This is the video and full transcript of a talk delivered by Peter Collingridge on February 2nd to the If Book Then conference in Milan.

Book marketing & analytics from Enhanced Editions on Vimeo.

It is clear that now anyone can create and distribute their book to a global audience of millions in a matter of seconds, that successful marketing and promotion is the single activity that will define institutional publishing in the 21st century.

Random House will become a B2B company

However, book marketing is broken. It is not evolving at the rapid speed of other parts of the industry, and many campaigns look identical to those 10 or more years ago, relying on PR and big-budget poster campaigns.

Why do campaigns stick so rigidly to this formula?

There is not – nor has there ever been – any empirical understanding of which combination of marketing strategy and tactics works. Currently, publishers might spend between 5-10% of their revenues on merely hopeful marketing, with little idea of what works – and what doesn’t.

Publishers have no insight into the effectiveness of their marketing

This is a huge problem that is only going to get worse as the retail and promotional landscape deteriorates.

We firmly believe the answer to this problem lies in “big data” – that publishing can dramatically improve its return on marketing investment through the methodical analysis of campaigns, in combination with more agile marketing techniques.

If you consider the decision-making approach of new publishing entrants such as Amazon, Apple and Google, it is clear that publishing houses still make their decisions based largely on gut feel rather than on data.

Amazon makes all of its most important decisions based on data rather than intuition

However, it’s not so easy: the data that is available to publishers is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Weekly Nielsen sales data gives no insight into ebook sales; does not break down sales by day or by hour, or by location; and such broadness makes it impossible to separate the impact of one activity from another in the course of a week.

At the same time, Amazon rankings have become a proxy for performance, and we heard many stories of people obsessively refreshing their page on Amazon for minute variations in sales rank.

So, after researching how poorly publishers were quantifying the new world, and believing that a data-driven understanding of consumer behaviour is fundamental to the future of the industry, we decided to stop making apps, and to focus instead on building a market intelligence service for books that we have called Bookseer.

Bookseer - a digital market intelligence service for publishers

Bookseer captures the real-time data “exhaust” of the web, combines it with promotional information provided by the publisher, and builds a picture of the variations in performance of thousands of titles.

Bookseer collects as much information about these books as possible. It captures price on Amazon, hourly sales rank, print and ebook sales data (uploaded by the publisher), what is being said about a book or author on Twitter, Facebook or in the media, and on the wider web, which marketing is being engaged with, the makeup of bestseller charts and so on.

Bookseer captures a wide variety of data and presents it to publishers, like a Bloomberg terminal

We collect this data in a variety of ways, but we do it all in real-time. This means that so long as we can identify significant events – media coverage, a tweet, a price change, a review – at a specific moment in time, we can measure the effect of that event on sales.

Let me show you what I mean with a couple of quick examples.

The first is a big-budget marketing campaign from the UK.

We tracked all 7 titles written by a well-known author, in digital and print format, in advance of a nationwide poster campaign (with a social media component) that promoted 3 titles.

The remaining 4 titles were tracked as a “control” to measure baseline performance on the non-promoted titles. We also tracked mentions of the author name, and the social media keyword promoted on the posters – all of which probably cost in the region of £75- £100,000.

Book sales, and sales rank, during a five-figure marketing campaign

As well as tracking Amazon sales rank, price and social media, we included Nielsen sales so we could see how closely Amazon sales rank and actual sales are correlated. The blue lines at the top represent the hourly sales rank (noting it’s incrementally harder to get higher up the chart), the blue bars are the actual sales through Nielsen, and the red lines are the Kindle sales rank.

The first circle here is when the campaign started, and ended here, at the second. As you can see, the run of the poster campaign made very little impact on sales, although if one were generous, one could attribute a slight increase in actual Nielsen sales (of around 150 copies), and a slight stemming of the downward trend of sales rank during the campaign.

Here we can see the social media metrics.

The blue line is the number of Facebook “fans” for the author, which is steadily climbing, but which remains unaffected by the campaign, again shown between point 1 here and point 2 here. There is a spike in the instances of the Twitter hashtag promoted on the posters, although the actual number of tweets generated was 37.

I’ll let you make up your own mind as to whether this was worth the spend.

My second case study also highlights the risks of big-budget marketing. This data was collected for a chick-lit title in the UK, with a heavily digital launch spend.

Ads were placed on YouTube, and a high-traffic community website was targeted with a strong demographic crossover with the book. All advertising space on the website was bought, pointing to the Amazon product page.

Furthermore an author livechat and two direct emails to site subscribers – over 350,000 of them – were secured. Estimates are that this was a £30-50,000 spend.

So, here on Bookseer we can see when:

1 – advertising goes live on site
2 – Live chat takes place
4 – Two emails were sent to groups of 175,000 subscribers. (I’m going to zoom in on the data on an hourly basis so we can see exactly when the emails were sent here, and here

Bookseer data from a five figure marketing campaign

Returning to the less detailed view, more obviously, we can see the impact of

Bookseer data for a five figure marketing spend

3 Which is when the author appeared on BBC breakfast and was interviewed in the Evening Standard. Going back to the detail view we can see that BBC had much more effect than the Standard, but in combination they both delivered great returns.

Again, make up your own minds – the question we want people to ask is, “With this data, would I spend my money in the same way again? How would my campaign differ?”

These are just two examples. We have other case studies that we think overwhelmingly demonstrate the need for a new approach to book marketing.

This approach is one that (obviously) captures and analyses data, but more fundamentally is simply more agile.

Rather than believing that expensive media space booked months in advance is the best marketing tool, the new marketing spreads its bets wisely. It monitors and hones multiple activities on a daily basis to find the right mix of PR, social media advertising, search engine advertising or direct mail. It looks at broad ranges of data in real time to see which activities work, and tweaks and refines the activities and propositions through split A/B testing and audience segmentation. And it adopts its learnings into future campaigns as it goes.

By being hands-on in this way (as opposed to just throwing money at the problem) publishers can monitor and refine a failing campaign into one that delivers much more ROI.

Bookseer is designed to demonstrate the impact of any marketing approach, and to quantify it against the metrics that matter in publishing: more sales.

But simply measuring isn’t enough. This new marketing approach undoubtedly calls for significant training and investment in skills, skills that publishing does not currently have, but which are fundamental to delivering the consumer-centric vision of the major houses around the world.

The new market calls for investment in new skills and tools

Let me finish by articulating our vision.

In the short term, a data-centric approach allows publishers to be much more reactive to an individual campaign and to tailor their activity to the bits that are working, and stop those that aren’t. They can compare the impact of PR against marketing spend, and measure the outcome of a price change. They can see what worked on a competitor’s title, and learn from it for theirs.

But, more excitingly, in the medium to long term one can build up an incredibly large corpus of data that can then be mined algorithmically to run predictive scenarios for books you will publish, using data from those that have already been published.

We believe that this data can inform future publishing strategies: what is the optimum price, format, time of year to publish? Who will the most successful retailer be? Who are the top 5 journalists who have the best track record of driving sales in this genre? Who are the most influential social media people to reach out to? What will the sales be, and therefore, what is the right advance to pay?

These are the questions fundamental to bringing books to market, and it’s time that data played it part in answering them.

Thanks very much for your time and attention, and for allowing me to do this on video.

If you have any questions I’ll be online now, and I’d be delighted to answer questions via twitter either to @gunzalis, or with the #bookseer hashtag.

Bookseer is currently in closed beta. Please contact Peter Collingridge for more details.

This month, our co-founder Peter Collingridge chaired a panel discussion on book “discoverability” at the Futurebook conference in London.  

Before the discussion, Peter gave a short presentation about the need to define what is meant by “discoverability” and its importance in the changing world of technology and publishing today.

His talk is reproduced below in full.

We are here to talk about discoverability, which is lucky, because as co-founder of a company called Enhanced Editions, Evan Schnittman has made it clear that I need a new business direction to focus on, fast.

So, discoverability it is.

However, I’m not sure that most people can agree on what “discoverability” means, exactly.

Personally, I feel that it is used to cover a whole range of challenges in the digital world, and that it might help to clarify what we mean by it if we are going to solve those challenges.

This is great as well because talking about it allows me to unpick “Discoverability” in a way that introduces the three awesome panellists I have here today, and put forward my own definition of it. So here goes.

When people say they have a discovery problem:

What I hear is that they have actually have a sales and marketing problem:

I believe “Discoverability” actually covers a range of problems that are broadly similar in the physical and digital worlds, but the “solutions” to the problems are fundamentally different.

So I’m going to propose we look at this very briefly – for like 7 minutes – before introducing three speakers who, neatly, will talk for a similar amount of time about each of the different solutions in the digital world.

If time allows, we’ll follow on with Q&A from the audience. So please prepare some questions as we go.

In the old, linear, “physical” world, “discovery” principally happens through bookshops, where loyal customers have lured by successful marketing.

In that linear world, this is trade marketing, which, when boiled down, comes down to the repetition of two successive activities:

1. Creating demand
2. Meeting demand (and creating loyal consumers through great products)
3. Rinsing & repeating

If you don’t have loyal customers, you don’t have discovery, you’re still just trying to create demand.

Demand is created through PR and bookshop coverage.

Demand is met through placement and merchandising in bookstores.

And the creation of more demand is through loyal customers who develop habits around books: reading book reviews, and visiting bookshops, where browsing, recommendations, word of mouth and serendipity lead you to “discover” books.

When the linear model works, it works well and if it doesn’t work the best explanation is probably that your sales and marketing has, I’m afraid, failed. Or, if you prefer, you can blame the trade.

But how is this different in the digital world?

Well, fundamentally, in the digital world, marketing (and therefore demand) is a consumer-facing rather than trade-facing activity.

You could argue, as John Makinson does, that publishing has previously been about managing supply, rather than creating demand.

Or, as Markus Dohle puts it, the future of publishing (or at least Random House’s future) is all about creating demand from consumers rather than managing supply to retailers.

If this is true, then everyone here today needs to work very hard on making sure that these consumer-facing activities are done as well as those you do in the trade: the objectives are the same in digital, but the activities are very different.

Creating demand looks very different to ten years ago; campaigns are increasingly “integrated” across digital and physical, with a strong digital and consumer-facing component. This is what Jenny Todd, sales and marketing director of Canongate, will be talking about very shortly.

Assuming your consumer-facing marketing activity has created demand, the first hurdle is that people find your products online, effortlessly and instantly.

Many people appear to swap “discoverability” for “search” problems. I would argue that this problem is better classified as “findability”.

And, understanding how each of your trade customers organises their search results (and their algorithms) is now your job. Complaining about it doesn’t wash.

So, search. And findability.

I believe that a fundamental strategic question for publishers is to ask themselves what they want consumers to find from a web search on one of their titles?

Is it Amazon; or a publisher’s own site?

All subsequent digital activity should stem from this decision, ie that all efforts be made to ensure that user searches return results that support that decision (ie optimise search results aggressively); and that the destination (retailer or publisher site) be tested and optimised across multiple variables (price, delivery, stock, content, proposition, &c) to convert as many visitors to purchasers as possible.

Whilst “findability” also relates to the search functions of the Kindle Store, the App Store, and iTunes / iBooks and many other destinations (each of which has their own quirks), Google is by far the leading jump-off point for “find”, with 92% market share.

Michael Bhaskar, Digital Director at Profile, is going to talk through how Google decides which pages to return first; how recent changes in their algorithm have affected publishers; and the actions publishers can take to improve their search rankings at Google.

And then finally we will get to the piece that I believe *is* discovery.

When your marketing has worked, and consumers have found and bought and enjoyed your books, and now want to find another one, but don’t know what to choose, this is when “discovery” comes in to play.

In the physical world, this was met by recommendations from friends, retailers and from browsing the bookshops.

These activities have translated poorly to the web, with recommendations being dominated by the notoriously polluted Amazon purchase history; browsing is more akin to listings, with alphabetical, chronological or price factors overshadowing more familiar taxonomies; and whilst word of mouth exists, it tends to get swallowed up by the noise of social media.

Small Demons have created a wonderful, lateral web experience that explores the relationships between books that only an algorithm can find. Profoundly serendipitous, it is a discovery engine, and Valla Vakili will walk us through it today.

So, to wrap up, “Discovery” is the outcome of great marketing, supported by intelligent sales activities, and fantastic products that bring people back for more.

Last weekend, Sonia Land said she would publish ebooks of Catherine Cookson’s backlist on Amazon, bypassing Transworld, Cookson’s traditional publisher.

This is just the latest example of author/agents “disintermediating” publishers and using digital distribution to go direct to market: established author Barry Eisler recently turned down a $500k advance from St Martins Press to publish his two upcoming books himself; and last summer Andrew Wylie set up his own imprint, Odyssey Editions, to publish a number of classic titles in digital format [Full disclosure: my company Enhanced Editions was involved in the Odyssey Editions project].

I don’t for a minute believe that these authors / agents are out to destroy the publishing industry, as some have implied. Rather, their actions appear to be driven principally by two things: the first is a frustration at a perceived lack of initiative amongst publishers to create, promote, and market titles effectively in a digital marketplace; the second is publishers’ refusal to offer authors anything more than 25% of net receipts on sales of digital books (i.e. what is left after VAT and the retailer’s cut).

This presents authors & agents with a tough choice: go with a publisher for 25% of net receipts, or self-publish for 100% of net receipts — and be damned. To stick with their publisher, authors & agents need to be confident that their publisher adds enough value to justify such a large share of net receipts. The actions of Land, Eisler, and Wylie indicate that they at least do not think so.

As digital reading rates rise, where and how and who in the publishing industry adds value needs to change. Certainly, a publisher must do more than simply digitise books and upload them to Amazon: this is an increasingly commoditised activity that costs just a few hundred dollars and in no way justifies receiving 75% of all future earnings. Publishers have always argued that they add value through the editing process. This is true — but again not enough to justify such a large cut, particularly on backlist titles.

After fourteen years in publishing and digital marketing, I would argue that in a digital market, publishers will add tangible value by defining and implementing an integrated digital and print publishing strategy, the objective of which is to connect readers and writers through a frictionless journey, with the publisher’s influence almost invisible at each step on the way.

This journey starts with the acquisition of all relevant rights for a fair price, and turning them into a range of products in digital and print format; it will generate well-timed buzz in traditional and social media; it will ensure the right products are discoverable through search engines or on retailer sites; it will optimise the marketing messages on retail partners’ product pages; and it will set prices according to what readers are willing to pay, rather than on the traditional cost-plus basis (assuming Agency remains in place).

An integrated strategy will deliver a flawless user experience (no typos or bugs!), a reactive and human after-sales support should things go wrong, and it will combine good user experience with sophisticated cross-marketing: the gentle recommendation of related products that readers might enjoy, the discreet prompt to check out a website, Twitter feed or Facebook page.

Underlying all this activity will be analytical engines gathering data that publishers can use to understand where they are — and aren’t — doing the right things, and providing the basis for future decision making, budgeting, production – even acquisition.

“Adding value” is the ability to do this at scale and at speed across your list. It requires a clear vision, a firm understanding of the assets you have to work with, investment in activities such as marketing and analytics, as well as understanding what gaps there are in existing skills and technology infrastructure.

We know that many publishers are innovating across a number of these areas. However it’s difficult to achieve all this in a consistent and integrated way.

By offering authors a greater share of net receipts, Amazon addresses authors’ frustration with the lower percentages offered by publishers. By owning one of the world’s largest digital marketplaces and excelling at analytics, Amazon can also go someway towards easing authors’ other frustration: effective promotion and marketing of titles in a digital market.

However, Amazon isn’t able to deliver all the features of an integrated digital and print publishing strategy and join writers and readers along the frictionless journey that we envisage. For example, Amazon will never link to anything that would take a user away from its site, even if it knows the user would be interested.

And herein lies the opportunity for publishers. By putting in place a properly integrated publishing strategy — along the lines of what is written above — publishers will be able to say that they add more value than self-publishing through Amazon and provide a truly differentiated and competitive alternative to the road taken by Land, Eisler, and Wylie.

Peter Collingridge is co-founder of Enhanced Editions, a digital publishing consultancy and software house. This post will also appear on FutureBook.

Earlier this year, our co-founder Peter Collingridge was interviewed about Enhanced Editions and digital publishing at Digital Book World:

“We see ourselves kind of like a publishing company. What we’re trying to do is not do stuff just because you can do it. I kind of got that stuff out in the last ten, thirteen years of being paid to do kind of wacky marketing stuff. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t.

“With digital books, the suggestion is, reading is an amazing, immersive, time consuming, rewarding endeavor. It’s not Twitter. It’s very very different to that kind of thing. You’ve got to be careful as to how you seek to disrupt that experience from the eyes of the person that’s reading it.



“We see our company as an experimental company. We’re trying to drive the future of the book commercially. We’re very commercially driven. We want to see what consumers like. We gather a lot of data, we look at that data, we see what’s popular and what’s not popular and we iterate on the back of that.

“There’s an amazing opportunity…to properly digitize the books. Not just digitizing the text, but digitizing the whole experience.

“There’s a lot of things you can do. You shouldn’t do all of them. You should have an editor’s view of which are the right features, functionalities, experiences to add around the text. But you also have to experiment. We’re interested in using technology intelligently to make books a part of our – increasingly digital – lives in the 21st century.

“We’re trying to innovate at a user experience level that isn’t just that facsimile of the book because we believe that, to kids growing up today, there’s more to offer than that. I’m very interested to see how that landscape is going to evolve, even in the next 3 to 12 months.”

You may know that last Saturday was the inaugural World Book Night, an evening celebrating reading, and doing for adults what World Book Day does for kids.

The BBC devoted a whole evening of programming to World Book Night, there were more than 400 events held across the UK, and a million books were given away. And in case you missed it, BBC2’s flagship arts programme The Culture Show interviewed one of our co-founders, Peter Collingridge, as part of their coverage.

Peter spoke to presenter John Mullan about digital publishing and showed off our Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro app on an iPad. You can watch his section on iPlayer (UK only), and the whole programme is really worth a look.

The Book Stops Here, a literary night run by our publicist Emma Young, was also featured on the show here, and both Peter and Emma were part of the World Book Night party at Royal Festival Hall headlined by Margaret Atwood, where Peter DJed and Emma hosted readings to a crowd of over 1000 people.

Nick Cave appeared at a huge World Book Night event in Trafalgar Square, where he read from Nabokov’s Lolita (at 15.44):

We thought it would be churlish not to remind you of our award-winning Nick Cave app and remind you of the cover of the ebook we created for Lolita last year:

David Nicholl’s One Day, for which we produced an app, was selected as one of the twenty books being given away. And Philip Pullman, whose Northern Lights was also part of the giveaway, spoke to the BBC about World Book Night in Trafalgar Square. We created an app for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ which you can read all about here.

Both Bunny Munro and The Good Man Jesus are discounted for this week only, over on iTunes.

Last year for World Book Day we created £1.79 apps for all the Quick Reads books. They include titles by Andy McNab, Peter James, Cathy Kelly, and a Dr Who story and are still available.

To celebrate World Book Night, we’re dropping the price of two of our most popular apps, Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro and Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. For the next week The Death of Bunny Munro will be £4.99 and The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ will be £7.99.

Both authors are huge supporters of World Book Night, which was established this year to celebrate reading and do for adults what World Book Day does for kids. Nick Cave appeared at a huge World Book Night event in Trafalgar Square, where he read from Nabokov’s Lolita (at 15.44):

Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights was one of the books given away on World Book Night, and he spoke to the BBC about it in Trafalgar Square:





Buy The Death of Bunny Munro in iTunes.
Buy The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ in iTunes.

Until now, even amongst our closest, most techy publishing friends, most of us wouldn’t bring up ‘metadata’ over dinner. If you knew what it was, you probably thought it was something someone somewhere else should be dealing with. But great metadata (stick with me) is going to be essential to the survival of publishing companies and the industry. The guy in your office who knows what metadata is just got cool.

What is metadata?

Metadata is data about data: information about a book and information in a book (except the author’s words). Core metadata is the bibliographic stuff: the title, author name, extent, format, and so on. Enhanced metadata can be anything from video, audio, sample chapters, reviews, social activity to data that’s still being dreamt up. ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) captures the bibliographic data of books and disseminates it to wholesale, e-tail and retail booksellers, other publishers, and anyone else involved in the sale of books.

Why do I need it?

Core metadata is vital for search engine optimisation (SEO). Today, digital consumers find books through searching or through social recommendation. The more core metadata you send out (through ONIX), the more you’ll get duplicated and supplemented on the Internet, through online retailers such as The Book Depository and Amazon adding reviews, for example. And the better the content is supplemented on these sites, the higher the ranking of the title on those sites.

Consumer strategy

Metadata is therefore critical for marketing and promotion: one of our co-founders, Peter Collingridge, spoke about metadata at Digital Book World 2011 in early February as part of a panel with Rob Reynolds (Xplana), Noah Genner (BookNet Canada) and Fran Toolan (Firebrand), moderated by Scott Lubeck.

The panel explained the importance of using metadata and search as part of a consumer-facing strategy. While basic metadata is trade facing, enhanced metadata (those sample chapters, video, audio, reviews) should be consumer facing, and may help to influence whether people buy your product. And search engines love content, and, therefore, enhanced metadata.

You can decide to send it out with your core metadata through ONIX for retailers to use (although they may not always use it), or you could decide to put it on your website and your website only, which will help you win the battle for search.

Adopting a direct-to-consumer strategy doesn’t necessarily mean selling direct. But it does mean developing and building relationships with your readers.

In the US in December last year, Facebook saw more visits to its site than to Google for the first time. We think that how your data appears in social media is so important that we created a Facebook-specific metadata component for our Odyssey Editions apps. We think providing Facebook with a cover, title, and descriptions of a product rather than just a ‘like’ is a much more effective way of influencing consumers.

Allowing users to do their own tagging and provide their own metadata means we can learn more about our products, what our consumers like, and help create and influence relationships with them.

Clearly a smart way for publishers to approach metadata is to collect it as much as to create it. Metadata will help you manage your brand reputation and guide conversations just as social media does. This means having someone in-house who monitors what data is being used where, and checking what works and what doesn’t. Your data might look very different at your end than on someone else’s site.

It seems essential to keep working on a consensus, or standard of behaviour, of core metadata. Genner talked about how book retailers, libraries, and online retailers want author bios, for example, but had run a quick scan of five hundred thousand titles and found that only 3% of them have that information. Although, of course, your strategy for what you include in terms of enhanced metadata is what gives you and your books an edge, and is something you’re unlikely to want to share.

While Lubeck opened the talk by describing the challenges of metadata as ‘building an aircraft while flying it, a technology specialist, from outside the publishing industry, said that maintaining and continually evolving standards will help technology people help publishers make money, create products publishers didn’t know exist, and help the industry.

In the last two weeks Peter Collingridge, one of our co-founders, has spoken at three digital publishing conferences around the world: Digital Book World in New York (organised by “digital guru” Mike Shatzkin and F&W Media); NLPVF in Amsterdam (organised by Maarten Valken and the Dutch Foundation for Literature); and If Book Then in Milan (organised by Marco Ferrario).

Whilst the principle area of growth in publishing is in what these conferences call “vanilla” ebooks, there was much talk of enhanced editions, and I enjoyed a variety of conversations both on how publishers are making apps, and how to make them successful.

With agencies quoting entry points for apps at $50k, apps can represent a high risk. It is managing this risk that I spent a lot of time talking about.

First of all – our approach. Coming from a tech background, we knew when we founded Enhanced Editions that a scalable platform (ie the ability to make 1000s of apps from the same code) would dramatically mitigate the risks and costs involved in the setup, so long as we got the user experience right. By comparison, the entry point to our platform is just £5k. However, whilst companies such as Vook in the USA take a similar approach, this is surprisingly rare, with many people I talked to choosing to build apps without a view to reusing the code in future projects.

Henry Volans of Faber Digital included in his talk in Amsterdam. a quote from a discussion we had, where I likened this approach to “betting everything on red”; Richard Nash (formerly of Soft Skull and now founder of publishing community startup Cursor) refined this to “betting everything on 7″ and being “like buying a racehorse”. Nash’s focus at Cursor is to instead “own a racetrack.”

Faber has had a well-deserved success with The Solar System. Volans cited 25,000 sales internationally in the first month, and with 50% of the $13.99 being split between Faber, Touch Press and Marcus Chown, it seems likely that their probably very significant (but undisclosed) development costs have been met. The other ±50% will go to the VAT man and Apple.

Faber created The Solar System with a model familiar to film companies – the funding of a pot of cash for development, with a share of the spoils allocated in proportion to the investment. Whilst Faber can’t reuse the code, The Solar System is being translated into Japanese and other languages, with foreign rights deals being handled by Faber: an old-school kind of scalability. Clever people.

At the time of the conference in Amsterdam, The Solar System was being promoted as “App of the Week” in every country around the world, according to Volans. This support from Apple, without doubt, is the single most significant factor in an app’s success, like loading the roulette wheel. However, it is my opinion that publishers are putting too much emphasis on this gamble in their promotional strategies, rather than planning a more nuanced campaign themselves that looks to independent methods of promotion. For example, how can awareness be created without relying on Apple’s involvement?

I spoke at DBW with Dominique Raccah, CEO of SourceBooks, and one of the leading lights of USA enhanced ebooks. Raccah has had hits with titles such as Baby Names (80,000 downoads) and several other titles developed from the ground-up from their print list, and says that their average sales are “a few thousand” of each app.

Soon to launch is their Fiske guide to university admissions processes, an interactive version aimed at students. When I asked Raccah what her marketing strategy for the title was, she said, simply, “promotion from Apple”, with whom they clearly have a great relationship. Whilst we discussed other strategies – from Facebook advertising (based on keywords shown on user profiles) to working with the colleges direct, it was clear that these approaches were far subordinate to promotion from Apple.

One thing I find very exciting about Sourcebooks is their structure. All of the app planning – the information architecture, user interface, user experience – is done inhouse and outputs blueprints for the apps. The subsequent development (coding) work is outsourced to an increasingly commoditised market. This is a different, and very smart, way of minimising costs and risk, so long as you know what you are doing.

Dominique’s relationship with Apple leads to other benefits: the launch of Fiske had actually been delayed because Apple had seen a beta version, and made some UI (user interface) suggestions. Raccah took the advice that it should “show off the features of the device” better. Similarly Liz Kessler of Hachette presented an app they had recently made for photographer Ansel Adams. The feedback from Apple was that the app was “too bookish”, and the subsequent re-engineering delayed launch and extended deadlines and budgets.  Such delays were clearly lesser risks than failing to impress Apple.

The digital marketing approach of many publishers reminds me of the reliance set on retailers to do the promotion of print books. As well as being risky, I fear that this omits one huge upside of digital: the ability to market direct to your readers, and to capture rich data about their usage. These are two areas in which Amazon, Apple and Google excel, and which should be seen as an invaluable by-product of any digital project.

Apple loomed large at DBW, but was conspicuously absent from the podium, unlike Amazon (who by and large impressed the crowd) and Google (who dramatically underwhelmed the audience and even the organisers). As James Bridle tweeted in Milan, “The big 3 always used to refer to publishers and were different from country to country. Now it’s the same globally: Apple, Amazon, Google.”

The power of Apple to change fortunes on a whim was shown by the storm around in-app purchasing; Michael Tamblyn of Kobo described being on the App Store to me as “like farming on the sides of a volcano: incredibly fertile lands, but you never know when you’re going to get wiped out”.

It is clear that a significant new ecosystem of enhanced books is emerging on the Apple platform, but Apple risks confusing users by putting apps in the App Store rather than iBooks, their eBook store. Book apps are a genuine example of user experience differentiation that Apple currently holds over Amazon and Google, whose platforms do not support many of the features available in an app. As Apple struggles to compete against Amazon, and as books compete with Facebook and Angry Birds for people’s attention, I wonder whether integrating enhanced books into iBooks would help celebrate the benefits of reading on the iPad over Kindle?

I had further fascinating conversations with other members of the international publishing net set: Peter Meyers, formerly of O’Reilly and author of the recent “Best iPad apps” book, described the incredibly fertile ecosystem springing up in enhanced books from outside publishing such as Strange Rain and The Pedlar Lady but bemoaned the lack of attention to narrative and typography. Mike Shatzkin suggested that “publishers are in serious danger of losing control of the juvenile market to developers”, although I disagree not least because of the powerful pull of brands such as Miffy, Maisy or Disney (who recently announced over 1m downloads of a Toy Story book app, which we’ve discussed previously on the blog).

Ed Nawotka, who runs the brilliant Publishing Perspectives site, noted that UK publishers are more advanced with enhancements than their US counterparts. He put this down to two factors: (1) that USA publishers got burned a lot more badly by CDROMs, although he thinks the comparison between enhanced editions and CDROM is fatuous; and (2) that the cultures of the media and creative industries in the UK are simply much more innovative and adventurous than in the USA.

We were joined in Amsterdam by the wonderful Ramy Habeeb of Egypt’s Kotobarabia who alternated between sobering comparisons with Egypt (”these are the tablets in our market” he quipped as he gave Maarten a litho block [LINK]) and the gallows humour of watching your countrymen, business, and culture’s future play out live on Twitter in Europe whilst Egypt itself had no internet access.

Publishing is a creative industry, entering a moment of great innovation. And innovation is all about managing risk. Fortunately, the rewards can be bountiful and long-lasting, and there are many ways for well-executed digital projects to mitigate the risks of their print counterparts. My advice to publishers who are interested in digital innovation is two-fold. Firstly to learn as much as possible, as quickly and as cheaply as possible, from everything they do; and secondly to channel their considerable creativity into making sure that their marketing is as polished, considered, and contemplative of their users as the products they have made.

A version of this post appeared on Futurebook on 8 February 2011.

We all know that digital books are coming, however recent news seems to indicate that their adoption is happening faster than even we expected.

Part of the reason is the rapid proliferation of the relevant hardware:

Apple sold 7.3m iPads over Christmas, effectively doubling its installed base to 14.5m. They’ve sold 160 million iOS devices in total, including 90 million iPhones.

And Amazon, without giving exact figures, has announced that the Kindle has become the most gifted item in their history, and that customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books on Christmas Day last year.

It’s also increasingly clear that consumers are warming to the idea of digital reading:

While the industry barely blinked at the news that bestselling author Nora Roberts has become the third author to sell over one million ebooks (joining Stieg Larsson and James Patterson in the ‘Kindle Million Club’), the news that Disney had downloads of over one million enhanced ebook apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch to date was more surprising.

Its Toy Story Read-Along app, which has had over 5,000 reviews already, averaging four stars, and been described as ‘the model for how children’s e-books should be done’ is marketed as a ‘fully interactive reading experience packed with Games, Movie Clips, Coloring Pages, Sing-along Tunes, and Surprises on every page’. Children can hear the story read aloud, record their own narration, or explore at their own pace.

Some observers reckon that while print book sales in the US fell 4.4% last year, it was entirely offset by an increase in the sales of ebooks.

So what does this mean for publishers? For one thing, the speed of digital adoption means that if you don’t have a point of view on digital now, you’d better get one soon.

We believe that for the publishing industry to survive (and even thrive), it needs to change its role away from managing the supply of books to bookshops and focus more on consumers and providing them great reading experiences.

To do this, publishers should consider two things:

1. Develop consumer brands and communities – finding writers for your readers rather than readers for your writers (as Seth Godin puts it). Knowing and understanding your readers will be critical in the digital future as readers try to make sense of the infinite choice available to them.

2. Embrace consumer-facing technologies and innovations that converge with other media and content – books also need to integrate into and be relevant with people’s digital lives.

Enhanced Editions co-founder Peter Collingridge will be at this year’s Digital Book World in New York telling you how to do this, talking about the importance of discovery and metadata, and reporting back on the differences between enhancement in the UK and USA, with examples from each. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter or RSS to keep in touch.

Image © Peng-Chun Lee, all rights reserved.

An editorial in the Guardian this morning talked about Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, for which we created the ebook app, calling it the perfect Christmas read and arguing that open-minded Christians will relish Pullman’s take on the nativity story:

In praise of … The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

For moralising monks and parents bankrupted by materialistic children, it is a commonplace at this time of year to bemoan the divorce between the winterval that rules the high street and the real meaning of Christmas. Happily, the book of 2010 provides a gift to reconnect the two. Philip Pullman’s take on the nativity story – which starts with Mary conceiving after an evening visit by an angel who looked “just like one of the young men who spoke to her by the well” – will not appeal to believers of a rigid bent. Nor, for that matter, will his reworking of the entire gospel as a tale of two twins, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, the one a fountain of simple virtue, the other set on building a mighty church on the foundation of “improved” truth. But open-minded Christians will relish it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, no less, hailed a “searching, teasing and ambitious narrative”, which fell short only if measured against the “still more resourceful text” of the gospels he preaches. Pullman retells the great tales of the good book in the pitch-perfect idiom of modern Bible translations, assembling such a persuasive director’s cut from official texts and ancient apocrypha that he had to emblazon “This is a Story” on the back cover to prevent the exercise from getting out of hand. Amid the carols and nativity plays, the human impulse to tell and retell tales is central to the real meaning of Christmas. Regardless of whether Pullman has anything to say about the real Jesus, he has a good deal to say about that.

Here’s the trailer for The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:

Philip Pullman lives in Oxford with his family, where we recorded readings from a number of chapters from the book. Below is Philip Pullman reading from ‘Jesus in the Garden at Gethsemane’, a pivotal chapter from The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Although this video didn’t make it into the final version of the app, it serves to demonstrate that Pullman reserves his scorn not for individual members of a religion, or even for religions themselves, but rather for those institutions that claim to be doing God’s work. He isn’t afraid to defend his freedom to say such things either, as the closing comments of his Oxford Literary Festival event can attest:

The enhanced edition, with the full text, the unabridged audiobook synchronised to the ebook, read by the author, and exclusive video interviews, is available for your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and you can download it here.