New Book Stats Describe the Flat Trade In New Ways--Including $838 Million in 2010 eBooks

After a couple years of no industry-wide statistics and many years before that of poor, illusory numbers, the publishing industry is back on the road to measuring itself with the new BookStats, prepared jointly by the AAP and BISG, released in highlight form to trade media on Tuesday.
All of the new numbers as you will read about them are modeled estimates rather than actual data--but they draw on data supplied by just under 2,000 publishers, and the methodology for extrapolating the estimates was far more careful and rational than the process used by the BISG alone for its annual Book Trends numbers, and has introduced fewer errors of gross exaggeration-by-multiplication. (More on this later....) Book Trends was abandoned after publishing data for 2008, and the BISG did not compile any statistics for 2009. The AAP has published annual estimates though they were considered less complete. So the new data effort covers 2010 but also compiles industry numbers for 2009 and 2008 using the same new method.
In the headline numbers, BookStats estimates trade publishers' 2010 sales at $12.59 billion. That's a slight decline from $12.71 billion in 2009, when sales were 7.4 percent higher than the year before, which registered $11.83 billion in 2008.
(Here's our first point of divergence with some other accounts: we calculate trade sales as adult fiction, adult nonfiction and juvenile sales. BookStats has put the "religion" breakout inside trade in their general press release. There is some overlap, but with $1.35 billion in wholesale sales, we're more comfortable leaving "religion" outside of the trade basket.
(Here's our second point of divergence: the official BookStats press release celebrates all of the increases in publishing, some of which can only be derived by looking at changes over a two-year period, instead of the traditional year-over-year view. And 2008 was when the economy plunged in the final quarter, so it may make for a skewed baseline, particularly on a two-year comparison. We are breaking out percentage changes on year-by-year comps, and our focus is on changes in the past year.)
*From Publisher's Lunch

It's All About the Social Network

 Nearly 80 publishing professionals tuned in to a BISG-sponsored webcast, “Marketing ‘Books’ in a Digital World,” on Wednesday. The hour-long discussion covered a range of tactics publishers are taking to get their books into readers’ hands, but the topic that loomed largest was social networking.

Rob Goodman, director of online marketing at Simon & Schuster, revealed a battery of impressive figures about how social networking influences consumer buying habits, among them: consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, 51% more likely to buy from a brand they fan on Facebook, and 79% more likely to recommend brands and products they follow on social media. The other speaker, Peter Milburn, digital products marketing manager at Wiley Global Finance, called Facebook (which has 500 million users), Twitter (125 million users), YouTube, and LinkedIn “the new retailers,” an idea moderator Jim Lichtenberg, president of the management consulting practice Lightspeed, confirmed when he noted, “You go to Facebook, hear about a book, then go to a retailer and buy it—so at that point the retailer’s just fulfilling your desire.”

 

Milburn advised publishers to “know your ecosystem. Learn to speak the language” that consumers are speaking. That might mean using UrbanDictionary.com to understand phrases and words like IMHO, hashtag, and API, or reading Mashable.com’s Twitter guide book, which explains basics, building a Twitter community, Twitter for business, and more. Being involved in consumers’ world also lets marketers see what people are saying about their books and brands online, Milburn said.

 

“It’s not enough to create a page on a social media site like Facebook,” Milburn said. He cited Peter Schiff, whose book, How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, Wiley published in May. Schiff created his own Web site and made sure that as people searched online for terms related to his book’s topic, they would land on his site. Milburn noted that it is important not to barrage consumers. “Don’t spray and pray. Listen, reply, and engage.”

 

Goodman also advised marketers to connectt with people online. “Things can go viral and feed out to millions of people in amazing ways,” he said, but first, “You must engage people to get them talking.”

 

Like many companies, S&S has increased its online advertising in the past three years with good results. Goodman said the company has had “great success” with Facebook engagement interactive ads, which, in an effort to tackle the grim click-through rates of traditional online ads, encourage people to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans.

 

*From an article in PW by  Lynn Andriani , Oct 29, 2010. To read more go to: It's All About the Social Network