somersault

A report in the The Bookseller (@thebookseller) says “the crucial role of physical bookshops to a healthy publishing industry” is evident “by findings from both Bowker Market Research UK (@Bowker) and research company Enders Analysis.”

“We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop,” says Enders analyst Douglas McCabe. This means as much as two-thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online, but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.”

Both McCabe and BMR director Jo Henry agree on the crucial role of bookshop browsing. Discovery still does not work online, McCabe asserted. “Consumers do not browse the Internet as is often suggested,” he said. Enders Analysis estimates that serendipity and discovery generate as much as two-thirds of UK general book sales, much of this down to bookshops. “There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant,” McCabe said. “Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level.”

Read this in full.

The UK bookstore chain Waterstones (@Waterstones) is now “stocking special limited edition books with exclusive extra material to try to give it the edge in the competitive book-selling market. The book retailer has signed contracts with publishers to sell unique versions of their books, only available in Waterstones stores” to lure buyers away from Amazon and other online outlets.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

For MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant), George Eberstadt (@georgeeberstadt), founder of social commerce company TurnTo (@TurnTo), writes that “Amazon now offers true social Q&A on most of their product pages.” This is one more step Amazon is taking to try to capture the one retail element online shopping misses: in-store conversational engagement with product experts.

They have built a powerful engine for ensuring that questions reliably get answered by past buyers....

The key to making social Q&A work for eCommerce is speed, and Amazon has done all the right things to make their model fast:

* The question appears immediately on the page when you submit. In the age of Facebook, this is what people expect from a social experience. Not a message that says “We’ll alert you if we decide to accept your question. It may take hours or days...”

* The question is immediately emailed to a large selection of people who actually bought the product.

* The answers get sent immediately back to the asker. That provides fast reminders about the purchase the shopper was considering – while the shopper is still in the buying moment – and a smooth path back to the product detail page complete it. And the answers appear immediately on the site for future shoppers to use and for the asker to view.

* Askers can easily submit follow-up questions, or even just send thanks, back to the answerers. That, too, is email enabled, so that it’s easy to have rapid, back-and-forth dialog about products that one knows about the other needs to learn about.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Anti-business sentiment, the evolving path to purchase, and broadening definitions of social media are among the main issues now facing marketers, according to the Toolkit 2013 trend report released by Warc (@WarcEditors) and Deloitte (@Deloitte).

The Toolkit 2013 report highlights 4 key priorities for brands:

1. Gain an increasingly in-depth understanding of changing consumer expectations, as hard-pressed shoppers take their anger out on major corporations in difficult times.

Companies must show they are making a positive difference by focusing on areas like values, ethics and authenticity, contributing to an easier life, or solving everyday problems.

2. Understand the impact of technology on the path to purchase, in particular the rise of "showrooming" (comparing products and prices while in stores on a mobile phone) and "multi-screening" (using digital devices while watching TV).

These trends suggest marketers should look at more closely aligning in-store messages with mobile, and by ensuring TV activity is joined up with social media, search, and e-commerce.

3. Be aware of new thinking on social media and social influence. The "social" channel is much wider than "social media" alone, particularly when it comes to the potential benefits of looking for influential advocates offline as well as online.

4. Marketers should carefully consider their options regarding "big data" to avoid running the risk of alienating consumers through poorly executed attempts at personalization.

Read this in full.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

BBC Radio 4’s business program The Bottom Line with Evan Davis (@EvanHD) recently (Feb. 9) focused on the sea changes occurring in the world of book publishing.

Like the music industry before it, the print book industry has been turned upside down up by the digital revolution. As sales of ebooks continue to grow, bookshop sales are down from a peak in 2007. So what does the future hold for the bricks-and-mortar bookstore? Will physical books become a thing of the past? And what role will traditional players like publishers, agents, and retailers play in this brave new world?

The program consists of Davis interviewing Jonny Geller, literary agent and joint CEO of Curtis Brown; Victoria Barnsley, CEO and publisher of HarperCollins UK and International; and Michael Tamblyn, Chief Content Officer at Toronto-based ebook retailer Kobo.

According to The Bookseller (@thebookseller), in the program, Barnsley says the idea of the bookshop as a book club, charging customers for “the privilege of browsing, is not that insane,” given the level of threat faced by the general bookshop. Certain shoeshops in the US are already charging customers to try on shoes, she noted.

Barnsley predicted that the level of digital ebook sales would “level off and end up being more like 50/50 [physical books and ebooks] for quite some time, if the physical bookshops survive.” But she said the survival of the physical bookshop was “the big question.” “Readers still do quite like physical books; the question is, will they be able to buy them, actually,” she told Davis.

Listen to this program in full.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Ann Patchett, award-winning author of such novels as Bel Canto and State of Wonder, is also the co-owner of Parnassus (@ParnassusBooks1), an independent bookstore in Nashville. In the above video from the Oprah Winfrey Network, Patchett says independent bookstores are vital for the health of local communities. She says a bookstore is “a community center.”

Also see our blogposts, “Why an Author has Started a Bookstore in Nashville,” “Baker Book House Celebrates Grand (Re)Opening,” and “Somersault Group Reports on Christian Retail Trends.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Book publishing veteran Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) says, “One of the most underappreciated realities of the book business is how hard it is for a retailer to manage an inventory of trade books.”

A bookstore’s inventory is its biggest investment. The performance of inventory — how many times it “turns” in a year and how successfully the store manages to buy what it needs without wasting investment (tying up cash) and incurring margin-destroying revenueless-costs (return freight, probably added to inbound freight, plus wasted labor shelving, removing, packing, and shipping) — is, by far, the single biggest determinant of whether a store succeeds commercially or fails.

As the shelf space for books being managed by retailers that accept the high cost of managing book inventory and commit to doing it effectively continues to decline, publishers need to understand that it will be really hard for non-book retailers to replace them.

Read this in full.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

HarperCollinsChristianPublishing, comprised of both Thomas Nelson, Inc. (@ThomasNelson) and Zondervan (@Zondervan), is now making its titles available through On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel.

Tom Knight, HarperCollinsChristianPublishing senior vice president of sales, says, “The Espresso Book Machine will significantly enhance a customer’s in-store experience by giving bricks-and-mortar retailers the ability to offer an almost endless supply of books.”

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and carry out the store immediately.

Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over 7 million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogs books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for ereaders.

Read this in full.

See the pdf news release.

See the pdf news release, “Penguin Titles Coming to an Espresso Book Machine Near You.”

Also see our blogposts tagged “Print on Demand” and “A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Members of Somersault were pleased to give the keynote presentation Jan. 9 at the CBA Next 2013 (@ICRShow) event held in cooperation with AmericasMart Atlanta (@AmericasMartATL) in the Atlanta gift mart.

We distributed our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now” and our Christian Bookstore Customer Satisfaction Survey. Both are available online.

We encouraged Christian retailers to brand themselves as more than sellers of product, but as experts in Christian publishing. And to declare their expertise by referring to their bookstore as a “Books Bistro” with “Publishing Einsteins,” so when a customer wants to learn about a Christian topic or write about one, the first expert advisor he or she should think of consulting is their store.

Christian Retailing (@ChristianRetail) covered our presentation:

Seventy percent of Christian store shoppers say they would buy an ebook at a Christian retail store, with many options now available to Christian market retailers, according to publishing strategy and services agency Somersault Group....

Creating an in-store experience that will draw traffic is critical. The panel urged Christian retailers to cultivate an atmosphere that promotes relaxation, provides real-time marketing and offers information openly that reassures customers in their purchase decisions. Stores were also encouraged to assign a staff member to event management and another to digital communication.

“Be the Christian hub of your community,” the panel told NEXT attendees. “Christian booksellers are no longer only in the bookselling business. You are in the community-building, personalized-service, outcome-based-solution-provider, experts-in-all-things-publishing-related and technology business with a spiritual emphasis.”

Read this in full.

Learn more about this retail report in the upcoming March issue of Christian Retailing.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

In the Los Angeles Times (@latimesbooks), Carolyn Kellogg (@paperhaus) reports that Circle City Books in Pittsboro, NC, “has just completed an eye-catching mural” of 48 huge, spine-out books along the outside of its store building.

See the list of titles and read this in full.

Also see The Bookshop Blog’s (@BookshopBlog), “Beautiful Mural at Circle City Books.”

And see the fun photo on our previous blogpost, “A Book Cover for an Eyesore.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

The online business journal Knowledge@Wharton (@knowledgwharton) scrutinizes the possible future of Barnes & Noble (@BNBuzz), which operates 689 bookstores in 50 states and 674 college bookstores.

The chain is caught between the need to bolster its in-store experience, and the drive to keep up in an ever-growing tablet market as readers increasingly turn away from printed books.

Barbara Kahn, director of the Jay H. Baker Retailing Center (@whartonretail) says Barnes & Noble's merchandising isn't giving consumers much of a reason to visit stores. "The best retailers are experiential," she says. "Online retailers can provide big assortments and better prices. If a retailer focuses on price and category, online [retailers] will always win. Barnes & Noble has to ... do what online can't do -- social interaction, physical presence, and experience."

...One of Barnes & Noble's core assets may be the people on its sales floor. "The more the retailer can provide service with a face on it and provide amenities, the better chance it has of surviving," says Wharton management professor Daniel Raff. "You can create a destination for merchandise and prices, but service and a response to your desires will get you ambiance.... If Barnes & Noble is just about buying books, customers can get that online. But what if it can also provide customers with insights from, and conversations with, people who understand the experience? Barnes & Noble has to figure out what makes it a good retailer and play to its strengths."

Read this in full.

In an interview in The Wall Street Journal ("B&N Aims To Whittle Its Stores For Years"), CEO Mitchell Klipper says that, while B&N still sees growth left in the physical book business, it plans to close about 1/3 of its stores over the next decade, bringing the total remaining shops to around 450 to 500. Klipper says less than 20 of B&N's total retail stores are money losers. Overall, the retail stores still make solid profits; enough to offset losses from the Nook business.

Be sure to download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we explain how 7 Cs – Casual, Current, Convenient, Communal, Collective, Convivial, Confident – can help retailers create an extreme in-store experience for customers.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp) our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.