In This Space

I suspect I’m the last person to post a DBW wrap up seeing as how it wrapped up just over 3 weeks ago.

The workshop day was a great addition to this year’s schedule. Once I was done blinding the presenters with my flash I settled into (@DanBlank) Dan Blank’s Content Strategy for the first session and Email Marketing for the second session. I was thrilled to see both workshops focused on data. The fundamental rules for email marketing can be extrapolated into a great theme for this conference: know your audience, have their permission to approach them, test your strategies, analyze the results and then proceed with the next steps. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The evenings entertainment included cocktails, a fabulous 7x20x21, the Innovation Awards and (@R_Nash) Richard Nash in an orange leisure suit hosting “Name That Audio Book.”

Conference Day One started off with both funky sunglasses (no, not these, these) and a fabulous left hook about libraries thrown at Brian Napack (Macmillian) by (@SmartBitches) Sarah Wendel, “why aren’t your eBooks available in libraries?” I retweeted @Stacy_Boyd’s sentiment, “I’ve always seen libraries as the gateway drug to book buying” because I couldn’t agree more. Unless you can show me data proving otherwise I don’t think having eBooks available for lending will be tantamount to cannibalizing your sales.

I’m not a developer but I really enjoyed (@Liza) Liza Daly’s smart talk on cost effective development of enhanced content. I was disappointed but not surprised by how the Google presentation was a live action commercial. Then (@sarahw) Sarah Weinman moderated what an interesting discussion with financial analysts on the future of brick and mortar bookstores.

I edited the morning’s batch of photos while sitting in The Sales Department in Transition and found it somewhat depressing that the fundamental conversation about the printed catalog hasn’t really changed much since I sat in corporate meetings about it 2 years ago. Having said that, I liked hearing Jaci Updike talk about how sales and marketing are even more closely aligned in the digital realm with field sales reps marketing books at the local level. And how reps who have a social media presence are good for the bottom line. An example raised was the fabulous Books on the Nightstand which is run by @AnnKingman and (@MKindness) Michael Kindness, both Random House reps.

@DonLinn moderated a panel on New Revenue Streams -I made it inside just in time to hear (@manaples) Mary Ann Naples talk about the Open Sky Platform, which in a nutshell gives an author a virtual storefront in which they can sell books and the verticals related to their expertise creating a vibrant space for themselves.

Day two was all about data. And I mean Data with a capital D, turned up to 11.

It started with the Executive Study, then the DBW/VERSO Book Buying Behavior study and finally the BISG/Bowker Consumer Attitudes focusing on the eBook behavior of Multi Function Device users. Here’s what i took away:

I caught some of the Consumer Sales Data session and I was especially fascinated by Kobo’s (@mtamblyn) Michael Tamblyn’s “ghetto business intelligence” presentation.

Not only is Kobo paying attention to the stats to see what marketing is working in real time (all the time) but they have released a personal dashboard to show you what/where/when/how you’re reading. The amount of data being collected by the eRetailers is staggering and ranges from how many books a consumer is actively reading simultaneously, the time of purchases, what readers abandon (including precisely where in the book they did so) and segmentation by platform device.

I sat in on the Enhanced Metadata session. In a nutshell, metadata is the data required in a B-to-B relationship. Enhanced Metadata is consumer facing. And importantly, it can be consumer generated. Enhanced metadata is incredibly valuable to marketing. The more enhanced metadata you have the greater the positive impact on your SEO. Here’s what you need to think about: extended author bios, author influences, videos, reviews both formal and user generated.

Tags. Allow readers/fans to tag, it is likely they think differently than you do and will make searching easier for like minded fans. There was also a robust discussion about Bisac Regional codes and how you can use them to work for you in search/social marketing.

So the takeaway is that enhanced metadata will greatly enhance the discoverabiility of your titles in both search and social.

In the Publisher Developing Verticals panel the mantra was “give them something before you sell them something” and the ideas talked about were making money around the content but necessarily on the content.

Russ Grandinetti from Amazon gave a surprisingly data filled presentation. My biggest takeaway was “the amount of time between ending a frontlist book and buying a backlist book by the same author has never been shorter.”

The final session, @MikeShatzin’s Where Are We Now and Where Will We Be in 12 months, left me thinking that Madeline McIntosh provided the perfect ending to my data filled day, my tweets on what she said were as follows:

As always, catching up with my industry colleagues was immeasurably valuable. And meeting/seeing twitter friends in real life is fantastic.

If you’re interested in seeing my pictures from Digital Book World you can find the original set on Flickr. and a somewhat better edited set here.