Quid Pro Quo and the online experience

Michael Jensen | 04/06/2009 | Digitization

“Why should I link to you?”

It’s one of the questions I ask my “Electronic Publishing: Theory & Practice” graduate students, at George Washington University. In this course, each student develops what I term a “deep niche” site—some sub-sub-specialty site that interests them—promotes it in a variety of venues and through a variety of methods, and attends closely to traffic and user patterns, as they make changes over eight weeks.

A few of the take-aways my students get from this half-semester course: a) it’s hard to get traffic; b) it’s hard to keep a site fresh; c) it’s hard to promote, even via Google Adwords; d) it’s really hard to get people to come *back* to your site; e) it’s *especially* hard to get people to *link* to your site.

The last two items are what this post is about. At the heart of user loyalty is the quid pro quo.

A user/customer must get something, to keep coming back. That something can be intellectual stimulation, novelty, humor, insight, wisdom, or a fun-fact-to-know-‘n’-tell. It can be a style that appeals, or a surprise that keeps on giving. It can be a document to be read later, or a great bargain. It can be a fashion tip, or a koan.

For publishers like us, it requires more than a dry description of a book, or a pretty picture of the cover. If we expect a user to be more than a one-time visitor—to be a deep reader.

As I wrote in the earlier “Real Readers Reading,” we want to attract the kind of reader who will be engaged in our kind of content, want to buy the highest quality version, and come back to buy again. These readers can (and should) be anywhere: Edmonton and Winnepeg, Amsterdam and London, Lagos and Pretoria. What distinguishes them is their appreciation of the long form work, and their interest in ideas. And, of course, their facility with English and French.

These are readers who will be unimpressed with promotional copy: they want to browse the book to see if they care about it. They will have no interest in bothering their friends with a Twitter tweet saying “come look at this advertisement.” But they may link to a sample passage and tweet “just bought this book because of this prose.” They are very considerate consumers.

To attract repeat visitors, you have to *keep on quid pro-ing that quo.* Meaning, you have to provide them with continuing value. They want to know that you publish other stuff they might care about (as a *reader*). But if you’re only self-promoting (“you can buy this other stuff”), you may not get them to return. Instead, “Sample these other books” is likely to be the appropriate message for the “deep reader.”

To do a little math: if you’re a publisher site able to attract 5,000 visitors a day, you’re doing pretty well. The Web’s growth has been attenuating and diluting the pool. (Note: Many sites I know have been seeing decreasing raw visitors, and increasing proportions of “conversions” of visitor-to-purchaser. That indicates that the right people are finding these sites increasingly effectively.) With 5000 visitors a day, a reasonable goal might be to get 10% to come back, 1% to give you their email address, and 0.3% to purchase: that would be 500 to return, 50 to give you their email address, and 15 to purchase.

This doesn’t seem like a lot, but these are *deep readers,* exactly the audience every publisher wants. They’re the most likely group to buy more of your stuff. How do we get and keep them?

By providing them with that quid pro quo I’ve been talking about: content, value, humor, quips, quotes, reviews, more content. Something they can sink their teeth into. Something they can *read.*

They’re *readers* after all. Give them what they want, and they might come back. Who knows, they might even buy something.

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Retaining Relevance as a Publisher

Michael Jensen | 04/02/2009 | Digitization

Let’s presume that writers want three things:

a) to be read,
b) to be respected, and
c) to at least enhance their income, by writing.

If that’s the case, then the equation of old—that a), b), and c) required a publisher—is no longer the case.

This has, I’m sorry to say, profound consequences for publishers. For the next two years, it may not matter dramatically. But two to five years out, it will matter significantly.

I’m worried about the value-adding intermediaries (aka publishers). Consequently I’m worried about *dis*intermediators. These are the web-based, print-on-demand, metadata-providing, ISBN-providing, insert-into-Amazon-servicing, epub-on-demand-selling, publisher-free and development-free publishers. 

Today, it’s easy to dismiss the options authors have—Lulu.com, or Wowio.com, or even Amazon and Lightningsource—as also-rans, or as niche, nearly-vanity publishing.

But that’s not unlike the newspaper industry thinking of Craigslist as “a classified ad web site,” or Yahoo thinking of Google as “just a search engine.”

In part because of Craiglist and Google, newspapers are failing, even closing. Because revenue has declined, investigative journalism is threatened.

It didn’t take a big loss of newspapers’ income stream to endanger their existence. Were publishers—a thin-margin enterprise—to lose 20-30% of their income, they’d lose a great deal of their financial resilience.

I think of it as a big-player problem, or as (yet another variant of) the 80/20 Pareto Principle (the long tail). 80% of income tends to come from 20% of our books. We wear 20% of our clothes 80% of the time.

This is just generally true in publishing—and if your publishing outfit has a different ratio, I’d like to hear it.

Given this general trend, it’s a signal weakness: the top 20% of authors, the top 20% of our publications, top 20% of our quality, is exactly what could most easily do without us.

The products could, even 80% (even 20%) of the time, sell themselves *enough*—reach enough of an audience, sell enough directly (without a majority of the income going to the publisher), and make enough of an “authority splash” in terms of publicity and blog noise, to make the publisher (perhaps 80% of the time) unnecessary.

This leaves us only with the 80% of the published content that produces 20% of the revenue.

Our challenge as publishers is to find ways to add substantive value: better promotion, better metadata, better Web presence, better integration into aggregators, better quality reading experience, better composition, better indexing, better blurbing, better print distribution, better insertion into aggregations, better long-tail promotion, better authority, better library adoption, better classroom adoption…. the list goes on, of course.

But the key point here is that if we are not attentive to the things we do best—and attentive to the new things we *could* do— we will not distinguish ourselves from the “raw intermediators” who could easily skim the cream from the top.

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Real Readers Reading

Michael Jensen | 04/01/2009 | Digitization

There is no exact definition of a “real reader,” but let’s imagine one, of indefinite gender. Se is finished with school, but is still involved in the world of ideas. Se is interested in the topics you publish in, and wants to understand it, not just know about it. Se wants a book on the topic, not just a review, or a distillation, or an article.

Se can be anywhere—which is really at the heart of this post. In fact, it’s likely se is *not* in Canada.

In a world of 1 billion Web-enabled people, Canada represents only 28 million of them—the highest penetration per capita of any top market, but still only 1.9% of total world users (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm).

Cory Doctorow, the Canadian writer and freedom advocate, has used a great analogy. He knows that his work won’t appeal to everyone. But he makes his entire ouvre free and completely open and reusable (even translatable) because he understands that.

His analogy was of a tremendously thin, worldwide layer of paint, tenuously connected, with three molecules in Yellow Knife, a lot of molecules in Ottowa, a few molecules in Zanzibar, a few molecules in the Internet-connected aircraft carrier in the North Sea, a few molecules in Toledo….

This layer of paint was his readership, and correspondingly, his market. For him, openness is a means of finding his market.

He knows that people who read one or two things of his, and *really like it*, are his market. They are his “real readers,” not unlike Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php), a seminal essay on niche audiences in the Web-abundance world, Doctorow is trying to find his audience by taking advantage of the possibilities of communities, cohorts, Vonnegut’s “karasses,” and other descriptors of collections of like-minded individuals.

“Real readers” in general are a small percentage of readers; “real readers” of your particular kind of publication are a smaller percentage of that share. Our challenge is to find the real readers and attract them.

I almost wrote “and monetize them,” but I think that’s shortsighted, not to mention jargonish. Doctorow hopes that free readers end up, at some point, purchasing something from him: his time talking at a conference; his time writing a commissioned piece; his time serving on a board; his time consulting on a project; or his product, a book he’s published; his product, a website he’s producing…. he’s looking at the next decade and beyond, rather than trying to maximize a specific publication’s profitability.

For his publisher, this means that they are the intermediary of a print product almost exclusively (apart from aggregators like GBS, Amazon, and others); it’s in their interest to keep him in their fold, because of his strategy.

This “real reader” (the author of this post), will buy any fiction Doctorow publishes in print—because I want to own it in that format. I’m willing to pay the premium for the work in my format of choice, for his kind of fiction. For other people, the ascii-printed or digital version is sufficient (especially if you’re on an aircraft carrier for months at a time).

But many a Navy private will end up buying something else Doctorow has written, in print, next time se has shore leave.

That’s that thin coat of paint he talks about—building an audience. For a publication, or for an author; for a book, or for a press.

We need to be thinking of the 98.1% of the Web audience that is *not* Canadian—perhaps 432 million of whom are English speakers, 63 million French speakers—and how to reach the thin coat of paint that cares about our kinds of publications: our “real readers.”

For any single publication, Doctorow’s open approach is daunting, and full of fear of sales cannibalism, and lost individual sales. But as an overall longterm strategy (for an author, and for a publisher who keeps the author), it’s very smart.

Authors want to be read. Readers want to read. Our job (if we’re not to be a barrier, a topic of a later post) is to find a sustainable strategy that facilitates that relationship.

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