R U DigiReady?

“Just ask yourself, what will publishing look like one hundred years from now? For Thomas Nelson to thrive then and now, digitally-ready content is the centerpiece of good business, good stewardship, and good strategy.” Bryan Norman, Senior Editor Nonfiction Trade Group

Thomas Nelson is about to start a very important initiative called DigiReady. DigiReady is a new process we will be implementing in editorial and Book and Graphic Design that allows for all titles to be published simultaneously in print and any electronic format.

Here’s why DigiReady is important:

Increased Sales – Today 17% of our Amazon sales are in e-book format, when we have both versions available on Amazon simultaneously. This percentage has been increasing monthly. Currently a new title is not generally ready for digital-release on the Kindle for weeks costing the company valuable sales. Today a new title has to go through a completely separate conversion process. DigiReady will allow us to make more digital sales more quickly starting the day a title is launched in its print format.

Reduced Cycle Time – The DigiReady process will cut between 2–12 weeks off of the time-to-market for a book. The quicker we can get a book to market, the sooner we can start selling it, and the faster we can recover our investment.

Improved Productivity – The DigiReady process will allow us to reduce a title’s digital conversion costs. It will also allow us to create derivative and bundled products much less expensively.

Better Marketing – DigiReady allows our marketing people to quickly send snippets or chapters of books to partners that can promote our book, such as online communities, web sites, and retailers. This will be very important for getting our books noticed quickly on Google and Amazon.

Our editorial staff will be going though initial DigiReady training on August 20 with a follow up session in early October. Basically, our editorial folks will be learning to apply styles to their MS Word manuscripts prior to sending them to BGD, allowing these many benefits to the company.

The company has done 14 DigiReady pilots so far. Like any new process there is a learning curve; the more you do it the better you get at it. For an average trade book, it takes an additional 3–4 hours over the life of the project for the editorial staff to make a book DigiReady; longer for more complicated books and shorter for simpler books.

The training will be conducted by Debbie Eicholtz and these brave editorial folks who did the pilots:

• Jennifer McNeil
• MacKenzie Howard
• Bryan Norman
• Michael Stephens

They will also be our subject matter experts. I want to thank these folks for leading necessary change at Thomas Nelson so that we can quickly capture the digital opportunities available today for our content. The team has plans for making this training fun.

Like any new process or technology, there will be problems. The important thing is to make those problems learning opportunities, and share them with others so we can all be DigiReady as soon as possible. We have set up a page on Sharepoint where folks can share their learnings.

Thanks in advance to our editorial and BGD folks who will be at the center of making Thomas Nelson DigiReady. I would ask that the rest of the company support our editorial staffs as they learn DigiReady.

Finally, none of this would be possible without the deep research and solutions from Bob Edington and the Internet team. I appreciate their hard work and service.

You will see and hear much more about DigiReady in the next 30 days. Please send me your questions. We can all learn together.

Why XML Is Important

This blog is probably most interesting to the editorial folks at Thomas Nelson, because it will affect their jobs more than others’ jobs. Marketing will be the next most affected; XML will be an important tool to help them market our books. Finally, sales will love it, because XML will drive greater volume across multiple formats.

But you ask, “What is XML?” It’s Extensible Markup Language, of course. And then you ask a bit more irritated, “What is Extensible Markup Language and why do I care?” Here is why you care: XML allows us to create content once, and then nearly simultaneously turn that content into many different formats. We are more consumer-friendly. By launching all those formats, we sell more of our content more quickly.

Yep, we will be able to “tag” the content once, and then make a printed book, e-book, Iphone app, Ijournals and other formats that might be interesting to our changing consumer much more quickly. While there are many advantages to XML, here are three big advantages:

Multi-formats - Ability to produce multiple formats quickly, as indicated above.

Marketing – As online marketing continues to drive book awareness, XML allows for fast retrieval and delivery of relevant content to promote the book in a variety on online communities and marketing tools.

Productivity – Productivity gains come in several ways. For traditional books, Debbie Eicholtz finds that she cuts her department’s processing time on a typical trade book. It is too early to tell how much productivity can be gained, but it could be as much as 40-50% in some functions. Most companies consider an annual 4% productivity gain a good year, so even if the savings is a fraction of the 40-50% throughout the process it’s a good thing. That, however, is just the start. With XML, it is also much less expensive to create other formats.

So, how does XML provide all of these benefits? XML identifies all the content components in a manuscript. XML is “format agnostic”. That means it identifies the content’s components, and then can feed those components to the various tools that create other formats much more easily. Or, maybe we want to publish a custom or new book on Christian parenting. If our books are in XML, we could quickly create a new product based on searching the exsiting titles in Thomas Nelson's catalog for related content. There will be much we can do with XML. If you want to learn even more click on this blog for additional information.

Note that we have to “tag” the content to gain the advantages of XML. And, this is where there is some extra work for our editorial folks. Editors have to spend more time initially to prepare a title’s content. This is accomplished by simply working in the editor’s currently preferred native format of Microsoft Word. The editors apply more structure to the document. The additional structure allows the publishing process to easily separate the content from its presentation. This separation is important for simultaneously accommodating the different displays, for example, for various e-book formats.

We have had several successful pilots preparing our content in format-agnostic XML. Bryan Norman, Michael Stephens, Jennifer McNeil and McKenzie Howard have all participated in pilots for the company. It is additional work for them, but we are beginning to see the benefits. Many thanks to these pioneers for leading this important initiative.

The day is coming when we will be 100% XML on new titles. In addition, we have a company in India converting many of our backlist titles to XML as well. Why do this? Because more and more our consumers want our content in other formats besides the 600 year-old book. The consumer is always right.

Bowker Pub Track 2008 Book Research

Bowker’s Pub Track presented interesting facts from their 2008 Demographics & Book Buying Behaviors survey at ECPA’s Executive Leadership Summit. Here are some quick facts.

Who reads books?

• Only 45% of Americans over 13 years-old read books
• 32% of book readers are over 55 years-old
• The average book reader is 44

Which and how much media do Americans consume each week?

• 15 hours on-line
• 13 hours watching TV
• 6 hours listening to music
• 5 hours reading books
• 5 hours reading newspapers and magazines
• 4 hours watching DVDs

Note to self: Americans spend 3x more time each week on-line being informed, educated and entertained than reading books. Need to devise a digital strategy for our content quick! Drop the idea of buying ABC from Disney; consumers spend more time on-line than watching TV.

How do consumers initially learn about a book?

• 37% In-store displays and placement
• 12% Friend or family recommendation
• 6% Online book review
• 6% Direct Mail or Catalog
• 6% Online ads

Observation: Online ads and online book reviews now create as much awareness as viral marketing from friends and family. An on-line marketing strategy is critical. Also, according to Bowker, the impact of all print, TV and radio combined accounted for less than 5% of consumers' book awareness. - Tough news for established, traditional media.

Just a few other interesting Bowker facts:

1. Consumers are going to online book reviews two times more often than print reviews.


2. 19% of all books purchased the consumer became aware or viewed the product online before purchasing.


3. 60% of all Christians under 30 have a Facebook account.


4. The largest adopters of the Kindle are over 55 years-old.


5. Bowker’s data has now drawn a correlation that audio and e-books are cannibalizing sales of hardcover books.

Think this stuff is interesting? Wait till you read what Wildfire Marketing has figured out when authors have dynamic web sites. Talk about an impact on book sales! Stay tuned. That’s the next blog.