Book People: Pop the Bubble and Get Back to Work
Whoa! What a hair-trigger temperament we have. The Amazon/Walmart price war shows how scared the book industry is these days. It is laughable that the discounting of a few books at a few online stores prompted so much hand wringing. Really. Calm down people.
Forget the e-reader media frenzy. Stop wigging out about file sharing, particularly amongst book clubs. And stop being so paranoid about release windows and pricing strategies.
And no your book doesn’t need new features to remain relevant.
Instead focus on problems you can actually solve, for issues and customers you actually have. Be open minded, but stay practical for goodness sakes.
Take Shortcovers for example. This week they announced they were adding international pricing to their site. Since their launch they have had a ton of international interest. They even flaunted this fact before uneasy rights holders at the BookNet Tech Forum last year. So it only makes sense that they adopt a merchandising strategy and a country-specific purchase path for these customers. It is so logical in fact that it barely warrants mentioning. That is until you consider what Shortcovers is not doing. They aren’t handcuffing international sales the way Amazon is doing. They aren’t distracted by ereader-as-shiny-object. They have completely dropped their titular chunking gimic. They are on more device platforms than anyone else, and they are now targeting more countries than anyone else. That says to me they have a simple strategy — customer acquisition — and they are willing to take the long view on profitability. That is boring but it is very very smart.
Same goes for O’Reilly. Saying they are savvy in this space is a cliche but are you paying attention to what they have been doing? They quietly but aggressively have been pushing into the mobile phone space. They are in the app store because that is where the people are. They have been experimenting with price, because the investment to do so is cheap and the resulting knowledge is valuable. And they are expanding their title/format availability while keeping things in control. Again, none of this is amazing cutting-edge stuff. It ignores the ereader bubble. It is boring. It is methodical. It is gimic-free. And it points back to yet another simple strategy — selling lots of books to lots of people.
Pop the balloon. Come back to earth. Identfy some goals. Plan initatives to get from here to there. And start collecting small victories.
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