Episode 54: Booktrovert – a Brand New Consumer Marketing Platform

Kristina Radke is the Senior Vice President of Business Growth and Engagement at NetGalley.

She joins the BookSmarts Podcast to launch of Booktrovert, a new consumer marketing platform for publishers and authors. Booktrovert allows for easy creation of marketing campaigns with digital giveaways and interactive tools for readers, designed to complement the existing NetGalley platform. If you’re interested in becoming a Booktrovert publisher, reach out to concierge@netgalley.com.

Find Kristina Radke on LinkedIn and click here to sign up for Booktrovert today!

Learn about Booktrovert:

• What is Booktrovert?
• Types of Booktrovert Campaigns
• Who is a Booktrovert? (see venn diagram below!)

Transcript

Joshua Tallent
So this month on the Booksmarts Podcast, I’m talking with Kristina Radke, who is my colleague from NetGalley. She’s the Senior Vice President of Business Growth and Engagement. Kristina, thanks for joining me today.

Kristina Radke
Hi, Joshua, thank you for having me on the show again.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, it’s great to have you back. I always like chatting with you. It’s always fun to have a conversation about NetGalley and all the cool stuff going on. And this month, we get to talk about some exciting news from NetGalley. You guys are launching launching Booktrovert. So tell everybody that’s listening. What is Booktrovert? Joshua Tallent Yeah,

Kristina Radke
Yeah, lots of exciting stuff going on. We are so excited to introduce Booktrovert.I think the easiest way to explain it is in two parts. So for publishers and authors, they should really be thinking about Booktrovert as a consumer marketing platform, a place to showcase special promotions, digital giveaways. It’s super easy to use. They just use a simple campaign builder tool that results in a beautiful campaign landing page for their books. So for publishers and authors, that’s what it is, consumer marketing platform. For readers, Boopktrovert is a destination website where they can celebrate their love of books. So for those readers, they’re going to come to booktrovert.com they’re going to interact with all these activities that we’re creating, like customizing and sharing digital bookshelves, discovering books that use interactive tools, and, most importantly, of course, participating in those special campaigns that publishers and authors are creating.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so this has been a long time coming. I know that the team has been thinking about doing this for a long time. So where did the idea originally come from? So why are you launching it? What’s really behind the scenes here?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, so you know, NetGalley is existing tools were really designed with a lot of flexibility so publishers could offer free digital access to advanced readers copies or advanced listening copies to trade professionals. So librarians, booksellers, educators, media or journalists as well as book advocates who write reviews, whether that’s traditional media reviewers or in digital spaces like blogs or social media. And because those tools were so flexible, we started hearing more and more from publishers that they wanted to be able to use them for their consumer marketing efforts, too. And that kind of presented us with a little bit of a conundrum, right? We really wanted to solve this need that our clients were telling us that they had, while also retaining the professional aspects of the existing NetGalley community. So Booktrovert is essentially our answer to that. It creates a completely separate, standalone website that’s consumer facing, where any reader is welcome to participate. Because it’s separate, we’re really making sure that we’re not diluting the valuable nature of the NetGalley community, who are writing reviews, sure, but they’re also making nominations for the indie next list or the library reads list. They’re making purchase decisions for their library or their bookstores or classrooms, etc. There are just like a lot of prompts and reminders in NetGalley that don’t really necessarily make a lot of sense for general readers or consumers. So Booktrovert is a place where they’re just going to see what’s relevant to them. It’s not going to be specific, right? For trade trade purposes. It’s just anybody can come and then, even though Booktrovert is separate for those readers or those consumers, for publishers, it’s actually powered by NetGalley. So that means that they’re going to use the existing NetGalley interface that they’re already familiar with, and will be fulfilling consumer facing digital giveaways with all of the secure reading options that they’ve already vetted. So it’s really cool and that it does kind of all of the things right? I think that NetGalley is pretty uniquely positioned in the industry to introduce something like Booktrovert, because we’re seated in this like super special place among publishers, authors and readers. You know, we’re so fortunate to have clients who collaborate with us when we say we want to hear what, you know, what publishers are needing or wanting or struggling with, like we really, really love to have those conversations, and our clients trust us to have those conversations too, and then we try to act on it. So, yeah, really excited to introduce Booktrovert in order to address all of those things that we’ve been hearing.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah, that totally makes sense. Okay, let’s take a step back though. We’re talking about consumer marketing. What is consumer marketing from a publisher’s perspective? What are the the kinds of things that publishers are doing, and what kind of campaigns are they kind of engaged in already, and can they do those same things in Booktrovert?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, totally. So, okay, so going back to that first question, really simply put, consumer marketing is really just aiming to increase discoverability for your books in order to drive sales, right. We want to sell as many books as possible, and consumer marketing helps put the books out there in order to do that. There’s a ton of things that publishers do and that everybody does, to try to engage with consumers, right? So incentives like pricing promotions, giveaways, bundled packages, special editions with beautiful gold foil covers or edge painted or edge sprayed pages, right? That’s all consumer marketing, but so our engagement campaigns on social media, including influencer campaigns, things where you’re trying to create a flurry of excitement, where people are talking about and sharing, and, you know, ideally going viral with something fun or funny or touching or whatever. That’s consumer marketing, too. And something as simple as advertising, right? Whether that’s online ads or a billboard, that’s also consumer marketing. All of those things are increasing the visibility for your book and filling that sales funnel. So I think, you know, when we envision Booktrovert, we wanted to make sure that all of those things were possible. In the campaign builder tool, publishers and authors are able to create campaigns for a lot of different purposes. Flexibility is kind of like our thing, as I was saying earlier. We want to make sure that whatever you want to do you we can help facilitate that. We recently did a webinar where we actually showed how easy it is to create a campaign. But because this is a podcast, I’ll just tell you really, really briefly about the types of campaigns that can be created, just so people have an idea, but I can share more resources too about what that actually looks like that can be shared with the show notes. Okay, so, okay. First, a campaign can include one book or multiple books, up to 10 titles. So if you’re promoting a series or the backlist for an author who has a new book coming out, or anything like that, it can be for one book. It can be for up to 10 books. For each book in that campaign, so for each individual book that you include, you can choose a click through action that is unique. It can be a pre order click through. It can be a Buy Now click through, or it can be a giveaway. And a giveaway can be limited by number of copies. Or if you say, I don’t want to limit it, then it will just run for a full week, seven days is the amount of time for the standard campaign on Booktrovert. And then a campaign can also be public or private. So in most cases, I assume that a publisher will probably want to run a public campaign where they’re organically reaching the Booktrovert community, because it’s living on Booktrovert.com, but they’re also sharing that link to their campaign as widely as possible, to their own mailing lists and communities, or their authors are posting about it, or both, all of the above. It’s likely that they’re going to be creating larger scale campaigns to drive excitement and urgency, right? That’s typically what we see. And of course, we have options to advertise those campaigns too. So if it’s public, you want to get it out as far and wide as possible, we can help you with that as well. But there are definitely use cases where a publisher or an author might want to do a private super, super highly targeted campaign. For instance, one of the examples that I shared in that webinar was, if they’re creating an exclusive book club online and they want to give free copies, free digital copies, to members who are participating, right? They signed up, they gave the publisher their email address, they’re going to do X, Y and Z as part of this book club, and here is a digital copy via booktrovert. It’s going to be super easy to do that, but you might also be going to an event where you want to give a digital copy to attendees whose badges you scanned, or to hand out flyers at the Brooklyn Book Festival, right? Where you’re going to see hundreds of people and you’re just handing out postcards with a QR code on them, and, you know, a way to sort of drive this excitement in person. So flexibility to do both of those things. And then one of the questions that we got within that webinar that I want to make sure not to skip over is related to those retail click through actions, the pre order, the buy now. If a publisher is doing one of those retail CTAs, then they will be able to drive to their retailer of choice. If they’re doing a special pricing promotion, they plug in really easily in that way. So super flexible, really on demand, whatever a publisher might need to do, they’ll be able to do.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, and one of those things would be then being able to get a free copy of the e book delivered to the reader’s account and using the NetGalley delivery mechanisms already, right?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And you know, it is good to point out too that, again, from the reader’s perspective, none of it will be branded NetGalley. So the reading options will be a Web Reader. They’ll be able to start reading it directly on their device or on their computer. We will have a Send to Kindle option, and we will also have a send to Kobo option. So for those digital giveaways, that’s the fulfillment method.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. So how does Booktrovert really differ from other platforms? There’s a lot of other book lover platforms, book engagement platforms out there. What sets Booktrovert aside and really makes it a place where consumers want to come and therefore publishers will have a very large community of consumers to advertise to.

Kristina Radke
Yeah, so for those readers, we are creating a mobile first website that feels really sleek and modern. It’s fun, it’s easy to navigate. They’ll be able to participate on their mobile devices when they’re waiting in line at the grocery store or sitting on a bus or, you know, just killing time. Well, let me open up my booktrovert website and see what’s new. The activities on the site also are going to be designed to keep them coming back again and again, creating and sharing their book loving habits, discovering, accessing books, etc. So yeah, I think there’s a lot in it that readers are going to just love and gravitate toward. And then, of course, for publishers, the back end, being powered by NetGalley being something they’re already so familiar with, super easy self-serve campaigns, setups, automatic digital fulfillment, right? Like you just set it up and it’s going and you don’t have to really think about anything else, except you’ll get right analytics at the end too. That’s something else we’re kind of known for. We have a ton of analytics that are not necessarily always offered by other platforms, including demographic data and email addresses. It’s a big question we are getting.

Joshua Tallent
Yeah and this also ,like you were mentioning earlier, one of the things this does is it helps NetGalley, kind of, in a sense, separate or make the NetGalley community different than the Booktrovert community. So who is a Booktrovert, and will the community differ from NetGalley’s community, and how is that going to feel to a publisher in your system?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, I love this question, because when we landed on the name Booktrovert, we really talked a lot about what it means to be a Booktrovert. This idea of this name of our platform being something that you can really identify with feels really special to us. So when we chose the name, you know, in Latin, we kind of expressed to one another, right? Introvert means somebody who turns inward, and extrovert means someone who turns outward. So, by definition, a booktrovert is somebody who turns bookward. And in our conversations, we were saying there are so so many reasons someone might turn toward a book or reach for a book to find escape, to learn something new, to expand their perspectives. Millions and millions of reasons somebody turns toward a book, and anyone can be a booktrovert, whether they’re reading 100 books a year or just one. So that feels really special to us . When we think about how the Booktrovert Community is different from the NetGalley community, the way that we’ve kind of envisioned it to ourselves is like a venn diagram where there are three circles. And I’ll share an actual image of this, because when we talked about it ourselves, internally, we were like, we just need a visual for this. It’s so cool. So I’ll share that with you, because we did create one, but just to describe it here. In one circle, we have the NetGalley community of the book advocates and the trade professionals that I was talking about before, and their influence reaches book lovers and avid readers in a lot of different places through their book reviews on blogs and social media or in libraries or bookstores, on podcasts or in other media, right? So that’s that second circle is these book lovers, these bibliofiles. And then with Booktrovert, now, publishers can extend that reach even further to reach any consumer. Again, no matter why they’re reaching toward a book. What type of book do they read? Why do they need this book? Or why might they be interested in this book? That Booktrovert community is going to be the widest community. And what’s so cool about this venn diagram is that all of the circles overlap completely. So the NetGalley community fits within that avid reader circle, which fits within that general consumer circle, and that’s how we’re thinking about the Booktrovert community.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. So yeah, and there’s so many people who love books and so many people who have different engagement with books. So it’s great that Booktrovert will be fairly inclusive for that, you know, all those different types of people. I mean, I’m excited, personally, to get to use it and put my shelf together and all those kinds of things. Okay, so we know what a Booktrovert is. Now, what is the reader acquisition strategy? How are you going to build a community?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, well, the good news is that we’re not starting from scratch. We already know over 630,000 active and engaged readers within that NetGalley community, and we’ve already started to leverage their excitement and their voices to spread the word about this new site. We do have, like fun PR packages planned that we’ll be sending to A-list celebrities and book influencers, and we’ll be doing our own advertising to consumers with reading adjacent interests. Plus, like I was saying before, Booktrovert is built to be really sticky, so all of those fun and shareable activities on Booktrovert will drive organic growth as people create those shelves, those beautiful shelves, and share them out. And everybody out in the world is like, I want to make one of those. That’s going to drive its own organic growth. So, of course, publisher’s campaigns will be drawing people to the site too. We really just anticipate that the Booktrovert community and the mailing list for the Booktrovert community will continue to grow, just really exponentially once it’s launched.

Joshua Tallent
So when does it launch? When do we get to use it?

Kristina Radke
Yeah, so publishers and authors can start pre-scheduling campaigns now within their NetGalley accounts in anticipation of a June 23 launch date. That’s when the first campaigns will be live on Booktrovert and when readers can come to start participating in all of the various activities. But there is a coming soon landing page already live at Booktrovert.com so I hope everyone will tell their book-lloving friends to join the wait list, and then they’ll get alerted as soon as we launch on June 23

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so what does everybody else need to know, though? So, if you’re a publisher, you need to get signed up. You need to start thinking about it. What do they need to know? Where do they go to find out more?

Kristina Radke
I think that the most important thing is that at launch, Booktrovert campaigns are available exclusively for NetGalley clients to reach U.S. readers. So we hope to expand internationally in the future, but we’re not really sure quite one yet. So that’s just one important detail to keep in mind. NetGalley clients to reach U.S. readers. I do also think it’s worth noting that Booktrovert campaigns are totally unrelated to the book’s settings within NetGalley, so publishers should be thinking about their overall goals when deciding when and how to promote their books using both of those platforms. We have some resources that offer strategic ideas and will help publishers, as they’re getting started with Booktrovert. So again, I’ll share a bunch of links that you can give out.

Joshua Tallent
Okay, so where can they go to find out more? Who should they reach out to be able to get the information they need, get signed up, get going and even if they’re not a current NetGalley client, right? I’m sure people listening to this would be like, oh my goodness, I need to get involved.

Kristina Radke
Yeah, absolutely. I think the best way to reach out is just email us at concierge@netgalley.com. That will reach a number of the members of my team who can answer any questions, help you get started, etc. And you know, signing up for NetGalley is super, super easy. You can sign up with just one book, or you can sign up for a subscription if you have multiple books in a year that you want to be promoting. So we’ve got a lot of flexible plans to help you get started with NetGalley. And then by extension, with Booktrovert.

Joshua Tallent
That’s great. So I’m going to have bunch of resources in the show notes, so if you’re listening, please go take a look at those and click on all the links and look at all the details and reach out to concierge@netgalley.com if you have questions. Kristina, thank you so much. It’s really exciting to see what you guys are up to, and I’m really excited to see how the launch goes and to see all the success that publishers are going to have with these campaigns. Thanks for joining me today. Joshua Tallent today.

Kristina Radke
Thank you, Joshua, it’s always a pleasure to talk.

Joshua Tallent
Well, that’s it for this episode of the Booksmarts Podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, you can leave a review or rating on Apple podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And we also appreciate it when you share the 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 us and getting smarter about your books.