Episode 27: Kevin Franco on Book Marketing Strategies

Kevin Franco is a Product Manager at Firebrand Technologies with a background in digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and direct-to-consumer ebook sales. He is leading the development of some new technologies at Firebrand, and has been doing a lot of thinking about book marketing strategies that can help increase book sales.

We talked about the book marketing funnel from discovery through conversion, with an emphasis on strategies you can use to increase your Book Exposure Optimization (BEO) and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). These strategies include metadata changes and enhancements, advertising campaigns, and data analytics, but the specific strategies you implement will impact different parts of the funnel.

We also talked about the Firebrand Group Community Conference, the year’s premier conference for publishing professionals, which will include informative and targeted sessions on marketing, sales, data, and workflows from industry experts. If you are interested in learning more about the conference, please visit firebrandtech.com/conference.

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

So this week on the BookSmarts Podcast, I actually get to sit down with one of my colleagues here at Firebrand, in person of all things instead of us being in different parts of the world and all the different times. Kevin Franco, it’s great to have you with me.

Kevin Franco 

Well, thanks! It’s great to be here.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, it’s good to have you across the—across the table from me. So Kevin is a product manager here at Firebrand. And he’s, he’s leading the development of some new technologies on the Firebrand team. So Kevin, before we talk about some of the stuff you’re doing, let’s talk a little about your background. So, for people who don’t know who you are, how do you get started in your career? How did you get started in publishing? What’s your background in the technology side, of course?

Kevin Franco 

Well, it’s a, it’s a long story, cuz I’ve been around a long time. But I got started, I guess, in the mid 90s, with an internet company that I started. And so I became an entrepreneur in about 1995. And I started the journey by going to the local public library and taking a book out, which was “how to start a business.” And that’s how I got my, my start. But, you know, I started quite a number of different startups. One of the most successful companies that I led and grew and sold was a marketing company. And so I spent quite a number of years in marketing and developing customer experiences for Hewlett Packard and professional sports teams and a number of consumer prod—consumer packaged goods, companies (CPGs). And, yeah, so I, you know, had a lot of experience in that area and did quite well. And that led to starting a company in the publishing space called Enthrill. And so there, there may be some people that still remember Enthrill out there. But, you know, I think our claim to fame was we created the Walmart ebook store. And in addition to that, worked with a number of publishers all over the world in distributing books directly to the reader for the publishers.

Joshua Tallent 

You guys had a kind of a unique way of selling ebooks as well, that nobody seems to have picked up on since then.

Kevin Franco 

There’s been a number of attempts, I think, you know, the latest, I think, with Kobo, and they launched a program a couple of years ago, that was very similar, and with Walmart, as well. But yeah, we took ebooks and brought them to physical retail stores by selling them as gift cards, and allowed the consumer to redeem whatever content was on that gift card. And they could download it right to their device. So and it’s yeah, it’s been—I think, Harper Collins worked on it very early, before we launched our company, they had some experience in that. And I forget the name of the, the, the, the name of the venture that they did that under. But, you know, there’s some success and it showed some signs of life. So when we went after we kind of, we changed the model a little bit. We went more mass retail, you know, working with Walmart, of course, but also with drugstores and grocery store chains. And we had, I think we had a retail footprint of over 3,500 stores approximately when we when we got to the end of our journey.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, the end of the journey. I understand all that as well!

Kevin Franco 

Yeah, the startup businesses is cruel.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, it definitely is. Well, that’s pretty cool. So your background in marketing is actually really interesting, too. You’re working right now on helping publishers understand more about book marketing. So tell me a little bit about kind of the process or the ideas that you’re bringing to the table. What is it that you think publishers need to be thinking about in the book marketing side?

Kevin Franco 

Sure. I think, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of approaches to marketing, especially when we look at digital marketing, which is really what everything is focused upon these days anyways. And so a lot of the work that I did was in digital marketing over the years and social media marketing in the early days. And, you know, there’s a lot of tactics and strategies to be used in that area. And so looking at that, and how that intersects with book marketing, and how publishers want to go to market, how they’re leveraging the tools that are at their, at their grasp, how they take their books to market and how they sell them and how they, you know, realize their sales and revenues. But the digital marketing piece is really exciting for me in introduce—not introducing it to publishing but, you know, the, you know, introducing new ideas behind it and bringing it to publishers, for sure. And, you know, you look at the tools that digital marketing—that that are available through digital marketing and, you know, this this Lean approach in continuing to, you know, make improvements on what you’re doing, but also carefully measuring the efforts and the sales, the impact it is having a market and the ability to take those analytics, and then make decisions from those analytics as you go to market. But I look at other areas like search engine optimization—what does that mean when your search engine is Amazon? What does that mean when your search engine is Barnes & Noble or Walmart, right? Like, so it becomes more like Book Exposure Optimization, or BEO versus SEO? So I think that those types of concepts are—they’re easy to understand, because we’ve got some examples in the web world—SEO. So and we understand how those search engines work. And as we start looking at the retailer search engines, and really focusing on that Book Exposure Optimization. You know, it’s—you’re winning the search, you’re trying to win the search, and there’s tactics, and there’s tools that can be used to do those.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, so Book Exposure Optimization is really that search mechanism, it’s helping the book stand out more. And there’s obviously some things you can do on the data side for that, there’s other things you can do on the advertising side for that. What’s the next step beyond the BEO side? What’s the next step for for a book?

Kevin Franco 

Well, it’s winning the searches is critical, right? So being on those first few pages is super critical. And you can affect the number of people that, you know, the glance views, if you will, more than the amount of people that see your book, and that’s that exposure piece or the discovery piece, you can do that organically through you know, Book Exposure Optimization, or you could do it through paid marketing. And, you know, it’s probably best to do a combination of the two, especially with frontlist titles. But the next step is really the conversion, right? And that Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO, and, you know, there’s tools that can be utilized to affect your conversion rate. So just increasing the amount of discoverability, that is going to affect that—there is a trickle down on that, and it will affect sales, but it’s not optimized. So there’s this constant back and forth of, you know, trying to win the search, and getting more eyeballs and then winning the sale, which is, you know, increasing that conversion rate.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah. So thinking about BEO, about that search engine optimization on the book side, what are some tactics you think publishers could do to increase their Book Exposure Optimization?

Kevin Franco 

Organically—and I know that publishers love this word, but—metadata, right? And the reality is, it’s product information, right? And you’re trying to get noticed on a retail platform with your product. And the thing that gets you noticed is that information. But there’s certain information that surrounds the product that is visible by the search engines, and then there’s certain information that’s visible by humans, and the consumer, if you will. And so the information is visible by the search engines are things like the BISAC categories, and keywords, and, you know, they, you know, some of the book data. So, those things are very important to get noticed by the search engine to win that search. When we talk about the Conversion Rate Optimization, those are really things in the product information that the customer sees, right? The things that influences the customer that could be like, author bio, and, you know, the book’s description, some imagery—so that could be additional images, if you’ve got images of the inside of the book, having examples of those, you know, poetry books, showing a couple of examples of the insides—those are things that can convert that sale and create a higher conversion rate. So when I look at it, I look at—it’s this back and forth of first trying to win the search, then trying to win the sale. And you can spend all your time doing nothing but trying to win search, but it’s really, you’re creating a lot of volume at the top of the funnel, but it’s not translating to sales at the bottom of the funnel. So it’s, you know, it’s spending enough time on the BEO and in winning that search, and then spending the time on the CRO in winning the sale. So—there’s too many acronyms in this business, right?

Joshua Tallent 

Way too many! That’s great. So when publishers are thinking about that, and they’re looking at their metadata, they’re like, “Oh, my goodness, there’s so much to do.” Obviously, keywords are an important part of this. You mentioned that BISAC categories are an important part of this. You know, looking beyond the BEO into that CRO, what are some things that they should be doing tactically to get that conversion rate? What do you think they should be thinking about and looking at to help them sell the book once the person gets there?

Kevin Franco 

Oh, that’s a good question. That’s the magical question, right? Like, if we knew the secret to that, right? But I mean, there’s some parts that aren’t secret, right? So creating a description that appeals to the user is a big step. And sometimes just adding bold text, or breaking your paragraph into two, two separate pieces is enough to make it more palatable for the viewers eyes, to make it appealing, and allow them to actually digest it and read it versus, you know, a big block of text. You know, we spend all this time formatting the inside of the book, we spend all this time on, you know, making beautiful covers that entice the person to look at it, and then it comes to the product information and it’s, like—I don’t want to say “puke,” but I’ll say puke. Right? So it’s just, it’s horrible. And, and so think about it from the customer’s perspective and the reader’s perspective: What’s going to entice them to to purchase that book? And, you know, like I said, just breaking up the text sometimes is enough to make it palatable for that user to actually digest it, because typically, the content is there, but how it’s displayed is horrible.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so we’ve talked about some of the free things you can do, obviously, metadata is technically a free thing that you can do, it may take a little time and effort to put into it, but what are some of those paid things that you can do, tactics that you can take on as a publisher to engage better with the the BEO, the Book Exposure Optimization on your books?

Kevin Franco 

So certainly, through some retailers, they offer the ability to take advantage of their marketing services. And, and that’s a great opportunity for you to augment what you’ve done with the customer—or with the product data. And you know, the product information, as it were. But the product information does a lot in describing it and helping it get recognized by the search engine, doing additional paid advertising in addition to that will really help move it up as well and it’ll improve the sales rank and etc, etc. But, you know, doing headline search ads, or, you know, taking advantage of sponsored reviews, those are types of things that you can help to, to win those searches. Now, advertising does not convert to—that’s not a conversion tactic.

Joshua Tallent 

Right. It’s a BEO tactic.

Kevin Franco 

Right? It’s about discoverability, and the Book Exposure Optimization. So and there has to be a balance between those two. So and it’s easy to focus on one really, really heavily. And, you know, pour a lot of money into your advertising and, you know, brush up the keywords and everything else to get the—win those searches. But at the end of the day, it’s not just the search that you have to win, it’s also the sale.

Joshua Tallent 

Well, and also, you have to have both sides of the BEO taken care of as well, you need to be doing better metadata, in addition to your advertising, because you’re only pulling yourself up a certain amount to the advertising, you have to have the also the leg up at the same time with the metadata changes.

Kevin Franco 

100%. Like, if you’re, if you’re spending money in market, and you’re spending money on products that haven’t had their product information updated, you’re going to spend a lot of money to get the same result that you could with half the money, with the product information up to date. So you know, it’s, it’s, you know—if you’re in a car race, and you haven’t maintained your vehicle, and you get entered into the race, that’s, you know, the entry is like the advertising bringing you in, but your car isn’t maintained. Right? So you want to have the right maintenance and everything done, get ready for that race. So I think that, at the end of the day, I believe that the ROI you’re going to see is going to be much greater if you spend the time on that product information and making sure it’s ready for market.

Joshua Tallent 

That’s the first step. And you can totally—but in doing so you’ll also start to see which products you should be putting advertising on, which products are not only selling well, but might have the potential to sell better, because now you’ve been looking at the data and figuring out, you know, what the product information is looking like and which one is which ones of these books, or maybe something I should be putting a little more effort into.

Kevin Franco 

Yeah, there’s a lot of data to be had. I know that through the Eloquence on Alert platform, you can find all kinds of information on what’s trending what’s working, which categories are connecting with which books, and then you can—that really helps to make your decisions or help you guide your decisions as to what types of advertising on those platforms to take, what sort of, you know, what sort of path will lead you to those customers quickest right, and where to really focus those efforts. So, using analytical tools such as the Eloquence on Alert is a really good idea to understand you know, the best path to the customer, what’s, you know, what’s triggering in the market, when to trigger in the market, and aligning your funds on the promotional side to align with those is a really smart tip.

Joshua Tallent 

You mentioned analytics actually, at the beginning of this conversation, because there’s a lot of data now that publishers are grappling with, you know, a lot of different sources of data. What do you recommend publishers focus on when they’re thinking about, “Okay, I need to figure out how to pick the books to go work on”? Or is there any, any guidance you can give on publishers trying to figure that part about with all the data that’s floating around?

Kevin Franco 

There’s a ton of data. Yeah, and I think it in some ways, it depends on the type of catalog that the publisher has, in looking for the types of opportunities. You know, there’s general categories that are that are driving things all the time. And, you know, if, if that’s where you’re publishing your content, and that’s what you want to be watching is those categories. And if you’re, you know, publishing, maybe more, you know, some categories that aren’t necessarily call them Top 10. But, you know, they’re they’re very important categories for that publisher, that’s their wheelhouse, then they want to watch those areas specifically and watch for trends in the market that kind of lead the customer down that path. So where are those customers? What are they doing? How do you connect to them? Those are—the types of analytics answer those questions are what you want to be looking for.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, and that’s where tools can help you with that. Because you can see those patterns evolving, you can take advantage of—even looking at your sales data can help you with that, if you don’t have access to tools. Just your sales data, if nothing else, shows you a month later, kind of where things were and what was happening a month ago. So it’s not the best, you know, on the spot data, but it is definitely interesting data and helpful data for figuring out where you might want to go in the future.

Kevin Franco 

For sure, yeah.

Joshua Tallent 

So you’ve been doing some work recently on looking at product data across a very large number of titles here at Firebrand. What is the—what is that project you’re working on?

Kevin Franco 

It’s a top secret project, Joshua, I can’t tell you. But it’s very exciting because we’re developing some analytical tools, and we’re able to crunch through a lot of titles. And to give you an idea, you know, we’re crunching through over 3 million product records. So that’s, you know, 3 million ISBNS—plus. 3 million+—it’s a huge amount of data. And so we’re looking at the different types of analytics that are coming out of there, the different trends, the different categories that like—it’s so dense, this data that’s coming out of is really cool. And we’re going to be reporting on that at the Community Conference in September. So we’re going to be putting on a big show with, you know, data from 3 million plus records in this category that I think publishers will be really interested in, in learning.

Joshua Tallent 

And for those of you who haven’t heard the Community Conference is Firebrand’s bi-annual conference—we do it every even-numbered year, and as Kevin mentioned, we’ll be in September in Baltimore, Maryland. If you want some information about that, you can go to the firebrandtech.com website, you can find a link there to learn more about that.

Kevin Franco 

This will be my third Community Conference that—I attended two as a vendor or partner of Firebrand when I had my previous company. So it was always a great event, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it this coming year.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, and that’s exciting, too, because we’re going to also have a lot of people from NetGalley and from Supadu joining us as well, a lot of really great sessions on marketing and sales and data, and workflow, and I think it’s going to be a really good conference this year. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Yeah. All right. Well, Kevin, thanks a lot for joining me. I appreciate you taking some time to chat about the stuff you’re working on and hopefully share some insights that people are going to find interesting and helpful as they work on marketing for their books.

Kevin Franco 

Oh, thank you. It’s my pleasure.

Joshua Tallent 

Thanks for joining us for the BookSmarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also please share this podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books!