Don't Get Trapped in the Amazon

DON’T GET TRAPPED
IN THE AMAZON!
champion the cause for a robust christian content marketplace

Friday, October 26, 2012

This is not an anti-Amazon tirade, rather it’s a call to ECPA publishers to embrace change and help to cultivate an expanding
digital Christian content landscape. One that most certainly includes Amazon, where the focus is on raising awareness and
facilitating discoverability of Christian titles. I have been awarded an honorary membership to the Rights community by Brian, so
please forgive me if this presentation skews towards more of a marketing bent. My intention is to highlight some strategies that
we at DCC have taken and to encourage us all to explore new opportunities to increase awareness of our category. In the digital
age, this is accomplished through licensing our content for multiple purposes. So, in that regard I will work to tee things up for
Craig Gipson, who will round out the second half of this session discussing the requisite legal hoops one must jump through to
be able to execute on these strategies.

A HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN BOOKSELLING

Future Christian The Parable Group 1999
1950 Booksellers Institute 1970 Age of chains, franchises &
marketing groups.

First CBA 14,000+
1967 The Living Bible 1986 Attendance at CBA International
Convention in Orlando, FL

DAVID C COOK DON’T GET TRAPPED... 10-23-2012

A quick history of the CBA channel...

50
years

and 3500 stores later...

A HISTORY OF EBOOKS

Google Books 2012 &
1995 2007 Year of the Tablet BEYOND
Project

Touch, Color,
Amazon.com 2004 Kindle 2011
Mobile & Fixed


A quick history of eBooks...

THE FUTURE OF MULTI-TOUCH


Communicating appropriate BISAC codes in your product metadata is essential to increase the chances your books will be
discovered. BISAC Listing available at: http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136-bisac-subject-headings-list-major-
subjects.php

17
years

In case you were wondering...

5
years

In fact, if we count the arrival of the Kindle as the beginning of the digital content commerce boom, then we are only at ﬁve years.
That’s 1/10th of the time it took to build the CBA channel and it has already reached more than $2B in sales (http://gigaom.com/
2011/12/02/e-book-market-forecast-to-hit-5-2b-as-the-book-industry-burns/) - nearly surpassing total sales of the
Christian book market (approx $2.3B according to ECPA)

5
Billion

Furthermore, Forrester Research is projecting total eBook sales greater than $5B by the year 2016. This is larger than the entire
CBA channel (all products) today.

60
percent

Additionally, Amazon today makes up approximately 60% of the eBook market share in the US, for some publishers in the ECPA
space this is as high as 90%+.


What’s happened? I’ll tell you, fewer and fewer people shop for books like this (browsing)...(only 1700 CBA stores left, 1/3 are
chains). Source http://cbaonline.org/nm/media.htm


Instead, browsing a bookstore is largely facilitated by categorization, it’s true, the single largest Christian bookstore on the web
today is a subcategory on Amazon.

BISAC’S ARE THE NEW BOOKSTORES
Text


Communicating appropriate BISAC codes in your product metadata is essential to increase the chances your books will be
discovered. BISAC Listing available at: http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136-bisac-subject-headings-list-major-
subjects.php


Christian Fiction


Multiple BISAC codes is a strategy that works, but primarily ﬁnds most of its success on Amazon, the truth is few other retailers
are giving this type of control to publishers, instead they are merchandising their digital storefronts much in the same way
physical stores do, 1 book = 1 category. This only serves to increase Amazon’s share of the market.


Christian Fiction
FIC042030
FIC043000
FIC019000
FIC014000
FIC027050
FIC044000




Christian Fiction
FIC042030
FIC043000
FIC019000
FIC014000
FIC027050
FIC044000
HIS036120


SOCIAL SHARING

g
g
g
g


Marketing is more outside of our control than ever, readers are telling others about our books all of the time, helping readers to
discover our titles (hopefully). However, there is not often a clear path to a purchase, leaving readers to ﬁnd the title on their own
(hopefully). After all, there is no longer a simple solution to “where can I ﬁnd that book and others like it?”

“One of the first rules I learned when I came into publishing decades
ago was “acquire rights broadly, license rights narrowly.” That is a
practice which was unambiguously the wisest commercial course until
our current developing age of digital delivery. Now agents (or
publishers) having licensed rights “narrowly” can cause books not to
be available to customers who would be happy to buy them when they
easily could be doing so.”
Mike Shatzkin, Idea Logical Company


So what is our should our ﬁrst move be? Get your content everywhere your readers are and use marketing, social media and
metadata to help them ﬁnd it. ) Quote - http://www.idealog.com/blog/three-words-of-wisdom-standards-rights-data/

So,where do we begin?


CREATE A DIGITAL CONTENT STRATEGY...


A great article from Publishing Perspectives titled “Why Publishers Need a Content Strategy Today” by Ingrid Goldstein of Oxford
University Press will provide you with a great starting point for how to create a digital content strategy. At Cook, we began this
process by creating a Digital Publishing Strategy...Source: http://publishingperspectives.com/2012/04/why-publishers-need-a-
content-strategy-today/

DCC’S DIGITAL PUBLISHING CONTINUUM


As you can see, we have built into our overall digital publishing strategy an intentional plan to constantly evaluate our content
(available rights and resulting digital opportunities) - reference author addendum - and then we continue to drive this strategy
across the various business processes, until we complete and then continue the process. This continuum provides the framework
from which we built a detailed 3-year publishing strategy, with detailed goals for each of these four product cycles.

SOME EXAMPLES...
1. Develop a digital products editorial & financial review
process.

2. Implement a digital products production schedule.

3. exploit international eBook distribution opportunities.


1) Think pub board but able to move quicker, be price ﬂexible and populated by digital natives (at least a couple of them:-)
2) Implement a production workﬂow and schedule to maximize digital content creation and process efficiencies.

GLOBAL CONTENT MARKETPLACE
GREAT BRITAIN
CANADA
EUROZONE

U.S.A.

CHINA

AUSTRALIA

BRAZIL
S.A. & KENYA
INDIA

DAVID C COOK DON’T GET TRAPPED... 12 - 12 - 2012

Global is no longer reserved for foreign language subrights. Begin to explore opportunities for English language digital
distribution in these areas. First priorities are obviously (and most easily reached) domestic, Canada, the UK, and Australia. The
next big opportunities lie in the BIC (Brazil, India and China), they’re coming and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to begin thinking about
translations instead of subrights for these areas. Finally, I put up some African countries, because I believe it’s only a matter of
time before there is a sustainable eBook market there.

86

# of countries where DCC digital titles have been distributed to date...

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOOK AND THE READER

29% 23%
42% 42%

PC Notebook Mobile Tablet


The upward trends in dedicated ereader adoption (41% of those who read eBooks) conﬁrm our need to focus on quality, efficient
eBook production and distribution. However, there are still considerable #‘s of folks reading on computers and multifunction
devices. It’s imperative therefore that we explore ways to exploit content in formats other than p-books and e-books. In fact,
some content simply doesn’t lend itself well to an eBook, but could be repurposed as an interactive or social web experience.
Source: http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/pew-internet-project-uncovers-ﬁrm-statistics-on-digital-reading/

DIGITAL CONTENT REVENUE DISTRIBUTION

LICENSED

ENHANCED CONTENT FOR
TABLETS/WEB

FLAT EBOOKS


Represents what I believe will be the distribution of Christian content formats over the next few years. This is in stark contrast to
an industry where digital content was nearly 100% licensed to 3rd party software vendors only a few years ago. Flat eBooks would
include full-length and portioned content, both reﬂowable and ﬁxed layout text, created for and distributed to readers via eBook
channels. Enhanced content for tablets/web would include interactive content (think children’s books and apps, content-centric/
monetized websites, iBooks author, panel-view interactivity) and licensed content would be 3rd party software providers.

The Segue

The digital world provides publishers an unprecedented opportunity to expose readers to your content without spending $1000’s
in marketing. Free is the new way to buy placement. Vendor speciﬁc promo’s, utilizing redemption codes, allow you to reach
speciﬁc niche’s of consumers without the need to support promo pricing across the board. Additionally, there are many startup
content storefronts on the web that have direct access to customers but do not promise an immediate revenue stream, use your
catalog to negotiate access to customers to help raise awareness of your titles and authors.

OWN YOUR TERMS...IF YOU CAN:-)


Moving toward the second half of this session, in which Craig will walk you through the agreements that are necessary in a digital
age. I cannot stress the importance of coming to the negotiating table with your own set of terms. A friend of mine once wisely
instructed me that the person who brings the pen ﬁrst often gets more of what they want and need out of negotiations. David C
Cook hired Flagler & Associates to create for us templates that serve that end where we are both the publisher AND the
distributor. More recently, we have also hired Flagler to create terms of use and a privacy policy for our e-commerce web
properties so that both DCC and our consumers interests are protected...

Finally...

It’s true that the current Christian content marketplace is no longer as homogenous as it once was. The old CBA formula no
longer works, this is the wild west. We all have a vested interest in working toward greater awareness of our authors and even
more importantly our category. We need to champion the cause, with Amazon for sure, but every other nook (pun intended) and
cranny where consumers can ﬁnd our content globally, at the end of the day we will all beneﬁt.

Don't Get Trapped in the Amazon

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