The latest ReaderBound news and updates on online book marketing

A title page should do A LOT for your book – and lead visitors to other great parts of your site. It's got to be a fun, rich presentation with all sorts of wonderful things for readers to click on.

According to new research, online book buying is one way we’re keeping ourselves entertained as we endure the remaining months of COVID – and there’s great potential for this behaviour to stretch past the pandemic.

We’ve been chatting with a number of publishers over the past month, checking in on how they are doing in this crazy year. Of course, they’ve all struggled in some way or another due to varying levels of lost sales, heavy returns, uncertain demand, and disrupted order fulfilments. But we also heard fascinating stories about how publishers adapted their operations to make the best of a bad situation.

With mere weeks to go until Christmas, it’s time to pull out all the stops to get readers to visit your website and buy your books. A highly effective strategy is offering free or discounted shipping and using your homepage banner to blast that news. By doing so, you’ll get your site visitors primed for making purchases and much less likely to abandon their carts.

Digital Book World is one of those events you don't want to miss, and this year it was easier to attend than ever thanks to a COVID-friendly fully online format.

I was delighted to join the program again to share some of our experiences in working with publishers on their sites, and, in particular, some of their success stories around direct-to-consumer sales.

Part of the fun we have working on ReaderBound is celebrating the triumphs of the publishers we work with. And there have been so many of these of late. For example:

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.