Using Google to sell more books - by Pete Shemilt
Pete Shemilt, Sales and Marketing Director (EMEA), Academic
and Professional Books, Cambridge University Press
The book publishing industry has a love–hate relationship with Google. In fact it has also been a litigious affair, with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) famously filing a law suit against the media giant in October 2005 claiming infringement of copyright by the Print Library Project: Google’s plan to digitize books held by some of the world’s major academic libraries.
But despite this, publishers of all sizes remain keen to work with Google and the reason, of course, is search. Google’s dominance in this market is compelling, and optimizing search results on key words and phrases associated with books, authors and content is a core component in any marketing strategy – driving Internet users extremely cost effectively to the point of purchase. In addition, Google AdWords offers a paid search option.
Google Book Search (books.google.com) takes this revolution in marketing efficiency a signifi cant step further. The Partner Programme allows the full text of books to be searched at no cost to the publisher (except the cost of delivering the book for scanning by Google). Publisher copyright is respected as there are constraints that limit the extent of a book that can be read online for free by a consumer. For publishers this is also a modest potential revenue stream as a share of income is received on advertising displayed against their content. Future models may include selling or renting access to the content to provide an additional revenue stream for publishers and Google.
Google Book Search is particularly powerful for books outside the bestseller lists: the ‘Long Tail’ of a publisher’s portfolio. Academic and professional publishers like Cambridge University Press derive much of their revenue from many thousands of different books targeted at very specifi c niche markets. What Google Book Search enables is discovery of this content and also reassurance that it is relevant: the publishing equivalent of being able to walk around a car, look under the bonnet and kick the tyres before making the decision to purchase.
For niche books, visibility is key and Book Search also provides a compelling call to action in the form of a click through to the publisher website or to a choice of online retailers. Backlist books which would otherwise be difficult to find have certainly benefited tremendously. Cambridge University Press studied the difference in sales between 2003 and 2006 for books that were published before the year 2000. They discovered that in the United States, books in the Google Book Search programme had a sales rate 20 percentage points higher than those not included. Cambridge enjoys over a million book visits per month on titles in Google Book Search.
So whether you believe that Google is true to its motto ‘don’t be evil’ or are suspicious of their ultimate motives, the impact on potential sales is impossible to ignore. As Google’s own publicity states: ‘you would sell a lot more books if a lot more people knew about them’.
Clark and Phillips, Inside Book Publishing, 2008, page 195
