The latest ReaderBound news and updates on online book marketing

In 2007, Chip Heath and Dan Heath released a hugely successful business book: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Other Die. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 24 months, went on to be translated into 29 languages, and keeps on selling. The audience for it, as identified by the Heath brothers? Pretty much anyone.

Today we’re in conversation with Norman Nehmetallah, who works at red-hot Canadian indie press Coach House Books. Norman’s responsibilities – among many others – include running Coach House’s website, which as of last fall is powered by ReaderBound.

In a recent post on TheBookseller.com, Roger Warner discusses an interesting twist that seems to be occurring in the evolution of reading: readers aren’t clamouring for ever-more digital experiences of reading despite a growing range of formats and devices. If anything, they are rediscovering their love of familiar formats. 

Have you ever loaded data into a publisher website by hand? Did you have the best time?

That was a rhetorical question, of course, but it points to an underlying time and resource issue many publishers face: loading data by hand into a new site can take weeks. After that, it takes a surprising amount of ongoing work to keep it up to date.

Half of Canadians discover the books they go on to read online, and more than a third of them now buy their books online as well, according to BookNet Canada’s recent research report, How Canadians Buy Books 2015, as well as combined BookNet Canada/Nielsen data also published in 2015.

“Book gifting is a major, major revenue driver in publishing …. And not every title makes a great gift …. This is an area we are actively researching. Can we distil the central factors that may make one title a better gift than another?”

—Digital Book World

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about how book metadata – the information that describes a book, from the title to the author photo to the fact that it won a literary award – is the foundation of book marketing because consumers are more likely than ever to discover books online and because booksellers increasingly rely on web-based ordering and sales tracking tools.

A MarketForce research study profiled in Forbes magazine asked consumers about how they engage with brands from various industries, including retail and entertainment, and the findings can reasonably be applied to how readers come to buy the books they do.

How do readers find books today? In many respects, in the same ways we always have: word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, suggestions from trusted sources such as booksellers or media reviews, and impulse buys based on visceral reactions to dust jackets or cover blurbs.

Everybody who works on ReaderBound has been in and around publishing for a long time. We’ve worked in publishing houses and also consulted with publishers, funding agencies, and industry associations.

In developing a website platform for book publishers, we wanted to provide fully featured page layouts that publishers can customize. We’ve built many custom publisher websites, but with ReaderBound it is important to offer ready-to-use widgets as building blocks for editors to organize into their own layouts. By achieving this balance, ReaderBound is a flexible but powerful platform.