Xandra Gregory

Epublishing’s terrain favors the light and the quick.  Large, lumbering organizations that are unable to turn on a dime or pinpoint a trending subject will be lagging.  Not that there aren’t advantages about playing it safe, but if the music industry has shown us anything, it’s that consumable entertainment–music, games, web shows, media including stories–needs to be relevant to the moment, and available at the moment.  And let’s make no mistake–most book purchases are impulse buys.  That’s why store placement at brick and mortar bookstores isn’t just the sales folk putting related books on a table in front of the register–every one of those spots is real estate, for sale or lease, by publishers who are willing to pay top dollar to be seen.

But especially in the online world, books have more competition.  Or I should say different competition.  At home, one can pick up a book and begin reading, or bypass the book and pick up a game controller, or turn on the TV or PC or stereo, pop in a DVD, change the channel, or decide to take a walk or bake a pie.  Online, it is much easier to click on an excerpt and get sucked into a good story…but it is just as easy to flick the mouse over another tab and click away…to a music site, YouTube, or heaven-help-us-all, popcap or facebook (and that’s only the SFW-rated stuff–nevermind what you can do without the fear of the boss looking over your shoulder!).

An epublisher that wishes to navigate the online terrain nimbly enough to keep from falling flat on its face will need to take much in stride, and to be able to make it look easy.  What does that mean, exactly?  It means that, in short, you must make your product easy to find, fairly-priced, and instantaneous to buy.  As an author, I try to do that as much as I’m able.  I might miss the mark, I dunno.  I hope that plenty of excerpts and easy to find buy links will do what they are designed to do and entice the reader into clicking “Add to Cart.”  But as I’m not my own vendor, I can only go that far.  An epublisher–which acts as vendor of digitally-published books–needs to make the buying process an easy, instant, and secure experience.  As a reader, I don’t want to have to click through many pages, or my interest fades.

As a reader, I have certain categories of story that interest me–I actually do pay attention to those “if you like X, try Y” suggestions some places have on their product pages.  And in spite of my deep and intense loathing (brought about by frustration) of iTunes (which I no longer use, but did for as long as my gift card had money on it), the iTunes algorithm did a very good job of finding songs similar to the ones I liked–and a lot better of a job remembering/discovering the (sometimes-obscure) names of the bands and songs that I couldn’t be arsed to look up.  As a result, I bought music I’d normally just sing along to on the radio.

My point is–ebooks are a consumable entertainment.  Make it so they can be devoured easily, in bite-sized guilt-free pieces, and at impulse prices.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Publishing, Xandra. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.