Pittis: watch other industries rather than other publishers; foster a culture that is, like HC, "extremely open to disagreement"; admit what you don't do well and outsource it; and "KISSS - keep it simple and secret, stupid," e.g., don't get management involved too early in an experiment, because there is the risk it could be quashed.

Publishers Lunch founder Michael Cader's Bezos quote was that "it's no bad time to innovate – do it around what customers care about." Like Pittis, his mantra was that we have to learn to think about the world the way readers do.

From the retail perspective, Todd Anderson, director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, spoke of his experience investing $144,000 in an Espresso Book Machine (one of four currently operating in the world). The POD machine arrived last November, and 3860 books later, Anderson is a happy man. He recently signed an agreement with Lightning Source that potentially makes 950,000 titles available.

As for ebooks, Harlequin digital content director Malle Vallik described herself "very pleased" with the two-three title per month "Spice Briefs" series of 5-15,000 word erotic e-fiction that started last August. For one thing, "it attracts those readers with a shorter attention span." A cross-department team was created for the project, "pulling in a lot of naysayers." The series' success is spawning a print anthology next year, and a similar e-initiative, on the paranormal just launched.

The most spectacular example of a single digital experiment came by way of Julie Grau, who described what it was like to support the instincts of a successful writer with whom she had had a long relationship, the popular financial expert Suze Orman. By this past January, there were already close to a million copies of Orman's Women and Money in print. When the book was going to be featured on Oprah's show in Feburary, Spiegel & Grau and their Random House bosses agreed to make it available for a limited time – it turned out to be 33 hours – for a free download from Oprah.com. Grau's biggest fears were that it would upset the sales department and the accounts.

But after 1.1 million downloads, rather than cannibalization, Grau saw an immediate spike in hardcover sales on Amazon. Amazingly, at one point there was even a spike in sales of the ebook on Amazon. In the end, the book travelled back up the bestseller list to #2 and stayed on for another dozen weeks.

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