Crow Content

It’s not new, but it is an increasingly important part of being visible. Branding in publishing has to this point mainly been the preserve of authors and series, with the odd notable exception, yet this is going to have to change as serendipity is whittled away in a world of keywords and metadata. So it is that the newcomer who requires a shortcut to awareness and recognition seeks to collaborate with known names while they strengthen their nascent brand, and uses these partnerships to speed up their data gathering in the target market.

For developing a non-fiction consumer list, the advantages of seeking partners when starting out are clear; traction in a target market, detailed information about the habits of the market and how to reach them, recognition and hopefully positive connotations amongst consumers towards the partner’s brand, and quite often expert insight into the subject courtesy of authors or subject consultants. You can see how these benefits would also apply to more established imprints and ‘brands’ whose expertise may not stretch as far into market analysis as that of the partner whose insight is being brought in.

As well as moving the product into a more apparent and accessible place for the targeted reader, the alchemy of two strong partners ought to bring a very attractive proposition and in doing so improve both partners’ reputations. What we, as the publisher, gain from this manifests in results. With the Love to Learn series coming to the end of its first year on the market, the nine strategic partnerships struck up have contributed directly to 20%-25% of sales (made on partners’ rather than our own site) and then provided a further 25%-30% of traffic.

And what’s in it for the more established subject specialist partner in the link-up? Obviously this will vary between each case, but the soft benefits of being able to off their members a valuable product packaged by experts, extra incentive for the interested to join up and receive offers on the products of the partnership, another location to be visible in and to grow brand awareness outside their usual avenues, and to poke a toe in the water of exploiting their brand and assets digitally without taking too many of the risks involved. These sit next to the harder commercial benefits of affiliate cuts of each purchase (rather than subscription) either through their site or from referred, completed journeys to our site, and flat fees for licenses to otherwise inactive assets (again this is dependent on how the partnership may be set-up).

It is these latter soft and tangible benefits which would also motivate publishers to not rely too heavily on their partners’ value. As a brand gathers momentum and adds to its proposition, the relationship with the partner changes. As is the way, friends with benefits can never really last forever, and so we pursue direct traffic and loyalty to our own, rather than our partners’ brand, no longer piggy-backing.

The objective at the end of all this is to cobble together an online community around the idea of learning for life, and to provide a resting place for the nomadic, lurking online retiree-generation under one umbrella. The forum and course ideas areas, where customers suggest where we ought to go next, encourage visitors to stick with us, come back to the site and series and look for those titles which follow on from their previous purchases. And so we start to engage in a different type of collaboration this time with the reader. As with most of what we have undertaken, finding older, active web users is the biggest hurdle, luckily we have a few friends who can point us in the right direction.

To paraphrase Rosamunde Pilcher, you don’t stop learning because you grow old, you grow old because you stop learning. It’s a sentiment that informs the Love to Learn series, a leisure learning series from Pearson aimed at the silver surfer, and everything we do in building the content and brand. The ‘silver surfer’ sector is the fastest growing online age-group and perhaps best described as the ageing, not elderly, part of the population.

From a digital or online perspective it’s an age-group which is much less explored, which may explain why we thought this would be a good idea in the first place, yet it’s a group with spending power and is the primary end-user/reader for any purchase they make (so why is the 55+ reader not more aggressively courted by publishers?).

The series is, in the way it looks, feels and is built, openly aimed at the empty-nester/baby-boomer. Starting with only a little knowledge of the social group, and still being a few years off pensionable, there’s really only one way to make sure we’re speaking to our market and that’s to involve them from the off. Being a web-only product allows Agile practices to be integrated much more easily into our development. We try, consult, go back to the drawing board, consult, etc, until eventually we have something we can really put to the test in the market. It’s an exciting and exacting development process that speaks to the ‘Ivory Towers’ criticism that some publishers remain susceptible to. Nothing puts the brakes on creative hubris quite as quickly as the user-testing session conversation that begins ‘I’m not sure I need all this faff around the edges at my age.’

The relinquishing of control to the reader in the development of a new title requires bravery from the author and from the publishing team, especially in putting out a product that isn’t yet finished to a demanding testing group; and not a little diplomacy from the user-testing team in identifying which gripes are with the content and which are with the journey to the testing session. But the benefits have already shown in the evolution of each title, adapting to readers with particular needs and habits which betray a mid-land between print and digital.

One of the great questions of this project is ‘where does the silver surfer actually live?’ It’s all very well trying to go and meet your customer where they live online; first of all you’ve got to have the right address. Yes they’re growing quickly on Facebook and Twitter, and use TripAdvisor and such as online communities, too, but that’s from a pretty low base, and habits don’t reflect those of younger groups. This online area where the silver surfer lives contains inconsistencies where usage is less regular and user error happens in even the most basic tasks, but demands of the technology and interactivity are high.

For extra difficulty points, the series is also direct to customer, and as a start-up we have to improvise our way to visibility, doubly difficult as anyone tackling online discoverability knows. D2C isn’t a familiar field for many in this sector, and so we are learning as we go here, too. Visibility through partnerships is key and will continue to be so as we partner up in-house and with blue chip institutions in the activities and subjects covered. That collaboration and networking joins up the publisher with the end-user in a more relevant area for our market.

We’re on a steep learning curve, and perhaps surprisingly there’s a limited amount of expertise that we can tap into, as we find agencies are still building their knowledge of the 55+ market, and aren’t much further ahead than we in publishing are, but hey, when did that ever stop publishers from trying before?

Recently listened in on a debate around the problem of monetising digital culture, it’s an issue which is going to present problems to publishing while the landscape sorts itself out.

In much the same way that the cost of a CD meant that they would be copied and shared to the benefit of listeners, but not labels or artists, readers are looking at ebooks and wondering why there’s a premium set closer to the physical product than, y’know, being free. Publishers are guarding their artists’ copyirght, and their own revenue streams, and that’s entirely reasonable, books don’t just materialise from the ether, a lot of hard work and no little skill goes into putting together a book – yep, even a crap one. Problem is, is once the ebook is out there, someone will get it, copy it and pass it around to their circle. It’s going to happen. No point fighting it.

In the meantime, any number of small presses, start-ups and self-publishers are selling titles for a price little more than that of a ham and cheese roll from an M6 service station. Again, it’s difficult to argue with the logic of the small presses, start-ups and self-publishers who are concerned with getting books out and read with as few barriers as possible. To get your own work, or that of your new-ish authors out there and picked up being reward enough. I’m all over this, great, absolutely democratises reader choice. Love. It.

Doesn’t help with the value of digital content though. By going fairly low on price, the argument of the freeloaders is strengthened; you’re not going to miss the 99p-£1.99 per unit are you, really? It’s not viable, so actually by pirating the book we’re doing you a favour by bringing the thing down quicker, rather than the slow deflation…
So, what to do? Set the price high, fiercely guard content and refuse to play ball with valuable public resources, like libraries because you’re just not convinced that reasonable safeguards for the content are there? It’s a path Penguin are following, and will have been decided on after some deliberation, but it feels as though it’s a bit cutting the nose off, and depriving libraries and their users can’t be a good thing, surely?

Why not go free? The whole lot. Honest. Alright, not entirely free, but ‘BBC’ free, ‘Sky’ free. A reader pays a subscription to your site and then gets access to everything.

Or levy it off the (really) big three? No, maybe that’s a bit far

Wow. In a pretty short space of time digital output of publishers – large, small and all points in between – has drawn a vertiginous arc which would indicate that, even for our more manic depressive colleagues, publishing might just end up being in decent shape after all.

The move from page to screen has had a few bumps and bruises, but there’s yet to be an apocalyptic rupture and, touch wood, if it hasn’t happened yet it probably won’t happen at all. Forays into the app market are pretty promising, delivering the multi-layered media experience which many feel – and I concur – will be needed to keep the modern reader engaged while encouraging innovation on the part of author and reader. Websites devoted to particular content seem to be delivering the goods, too – on the whole the world is a better place, right?

Well, there’s is one cloud in this deep azure sky, the role of and control ceded to digital creative agencies in the development of e-products. The expertise filling the current skills gaps in publishing is by and large impressive, and the real value of that external eye who knows the digital landscape, who can offer a perspective that might not have occurred to the publishing bods, who can perhaps bring the content ever-closer to the reader (I don’t care what the buzzword at Frankfurt is, ‘consumer’ is something you find in Tesco) is a great prize to claim when opening the doors to outside creatives.

And, let’s be straight here, buying in is a necessary step right now. The great pace of fundamental change in content delivery is, obviously, going to catch many publishers out; it would be nice to think that digital process skills across the board were keeping pace with the product, but unlikely. From my own perspective, checking out of an in-house print job was based purely on seeing the gaps in my skills and going ‘web’ to learn what I needed, an option not universally available. So ‘buying in’ skills is hardly a point of contention.

It must also be observed that having imported skills, capability and technical sensibilities any number of great interpretations of books have come about, giving content the multimedia immediacy required. This has answered the argument that broad scale importing of skills shouldn’t be done, that content design and structure is what publishers do, so why hand it over?, and shown the benefits of opening up.

New eyes and minds are always a plus and ought to be brought in. (Which is not the same as sending content out.)

So what’s the problem? For all the good work that has been done I do wonder if the balance is a bit out and that the keys have been handed over with insufficient returns. Is it fair to suggest that some publishers are short-changed by their digital partners? Maybe you feel it’s not, but it’s not inaccurate either. Conversations I’ve had with publishing, digital media and music people suggest that publishers aren’t always getting their value, and aren’t always in a position to push for it. And so having such a degree of control placed into their hands, digital agencies have become a gatekeeper, another layer, between author and reader. And who wants that?

Sitting in the meeting where an idea goes from new, different and exciting to polished if obvious because the contracted expert thought it would be ‘pretty difficult’ to create the imagined product is exasperating – and quite frankly disturbing, too. If content evolution is faltering because the bought skills don’t fancy the challenge, and that voice carries the most weight around the table, then there’s trouble ahead. I’d want to know why something can’t be done, and what can be done to make it possible. And I’d also want to hear proper reasons, rather than attempts to blind with science – which having spent 12 months or so intensively (usually in over my head) on e-content, I can now look back and recognise from a few projects past.

It may be a slightly delayed development, but it looks like a similarly sharp curve to product evolution, in-house digital skills and knowledge are building and so, hopefully, control over e-content will come back in a little bit. There needs to be a point at which digital agencies deliver better and surpass expectation as standard, not just churn out ‘stuff’ knowing that it will pass muster for the client unsure in the digital space. This will come as publishers learn what’s possible and what’s not. But in the meantime if the current habit for farming out is to remain, the new gatekeepers need to be watched and tested more than is currently the case.

Was in my local Waterstone’s yesterday, and maybe I was in a good mood but it just felt a bit better. Fewer ‘giveaways’, instead discounts – so therefore no ‘a book is free’ messages, more locally focused titles, more amenable staff than the last time I was in. Admittedly. there remains a number of behind-the-scenes issues to be resolved between the bookseller and publishers, and their smaller book selling counterparts too. It’s by no means perfect but the new Daunt Waterstone’s may well be picking up already.

Of all the changes being made the most interesting to me is the proposed e-reader, or the Wook* as it’s been short-handed to. Entering the e-reader market is a pretty tough task; taking on the behemoths of Amazon, Apple and Google, too. It’s not a challenge you could just ‘try your hand at’, and it’s an arena that any large-scale bookseller really needs to be competitive in if the tills are to keep ringing up and down the land. In part through their own previous strategies, Waterstone’s are fighting this fight more or less alone. How might they go about it? Pricing is an area where a national business, WeltBild’s €60 e-reader over in Germany, has looked to get ahead of their supra-national competitors, and could be one avenue for Waterstone’s. Perhaps a tie-in with a partner, like Orange, to give their device added utility? The most obvious answer would be to look at what Barnes & Noble are doing given the make up of the new Waterstone’s board, i.e. massive dedicated floor space just inside the door, in-store promotion teams, etc.

It still goes without saying, high street book selling is important to the health of the industry, and needs to be a central plank of the book trade. The stakes are pretty high, and the answers will be seen pretty shortly – it’s difficult to see how much longer the real breakthrough (by which I mean e-books having 25%+ of share) can be delayed, and anyone hoping for a piece needs to be in beforehand. Ultimately I think Waterstone’s are more or less betting the house on this working, they really can’t fail big in the digital market as they’re already in need of some detoxifying in the traditional book selling area. Yet I’m pretty optimistic about Waterstone’s Wook and the possibility that the mix of physical and digital might prove a sustainable model for book selling on the high street.

Barnes & Noble reported a 37% jump on sales in the first quarter following the release of the Nook, a return which you would think the new powers that be at Waterstone’s would be pretty delighted with. It would seem that people are therefore back in book stores in the States and you’d like to think that this would be a starting point for B&N to re-assert themselves in a pretty beleaguered market. Can Waterstone’s do the same? I don’t see why not, the physical space that Waterstone’s has on the high street means it has exposure, and I do think that by and large we are a tactile animal who like to go touch and see. If the product range is right, which is where you’d like to think Waterstone’s can sort of compete with Amazon and Apple, and the device is right then the luchtime or Saturday browser walking in may even give the bookshop a bit of a headstart on their e-commerce chums.

Of course the massive elephant not so much in the room as shoving everyone else out of the room is the Kindle and its various offspring. The Nook enjoyed a short period to take root and build a bit of a fanbase before the new Kindles started to stride the land, the Wook is unlikely to enjoy such a honeymoon period. It’s not yet known what the impact of the Kindles will have on the Nook (and despite the slump in B&N shares post-Fire launch it is worth noting that the Kindle has been around for some time, including the bedding-in period of the Nook), but it’s quite possible it will swat aside any competition but for their equally massive combatants. Part of this attack on the competition will of course be seeing the book on the shelf for £8 and going home to buy it off Amazon for £3.74, a natural decision, but one that Waterstone’s must try and reduce the impact of if the Wook is to prosper.

It’s a real fork in the road for high street book selling, if this works, then maybe, just maybe, this could be what reinvents Waterstone’s as a bookseller for the digital age. If it doesn’t it’s difficult to see where they go next. I’m an optimist though (stop laughing) I reckon it could be just what the doctor ordered.

*is the ‘Wook’ staying as a name? Is Russell Brand really setting the branding agenda these days? What? He is? Fair enough.

My twitter feed was recently drowned by news of ‘kindleweek‘. Yep, it’s a new one on me too. Anyway, I followed this discussion on the merits of the Kindle for a while. I’ll be honest with you, I remain as unconvinced by the product now as ever. Some of the more common pros include;

Portability or ‘With a Kindle I can take as many books with me as I like when I go on holiday.’
Unless you have a 10 a day habit, I don’t quite see how this is of use. I read a fair amount, I read fairly quickly, but if I’m going through more than a book a day I’m not reading I’m consuming. In the same way that I wouldn’t set an egg to boil as I enter the Tate and race all the way round to ensure I’m out by the time the yellow’s still a bit runny, I wouldn’t hurtle through books at Mach IV. Does being unable to choose from every book I own at any given point kill me? No, for me this is one straight from Marketing.

The killer for this curmudgeonliness, would of course be in education. Save the backs of a nation of schoolchildren by giving each one a Kindle and see that our digital native offspring have all they need at the touch of a button. Hasn’t happened yet, I guess the Chiropractor’s Lobby is more powerful than I thought.

Back-up or ‘It’s great that Amazon keeps a record of stuff and I can retrieve lost data.’
This is a facility I could easily end up using if the number of times if my care of phone numbers are anything to go by. ‘Ah, Mr Murphy, we speak again – reload is it?’ ‘Err, yeah if you don’t mind.’ Ace. Hang on a minute, if Amazon can retrieve lost data they can also recall your purchases, can’t they? In 2009 Amazon, with great comic timing, recalled 1984 without prior warning. They promised they’ll not repeat it, excuse me if I remain cynical of that. Imagine going home and finding your bookshelves emptied and replaced with a note ‘sorry, took your books, would tell you why but I don’t really want to’. Once you’ve got past ‘it’ll make moving house easier I suppose’ you’d be a bit miffed wouldn’t you?

Price or ‘Getting a book I want for a couple of quid is incredible’.
Incredible, indeed. You can get your book quickly and, quite often, cheaply, you’re in non-stop impulse buy mode. This one aspect is where I come in on Kindle, and fall in line – it’s presence in the market has clearly flattened the landscape for new entrants. Thing is Amazon seem hell-bent on driving down the prices of the book. The agency model isn’t perfect, but to actively advise against it makes you wonder. This relates to a previous ramble of mine, and indeed a ramble of a chap at Grauniad Towers too; what are you buying? If you’re just buying the words on the screen, fine, but what does that say for how we value literature. We cannot raise eyebrows at the Tesco bookshelves and at the same time run with the device of a retailer doing as much to reduce price expectations amongst readers. It’s not about making money, sustaining business models, or such – this is about ensuring content and reading are valued and not disposable.

Spot the difference
Pages, as the author intended, bound as requested, static*, standard format, whiz through it in sequence, that’s your book/Kindle. I own a watch, a camera, a phone, an iPod, a computer and a Kindle to the amusement of my very smart little brother (that’s alright, he’s ugly). All these single use devices, delivering quality performance in their particular function, incapable of performing others. The Kindle doesn’t seem to move on very far from books** and is even an anachronism. The app is caught in a territorial pissing, but this is where it needs to live. Otherwise we’re all going to need bigger bags for all our gear.

*making text bigger or smaller doesn’t count, it’s not 1973.
**making text searchable? See *

I’ll stop there. I’m not anti-ebook at all. A screen reader needs to replicate what’s good about the experience and turn the current pluses into nice addeds, rather than key advantages. It’s not a million miles off, perhaps the Kindle required more development to fulfil this. But we shouldn’t be pouring words into a screen simply because we know how. Whilst we’re in the middle of (or coming out of if you’re a Schnittman-ite) the great leap forward, I hope that the Kindle, and its iterations in the months and years ahead, isn’t the answer. If it is we’re asking the wrong question.

On holiday recently I was sat with my iPad flicking about and generally e-mooching when a friend said to me
‘How come ebooks are so expensive?’
Aye, aye, here we go, I thought, can’t even get a minute when I’m working on my tan (aka third degree burns on pallid celtic skin). To be fair to said friend, he’s a guy who works indirectly in music and so I could see that his question came from a slightly more aware standpoint than might have been expected, but still one that really didn’t see how the sums worked.

So off I trotted, regaling my companions with tales of how producing content hasn’t got enormously cheaper overall, even if the details might have changed; of how publishers aren’t all making gazillions despite the popularity of reading; implications of the new VAT rules now that trees aren’t being pulped in the same numbers; how bookselling hasn’t always helped sustain the creation of its products; and how publishers were keen not to repeat the mistakes of the music industry despite all of this and really did want to deal equitably and offer affordable quality to keep readers coming back… and obviously how, y’know, mortgages and rent have got to be paid as well. It was a real riot I tell ya, had the whole poolside eating out of my hand.

He wasn’t buying it. Not a bit of it. And in many ways I agreed with him, why create a barrier to content if you truly believe in the value of the written word?

This particular question causes me more headaches than spending hours poring over manuscripts in bad light. There’s a large part of me which says ‘YES! open it all up, take down walls and barriers, economic and social, let people read and don’t dare try and constrict the imagination of the author and the reader’. After all, wars have been fought over the right to access knowledge, the right to access literature, the right to enrich and better oneself through learning – and thus through reading. Those wars were won, thank god, for us descendents of the proles.

And then there’s the flipside. Does the price on a book, in whatever format, reflect something more than the cost of production? We don’t live in a society which puts such intrinsic value on reading – even in the UK where we do value the arts, to varying degrees – and so quite often value is identified through cost. Make something free and nobody really wants it is how it goes. Give something a value and immediately people will look differently, offer at least a fleeting moment of reverence even if they then set about deconstructing how much value you get for your money… and at many hours of pleasure or learning who is to say a book doesn’t offer value?

Forget about value for money; surely the price of a book and of what literature and literacy represent, should make us immune from distrusting minds looking to squeeze every last penny from their purse? If we cheapen books do we run the risk of downgrading the importance of literature (for my money, this is the most poisonous of all the legacies of the 1997-present price wars); how important can a book be when I can get ten of them for the same price as the latest shoot-em-up..? The industry will eventually find the right pricing level for its products, the customer will dictate, the quality of the content will dictate, the narrowing of general sales channels will dictate, but it would be tragic if it was just a case of ‘production cost = price’ and a demise in the value of literature to our society ensued.

Of course this may be an entirely redactive view, not taking into account the way the internet has put more stock in quality of content over price… hope for my (admittedly very well-hidden) inner communard after all!

I remember it very clearly, not sure how as it came at around 3am during that timeless period between Christmas and New Year and my Dad, my brothers and I sat around for the annual ‘whisky school’ whereby my father would run his sons through a selection of his single malts. My brothers had got up for a short break/respite and my Dad turned to me and said ‘the thing is Mike, you’re actually really special to me, you’re choosing to do what I had always wanted to do.’ I assumed he wasn’t talking about going out with a girl from Edinburgh – which would have been quite the revelation with my scouse Mum asleep upstairs – and I could only hope he wasn’t referring to my enjoying of everything the late 90s/early 00s clubbing scene had to offer… (although it should be said that with some of the stories I’d heard from his contemporaries he’d not been shy himself) so I asked him what he meant.

‘You’ve chosen to tell stories, to make sure people love reading. If I could do it all again, that’s what I’d do.’

Huh. Gobsmacked. My Dad taught in a pretty tough school in a LIverpool overflow town, teaching English and Drama – some might say doing the work of making sure people love reading in a far more vital role than any editor or developer does – and so to get this affirmation was quite somethng.

My old man and I had never realy got on until after I left home to go to uni, familiar tale: stags knocking their heads together into exhaustion. But since that point we got on far better, as equals, as people who could trust each others opinions, and most of what glued us together was books – and Everton, but that was never likely to bring either of us much joy. And so I sat pretty stunned as my brothers returned for the last run of the single malts, assuming my silence was more to do with my tongue being numbed by a hail of whiskies.

In the last couple of years things got pretty ropey after my mother lost her fight with cancer, the stag complex came to dominate our relationship again and indeed all out war has simmered for a little while. And then just this last week or so the weapons have been laid down, a standoff has been broken, and it was books that have opened the door. Let the Great World Spin has been sat on my bookcase for ages, read and re-read and earmarked as the type of book my Dad would love, forgotten about amidst a welter or spats. But the reappearance of the book in the headlines recently made me take it down, stick it an envelope and send it to my Dad. ‘Read this, it’s brilliant’ I noted in it, and it turned out he did and did. Got a call on Friday from my Dad thanking me for the book and telling me to keep working to make sure people will always love reading.

Cheers Dad, will do.