Part of the reason that sales are so low from publishers’ web sites is that, in general, they’ve never put much effort into making their websites attractive to buyers of books, or, for that matter, to Google.
When I hear publishers say: people don’t want to buy from a publisher’s site, I’m always a bit puzzled. How do they know?
From my experience with LibriVox, which of course is a little different, since a) we “publish” audiobooks, and b) they are free … the majority of our listeners find our books from our site (actually we have no real idea how the majority of listeners find our books since they float freely around on the Internet, on torrent sites, at gutenberg.org etc)
We have tens of millions of downloads, with popular titles pushing a million downloads (and we don’t keep very accurate stats), and obscure titles, such as, say, Romance of Rubber, get downloaded 2,138 times.
LibriVox.org gets about 40,000 visits a day …
Marketing budget: $0
But, lots of people like us, and link to us, and we run a simple but well-indexed Wordpress site … so … if you want “free audiobooks,” Google knows where to send you.
Publishers, it seems to me, ought to put similar efforts into being at the top of searches for books/authors, and should encourage buyers to buy from them. I know I would prefer to buy from a publisher, rather than from an online retailer.
One Comment
Yes! I, too, have heard publishers dismiss the suggestion that they would be better off selling directly to their customers as often as possible. Their reason (along with pointing out that customers just never liked doing this kind of thing in the PAST) is always something to the effect that it would just be insane to expect a potential customer to go through the extremely laborious and inconvenient process of going to the publisher’s web site to make a purchase. Really? And then when you look at those same publishers’ sites, it’s clear why no one goes there: it’s essentially wallpaper. There’s nothing to draw the potential reader in. It’s basically just a list of books. No place for readers to engage with each other, with the publisher or with the authors.
Not only do direct sales have the financial benefits of cutting out the middlemen (whose value becomes questionable when we’re talking about ebooks), but just as importantly it gives the publisher a chance to draw readers into some kind of dialogue so that they come back again and again and, eventually, buy more.