The latest ReaderBound news and updates on online book marketing

Every sports fan and athlete knows that home field advantage is a real thing – a solid opportunity to win games whatever the odds, a chance to change the dynamics of competition. In the publishing world, home field advantage is a metaphor that works when we think of the ability publishers now have to sell books to readers from their own websites.

The average rate of shopping cart abandonment, based on dozens of research studies, is 70%. That’s just a fearsome statistic. To make it more concrete, imagine you’re making $10,000 in online sales each month. According to that average abandonment rate, your $10,000 represents only 30% of the potential sales you could have had. Reducing the number of abandoned carts – even by 10% or 20% – would result in a notable uptick in sales.

Designing a digital pre-order feature for books seems like it would be easy, but trust us, it’s not. It took us months to get the functionality right, and it was time well spent.

We think of innovation as the collection of tactics and practices that every business intending to thrive on the web needs to step up to. The compulsion is two-fold. By way of incentive, technology and technical capabilities continue to grow exponentially; making current work easier and enabling new opportunities. By way of compulsion, consumer's expectations are also changing exponentially; exposing various problems including a new, global, scale of competition and audiences unwilling to stoop to poor user experiences.

Imagine being invited to a party hosted by someone you thought was interesting, deciding to attend, and then not being greeted enthusiastically when you got there. You’d quickly conclude that the host didn’t care that you came, and you’d certainly think twice before going to the next event you were invited to.

I recently had an experience as a consumer that highlighted several practical challenges readers face when buying books directly from publishers. I was lying in bed surfing Twitter, and happened across the mention of a kid’s book that falls very much into the vein of books we read at home. It was Canadian and had won all kinds of awards, so I followed the link in the tweet.

ReaderBound is a powerful website platform that helps publishers easily showcase and sell their books online.

It combines sophisticated content management and e-commerce solutions, client support, website hosting, and maintenance into one convenient package.

We often explain the ReaderBound benefits in terms of what it enables you to do. However, one of its key benefits is what it takes off your plate: a number of site maintenance worries.

Earlier this year, we wrote about the implications of these two facts:

• More than four in 10 (42%) book recommendations received by readers are now transmitted by online channels.
• Close to half of book buyers’ book purchases are now made online.

And we noted the key role that solid metadata plays in the ability of booklovers to discover and buy books online.

With December upon us and consumers beginning to enter last-minute-shopping panic mode, it’s a perfect time to ramp up your holiday campaign. This requires smart copy and good design of course, but most of all, it means adopting the psychology of a person who is:

If you’re interested in building more community around your publishing program, encouraging more engagement with your authors and books, and driving sales, you need a solid email marketing strategy.

The annual Frankfurt Book Fair always provides a sense of top-level trends, challenges, and opportunities in the book publishing industry, and this year’s event in October was no exception. Kicking things off at the opening press conference was the assertion, by Penguin Random House CEO Markus Dohle, that right now, making books discoverable to readers is “one of the industry’s greatest challenges.” 

We were recently asked by major industry funders to elaborate on the business case for publishers to invest substantially in new business systems. The following is an adapted version of our response. Any points that you would add or argue? Please feel free to be in touch at hi@readerbound.com.