[Resource of the Day] – Can Giving Away Ebooks Boost Sales of Print Books?

Today’s Article: Neil Gaiman: Giving Away Ebooks Sold My Print Books
By: Cory Doctorow
Source: BoingBoing

I saw this piece on BoingBoing, but go ahead and check out Neil Gaiman’s blog as well to read more about this story. Basically, Neil Gaiman’s publisher, Harper Collins, decided to give away free ebook editions of American Gods via software called “Browse Inside”. The result: sales of the novel surged in independent booksellers, and probably in big chain stores as well (though it was apparently difficult to deduce this since a product promotion was running at the same time). And as soon as the free ebook promotion ended, sales dropped.

So the publisher was giving away free ebooks, and customers were going out and buying the print edition. On the surface, that doesn’t make any sense at all. What the heck was going on?

Before I offer my own analysis, let’s look at some statistics from the article:

Response to our Browse Inside Online Reader was mixed – with 44% saying they enjoyed the experience at 56% saying they did not. The chief complaints were that you had to have an internet connection to read the book, you had to scroll to see the whole page and that the load time was sometimes slow. 69% of respondents said that they would like to be able to download. Some people complained that since they couldn’t bookmark where they left off, they got lost between reading sessions.

Back to the 44% who enjoyed the experience….9% of respondents said that they read through 100% of the book and 30% of respondents said that they would use this tool to read the whole book.

Elsewhere in the article, it says that 85,000 people attempted to read the book. The average time spent reading was 15 minutes, and the average number of pages was 46.

The promotion boosted sales not only of American Gods, but other Neil Gaiman books as well. A large number of the readers were familiar with Neil Gaiman, but had not read American Gods before.

That data helps us paint a clearer picture of what was actually going on:

1. Most readers weren’t especially interested in reading the book online. It’s more likely that they were interested in having an unrestricted preview of the book that could help them decide whether or not they should buy it.

2. Most readers were interested in reading the book because they were already familiar with Neil Gaiman. That is an important point to keep in mind. Readers would not have been nearly as interested in reading a free eBook by an unknown author.

3. Since so many readers were frustrated with the eBook experience, it’s possible that they simply gave in and purchased the book because it was such a hassle to read it online.

4. Since American Gods is such a long novel, it’s possible that fans who couldn’t bookmark their place in the book (another drawback of the software) decided to buy a copy so they could finish it more easily.

5. All in all, only 30% of the people from the sample (which we’ll assume is representative of the entire population) were willing to finish reading the book through the free eBook software.

As such, this is hardly a shining beacon that will point publishers towards releasing their titles in free eBook form as a promotional move. Harper Collins clearly generated more badwill than goodwill in the process, and the only reason the program worked out in their favor was because readers were more interested in reading this book (a terrific novel, by a great author) than they were in giving up on it.

But with that said, I don’t think the whole idea was a disaster. In fact, I think it offers some clues as to how publishers can use the power of the web to dramatically increase sales, even with unknown authors.

First of all, publishers need to stop being so stingy with their previews. I would suggest making 33-50% of each new novel available, for free, online, using simple, unrestricted software. For one thing, it doesn’t cost the publishers much to do this — once they have the software and the web infrastructure set up, all they’re paying for is bandwidth. And if they make these previews more readily available to customers, they’ll see higher sales as customers log on, start reading, get hooked, and head out to buy. In fact, publishers could even benefit from offering eBooks through this model since they could sell the customer the rest of the story, available immediately, for a fraction of the price of the printed book. That’s money that goes directly to the publishers’ pockets, and it won’t be diminished by returns, payment delays, or distribution percentages.

Second, publishers need to stop worrying about trying to keep smaller retailers in business. Don’t get me wrong — I’m very much in favor of retailers, because they perform an important function at the end of the distribution channel. But retailers love to complain that publishers are trying to undercut them when, really, it’s the retailers themselves that need to change. I’ve been in plenty of mom + pop bookstores that have terrible customer service, lacking selections, horrible atmosphere, and ridiculous prices. It is they, not the publishers, who should be responsible for their failures. Many of them refuse to adapt their stores to the 21st century, and insist instead on blaming everyone else in the distribution channel. Their focus is pointed in the wrong direction. Customers flock to places like B&N, Borders and Books-A-Million because they’re better places to shop, plain and simple. These big chains are also a lot less likely to whine about competition from publishers, since they know that they have mindshare when it comes to getting customers to buy books.

Third, publishers really need to try to understand the mindset of the modern consumer. Contrary to popular belief, book buyers don’t buy books just to read them; they buy because they want to have a sense of ownership. After all, books aren’t hard to read for free; they can be borrowed from friends or checked out from the library as easily as they can be purchased. My wife recently read the Stephanie Plum novels by Janet Evanovich by borrowing them from the library, and decided that she needed to go out and get the entire series. (Sorry, Janet, but I made her buy them secondhand, because we’re broke.) I pointed out to her that she could always check them out again if she wanted them, but she insisted that she needed to have them — in her mind, she wanted to be able to say that they were a part of her personal library, which in turn makes them a part of her lifestyle.

If Harper Collins thinks that people are buying American Gods because it’s a good book, they’re only half right. People are buying American Gods because it’s written by Neil Gaiman, whose work they know through comics, novels and film, and owning his books reflects well on them in their minds. I’ve actually known quite a few people who have purchased American Gods and never finished it because they thought it was too long and too slow. It’s that sense of ownership that made them buy it, and getting them interested through a preview only increased their chances of wanting to have it.

So, what I’d ask would-be publishers to take away from this is not the idea that free eBooks will increase sales, but rather the idea that consumers do appreciate eBooks as a marketing tool. The more you can give them, the more likely they’ll be to get hooked and buy. And in the meantime, don’t fear the retailers; in the current market for books, suppliers have the power, not the middlemen.

In wrapping this up, I do want to be clear on one point: while this trial did influence many of of the readers to purchase the book, the report does not reveal how many of them actually did or how many additional copies were sold. Because of that, we should take this entire situation, as the saying goes, “with a grain of salt” — Neil Gaiman indicates that the publisher sold “a lot” of books, but he doesn’t say how many. His status as a well-known author also had a large influence on the results.

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Resource of the Day | SeanJJordan | July 14, 2008 4:25 pm

2 Comments

By Neil Gaiman, July 15, 2008 @ 12:48 am

Are you taking with a grain of salt the statement that putting up American Gods online had increased “sales of all my titles up 40% through independent bookshops”. (Sales of American Gods itself went up 300% overall during the 5 week period it was online, but there was also some promotion going on in the chains, which messes up the figures.)

That’s a lot of books.

(They also sold 1600 copies of American Gods online through a buy it now button. That’s not a lot of books, but it’s still interesting.)
By SeanJJordan, July 15, 2008 @ 8:26 am

Hi Neil,

Thanks for the comment. My intention in the statement was to caution small publishers not to get big dollar signs in their eyes since this was clearly a unique situation, and since an increase of sales of 40% has a very different meaning to a bestselling author than it does to a writer who is just starting out. Since we’re not talking about hard figures, we have to assume that numbers that are impressive to you should be impressive to us as well. With that said, increased sales of 300% are stunning on any scale, and I stand corrected if I seem to be downplaying that achievement in my post!

I’m thrilled to see the eBook model working as a marketing tool, and I’m glad that it had a positive impact on indy bookstores with respect to your books. This is an interesting case to talk about, and I hope that good things come of it for the publishing industry as a whole. As a big proponent of relationship marketing, I can’t imagine a better way for publishers to get in touch with their readers.

Writing Scraps

by Sean J. Jordan