A few months ago, I wrote several posts reviewing publishers’ websites. Essentially, the same problems arose again and again: the inability to target a specific market, poor search engine optimisation, a lack of attention to the user experience, a lack of original content.
I didn’t run the series for long because the repetitiveness made it boring to write, and I’m sure it wasn’t any more fun to read. However, I looked at many more sites than I wrote about, and I came to some general conclusions that may be worth sharing.
In general, it seems that the smaller publishers and the stand-alone imprints fare better when it comes to managing their websites. There are a couple of reasons for this.
1. Marketing to a Niche
When a niche publisher or imprint has a website to itself, it can shape the content and design of that site to exactly target its audience.
Historically, imprints haven’t been an important part of consumer book promotion. Those days are over.
Rather than landing their readers on a home page featuring one romance novel, one “how to quite smoking”, a celebrity cookbook, and a reissue of Chekhov, niche sites can tailor both content and appearance to their audience. Compare the Science Fiction section of Penguin or Tor at Macmillan to, say, Angry Robot Books, a Harper Collins imprint given free rein. Angry Robot does a far, far better job of engaging their target audience, both through visual cues and through content.*
This isn’t just about dark-corner genres like SF, though: genres from literary fiction to art history, and within genres, imprints from Harvill Secker to Macmillan New Writing could benefit from this kind of focussed audience-building, using both content and appearance to engage their potential market and build lasting relationships with their customer base. Publishers & imprints are authorities in their niches: their websites need to be the same.
*Although they might benefit from more general genre talk on the blog—it’s hard to stay interested in somebody who only talks about themselves. And they really, really need to remove the nofollow from their pages if they want new people to discover the site!
2. Adaptability and Experimentation
Like most things in big business, large corporate websites move slowly. Want to change the blog template to reflect a new angle? Throw up a new set of pages for a social media tie-in? Try out some new placement for video content? Talk to A. They’ll bring it up with B in a meeting, but don’t expect results. Remember, Communications do all the Web stuff, and they’re already over budget on the Stephen King “Snap a ghoul” photo competition. Not to mention the legal people will have to look it over, and, I don’t know, might a Vimeo video not be a security risk? Can’t you just get your author to put up a MySpace page instead? We’re not really prioritising web development for 2009-10. What if there’s a virus?
You get the idea: it’s not the web work that takes the time; it’s the bureaucracy. If an imprint or small press is running its own site, and has somebody tech-savvy on board, said changes will just take a couple of late nights and some pizza. Mistakes will be made, but so will massive improvements, and in the case of larger houses, what’s learned can then be circulated among the other imprints.
So why does any of this matter?
I’ve said it elsewhere, and I’ll say it again here: If I run an Internet search for a book, and the first page results don’t include a publisher website that provides a compelling case for me to purchase that book, the publisher in question is not doing their job. They aren’t fulfilling their basic marketing role, which along with quality control and development, is what makes the role of traditional publishing so important.
High-quality online promotion isn’t optional; it’s not a trend to try out if you get the chance. It’s the single most important aspect of modern marketing. If a business isn’t getting results that back this up, that business isn’t doing it right.
This is a lesson that other industries have been learning about their products for years, and it’s time—for all our sakes—that the publishing industry did the same.
August 24th, 2009 at 12:07 am
Fascinating post. I followed your links, the examples really make the point. The Angry Robot Books site is accessible, but fun too, and it invites you to keep reading. The others are mere lists, nothing more than I could probably have got from wikipedia.
Most publishers’ sites are pretty dismal, even the smaller guys, it tends to just be a list of books and an option to buy them at a higher price than on Amazon or The Book Depository even though you’re buying direct. The websites are clearly afterthoughts, and yet the web is my primary means of researching which books to buy, and I’m far from alone in that these days.
August 28th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
In my 20 years as an author, working with most major publishers, I have noted a tremendous fear of technology. Publishers still work with pencil and stick-ums on original manuscript pages. The only publisher I’ve seen use Track Changes was F&W. Adapt or die. Hate to say it.
I’m pushing my Warrior Writer program to train writers to be authors and not getting resistance to it from agents/editors, but incomprehension. They don’t get the concept of actually teaching new (and often old) authors how to be part of the business. We must change.
September 27th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
What always surprises me is how hard or impossible most publishers even make it to do something as straightforward as download their catalogue for the next six months. Most are like Faber–they don’t have it anywhere on site, even though a PDF must exist somewhere for the print edition to be made from. Others, like Random House, have it online but not anywhere you can find unless you do a cunning Google search for PDFs stored at their domain name. Only Penguin, Orion and the smaller publishers seem to want the public to see what they’ve got coming up.