Firsty Commentary

Train to Gain

Selling direct to consumers has been one of the most significant shifts in publishers’ activities of the last few years. But are we all doing enough to understand those consumers and maximise our sales?

A show of hands at the IPG’s recent Digital and Marketing Quarterly event suggested that a third of all publishers are now selling direct, and many more will be thinking about doing so. This has been a massive cultural change for publishers who until recently had no retail experience, and we have been delighted to help some of them rise to the challenge.

The work isn’t done yet, though. Now publishers must turn themselves into true retail experts, able to maximise the return on the investments they have made. Anyone who goes to the trouble and expense of building an eCommerce website owes it to themselves and their customers to make the most of it.

Of course, it is not surprising that many publishers are still getting to grips with this job. Few came into publishing to be a bookseller—but D2C opens up superb new sales opportunities and is something that should be positively embraced.

The good news is that direct selling and marketing is not rocket science. With some thought and strategic planning everyone can do it well, and it all starts with good analytics. There has been a lot of talk about big data in publishing lately, and this can appear a daunting subject—but all it really means is generating simple but robust analysis of the numbers publishers already have at their fingertips.

Firsty News

There’s been an awful lot happening in the months we’ve been off air , and it’s a little difficult to know where to start.

Sites have launched, new projects started, and there’s been a healthy dose of R&D in amongst it all…

Profile sites go live!

But perhaps we should begin with the news that, back in July, we launched a trio of new direct-to-consumer, p+e eCommerce sites for Profile Books: one fully responsive, customer-facing web presence showcasing titles from their core list , as well as sites for the Serpent’s Tail and Profile Business imprints - all built on the same underlying Magento CMS infrastructure.

Shaw Books makes its mark

Moving even further back - into early summer - we witnessed the arrival of Shaw Books: an eBook-only site, aggregating titles across a growing range of grade A publishers, including Bloomsbury, Kogan Page, Pan Macmillan, and Taylor & Francis, amongst others. The Shaw Books team are expanding the publisher list - and consequently growing the breadth of available stock - and recent agreements with Vearsa and others should see this pick up fairly rapidly.

EUP partners with Firsty on new books website

We were delighted to further expand our academic press footprint with the August signing of a new eCommerce site for the Edinburgh University Press books catalogue - for launch in early 2016.

Edinburgh in August is always a joy, and we successfully managed to weave our way through street performer, flyer-distributor, and camera-happy tourist to the EUP offices just off the Royal Mile to kick off the project, whilst  general mayhem ensued outside.

New WordPress presence for Hammersmith Books

We also saw the summer release of a new customer-facing platform for Hammersmith Books: based on the popular WordPress platform with WooCommerce plugin - enabling them to sell their physical and digital products to customers around the world at the drop of a hat…

WordPress was a natural fit for Hammersmith, bolting a powerful eCommerce tool onto the renowned blogging platform, and providing the team with an extremely user-friendly backend admin area, where they can check sales, tweak pricing, run promotions, blog, and a lot more.

What others are saying...

We've all encountered badly made ebooks, but with only Amazon offering a reasonable return policy there wasn't much that we could do about it. But today that situation changed for readers in the UK.

The UK has enacted a new law which extends existing consumer protection laws to include digital content. The Consumer Rights Act guarantees that anyone who buys digital content such as DVDs, online films and games, music downloads, or  ebooks in the UK will have the opportunity to return the content and get a refund should it prove defective. Read more

Right to 30-day refund becomes law

New consumer protection measures - including longer refund rights - have come into force under the Consumer Rights Act.

For the first time anyone who buys faulty goods will be entitled to a full refund for up to 30 days after the purchase.

Previously consumers were only entitled to refunds for a "reasonable time".

There will also be new protection for people who buy digital content, such as ebooks or online films and music.

They will be entitled to a replacement, if the downloads do not work, but not a refund.

If a download also infects a computer with a virus, the provider could also be liable to pay compensation for getting the virus removed. Read more