Know Your Industry

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit."

- Aristotle

Inspiring People who Know their Industry
I get inspired by people regularly...particularly people with vision who can also execute.  As an author, you are an entrprenuer, and it's important to find and surround yourself with people (virtually or phsyically) who inspire you to keep pushing forward.  For me, Dave Williams is definitely one of those people who "knows his industry."  One of his recent articles is a super example of knowing your industry.  When you read his article on Facebook Advertising, you realize very quickly just how much Dave knows about Facebook and advertising.  Heck, I feel like I need to read this article 20 times just to learn everything that is mentioned in here.  If they haven't already, someone will probably write a 200 page book on the same information in the article...it's packed!

Knowing Your Industry
As Larry (my dad) and I have started the marketing planning work for marketing "the book," we have been doing a lot of research on what is going on in the publishing industry.  We are reading 100s of pieces of information about the market, the industry players, how money flows, what innovative authors are doing, the profile of our target market, book reviewers, etc.  There is a knowledge threshold you really need to clear to understand an industry and how to market yourself in that industry - know the book industry in addition to the industry of the market your book is going to go into (e.g. consumer entertainment, motivation, business, finance, psychology, etc.).  Meeting a knowledge threshold is important...and it takes time...but really costs nothing...the cost is a commitment to learn...and some spare time.  Musicians often fail in this area...they love music but they don't pay attention to business.  Music may be their passion, but if they want to make a living at it, they better understand the business side...I am willing to bet that any musician who has more than one platinum hit over the course of a decade has really learned the biz.  Authors...know the industry.

Why is Knowing Your Industry Important?
Because when you are making decisions about where to spend your time and energy, you are trying to optimize the ROI on your efforts (unless you are just writing as a non-profit).  Whether you know it consciously or not, you are constantly processing inputs that direct your energy...you are in a feedback loop.  And, the market is sending some feedback information to you.  Seeing and understanding what is going on in the book industry will help influence and improve your decisions...and ultimately your ROI.

Perhaps I am stating the obvious, but I am just sharing what is going on in our journey of taking a book to market.  As always, feedback, comments, criticism, etc. is welcomed and appreciated.  As well, let me know what ideas or topics you might want to see me cover.  Thank you for reading!

Amazing Book Facts/Stats

Wow, I just got edu-ma-cated.  There is a ton of interesting facts from this link.  Here are some particularly engaging ones...

6 large publishers (in New York)
3-400 medium-sized publishers
86,000 small/self-publishers


2006: The Top 12 Publishers by revenue were:
Reed Elsevier, Pearson, Thomson, Bertelsmann, Wolters Kluer, McGraw-Hill Education, Reader’s Digest, Scholastic, De Agostini Editore, Holtzbrinck, Gr. Planeta.
--Publishers Weekly, August 6, 2007



California has 6X the number of small publishers than any other state. This finding is consistent with surveys of other creative professions, including desktop publishers, web publishers and multimedia designers.

A larger publisher must sell 10,000 books to break even.
--Brian DeFiore, Maui Writers Conference.

A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies. --Authors Guild.

In 2001, consumers purchased 1.6 billion books.
--2001 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing by the Book Industry Study Group

2004. “Of the 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies.”
-- Publisher’s Weekly, July 17, 2006

2007. Chains, Internet dominate bookselling.
Chain bookstores accounted for 33% of unit book purchases in the January through September period.
Purchases made through online retailers represented 20% of book purchases.
Book clubs accounted for 12% of book buys.
In all, the direct-to-consumer (Internet, book clubs, book fairs, other) channel accounted for 35% of purchases in the nine-month period.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6515670.html

Number of books sold online in 1999: 57 million.
--The Standard, October 23, 2000.

2008: MORE BOOKS SOLD ON THE INTERNET THAN ANY OTHER PRODUCT and the number is increasing. Polling company Nielsen Online surveyed 26,312 people in 48 countries. 41% of internet users had bought books online. 58% of those online in Korea had purchased books online. In the U.S., 57.5-million had purchased books online.

On the average, a book store browser spends eight seconds looking at the front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.
--The Wall Street Journal

The library market represents over $5 billion.

90% of the 15,000 public libraries in the US order (some) of their books through Baker & Taylor and spend more than $444 million on books annually.

How much do people like to pay?
28% $5 to $7.99. Presumably they are buying mostly mass-market paperbacks.
19% $3 to $.99
19% $10 to $14.99
19% $15 to $24.99
--2001 Consumer Research Study on Book Purchasing by the Book Industry Study Group

1859: The first self-help book was published by John Murray Publishers. Written by Samuel Smiles, the title was Self-Help: with illustrations of character and conduct.
The self-help book category came into its own in 1936 with the publication of Dale Carnegie’s book How to Win Friends and Influence People. Today self-help sales are $538-million and account for one in ten titles sold.
--The Wall Street Journal, December 8, 1998.

64% of book buyers say a book’s being on a bestseller list is not important.
--Publishers Weekly, May 12, 1997, page 13.

Market Planning for Our Book

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."

Sam Walton, Walmart

Do I Need a Marketing Plan?

Marketing plans typically outline a target audience, goals, timelines, the message to the audience, possibly a creative treatment, and the detailed plans and budgets for each tactic in the campaign.  Even as a small company or independent author, it is very helpful to think through these things.  There are a myriad of choices and you need to select only the best things to work on…the ones with the most potential at the least cost (i.e. money or time investment)…you cannot do it all!  No one can.  Picking the first thing that comes to mind is probably risky.  Come up with a bunch of potential ideas; quickly weigh the pros and cons of results and costs, then keep moving the ball forward!

Who’s Our Audience?

Of course, it’s really important to understand your audience, their behavior, and what influences them.  For authors, this means that we have to understand book reviewers.  These are a very influential and passionate segment…we love them because they are typically more passionate about books than anyone on the planet!  Once we know who they are, we need to figure out how to help them accomplish their goals and line our goals up with theirs.

Creating the List of Reviewers

Typing “book reviews” in Google brings up 97,000,000 results and checking adwords shows 368,000  global monthly searches and 201,000 in the US.  So, every month (according to Google), a bunch of searches are done…and adding all related keywords and sub-searches would likely show that there are millions of searches on this topic per month.  It’s our job as marketers to try and hone this list down.  Every marketer has limited time, resources, and budget…one key is finding the optimal way to reach your audience.  Clearly, we cannot address 97 million websites or pretend we can be a top search result for all of these.  We may only have 5 days to spend trying to reach reviewers, and it’s probably better to spend a day getting the best , most targeted, most relevant list possible than 5 days on a random list.

What We are Doing

For our book, we are going to hone our list down by relevance and reach, then balance this list with the cost it takes us to engage with them.  For example, reaching the NY Times might be very difficult and take a lot of energy or money…but reaching the top 10 psychology book reviewers might not be.  Then again, getting on the NY Times review list would probably reach a ton of people and sell a lot of books.  There is always a balance, always trade-offs, and always a time to just do the work and quit thinking about it.

Generating a list of relevant book reviewers is one of my goals for this week.  I’ll probably group and catgegorize the list a few different ways.  Depending on how search savvy and comprehensive you are, this could take you an hour or a day.  Once I get a template that I like, I’ll eventually publish it…please let me know what questions, comments, or thoughts you have on this or if you’d like to collaborate!

So, Let's Talk strategy! (Part 1)

"Perception is strong and sight weak. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things." - Miyamoto Musashi (1584 - 1645), Japanese Swordsman

"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do." - Michael Porter

NOTE: This is part one of this article, and parts 2 and 3 will eventually provide more detail.

Strategy Foundations
LJB and I had a super strategy session this morning...and I plan to share a specific info about it in the very near future...but first, I want to provide some foundational thoughts to strategy. At the end of the day, authors want to connect with people and share something of value with the them. In return, profit-oriented authors make money. So, how do we devise a strategy for your work to make money?

Betalkaboutable Strategy #1 - Know Your Freakin' Customer!
Aside from stealing or counterfeiting, the ONLY way to make money is to help people...and get paid for your product or service that helped them. So, you need to know how your work is helping your fellow human. If you've failed to figure this out, keep failing and don't stop...but make sure you learn from each failure! Know your customer better than they know themselves!



Betalkaboutable Strategy #2 - No Sucky Content!
There are a million things you can do to try and make money as "an author," but your content CANNOT SUCK! You have to have a great, talkaboutable product if you are an author (or an artist or musician for that matter). CC and Ann wrote contentrulesbook.com, and it covers a lot of this type of info about content. To disclose, CC is a friend, and he totally knows what he is talking about. Other than that book, I would study any other great authors and any good content out there on the internizzle...study it.



Now, I believe firmly in a concept (and am pretty sure I came up with the concept) called "Return on Content." This is based on the marketing operations measurement work I've done...for example, we invested in white papers at Siebel. Those papers took time/money to make...and some produced way more leads and business than others! The same rule applies to media companies who will shut off a TV show that doesn't have enough audience (as audience = ad dollars). Authors, marketers, media companies, and software companies create a TON of content...it's endless. Where do you focus? How do you maximize the return on the investment in content? Well, first...it really helps to think of your investment of time and/or money in content as something that needs to maximize a return. Then, you manufacture content, measure the return, and optimize it. So, that means you need to get a feedback loop in place ASAP...that way, you know when you are creating good content and you know what metrics you are moving the needle on. If you don't know where to start, you gotta start somewhere! Take a an educated risk.

betalkaboutable Strategy #3 - betalkaboutable!
This should be obvious, but if people don't want to talk about your content, it sucks. If people aren't talking about your content/media/work, refer to rule #1 and #2. In the world of social media, people are in a constant state of talking, liking, twitching, and talking about content as noted here. It's now part of human behavior...if you have great content, people will talk about it...and being talkaboutable leads to sales!

That's it for now! Feedback always appreciated!

The Life and Death of a Twitter Trend

Reposted from Twitter Trending analysis

ROTFL

Betalking or betalkaboutable?

there is "betalking" ...and...there is
"betalkaboutable" .
no matter what, you likely want the latter.