You walk into any major store and see a huge stand of gift cards. Now imagine that rack full of cards are all cards that represent electronic books. All the buyer of the card has to do is log in a code on the back of the gift card to download the book to any device.
That’s a very real and coming future for electronic books. But it’s not here yet. But you can count on the fact that it’s coming.
Why? Simple. Physical brick-and-mortor stores and major chains need to sell a physical product. A book card is a way to turn an electronic book into a physical product to sell in regular stores. In fact, a number of bookstore owners at the World Science Fiction convention in Reno mentioned to me that this idea might just be what saves them in a number of years as electronic book sales dwarf print book sales.
And other specialty press and small and indie publishers loved the idea as well. It took some explaining as to what it was, but once everyone realized what they were holding, that they were actually holding a regular book, they got excited.
My story of book cards and the World Science Fiction Convention.
The intention of WMG Publishing was not to make money with book cards at the convention. In fact, my intention was to go and have fun and just give the cards away and work to get other publishers to pick up the idea. No one owns this idea. No one. A company in Canada has been doing a test this summer in numbers of indie bookstores using this idea, but I have not yet heard the results.
The more major traditional publishers who use this idea, the better off we will all be. So I talked to a lot of editors and one major traditional publisher at the convention. Planting seeds.
WMG Publishing did two gift cards for the convention, both with codes on the back where a buyer could go to Smashwords and plug in the code and download the book. They could have done it on a page on the WMG Publishing website, and might down the road, but that site is not ready yet. So they just used the easy Smashwords code.
Cindie Geddes at Lucky Bat Books did a book card for a Greg Benford’s book Chiller as well that looked wonderful. She used the same form and size. So in essence there were four of us at Worldcon showing off the book card idea. That turned out to be a super thing to have four of us pushing this idea. We got to almost everyone I had hoped to get to in one way or another.
One card WMG Publishing did was for the first book of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Fey series, Sacrifice. The second card was for my Poker Boy short story collection, The Women of the Felt.
Each “book card” had two parts.
Part one was the plastic gift card the size of a credit card and the same thickness. The cover of the book is printed on one side, the code and instructions on the back. We used these cards alone for a sort of business card as well, since the cards had our web site addresses as well as WMG Publishing website address.
As you can tell from the image up to the left, these credit-card-sized book covers were way cool.
Part two was the printed paper cover, or gift card holder. WMG has these printed at 11 x 8.5 in trim size on heavy card stock so they would feel like a real book. (Actually in traditional publishing, this is called a “cover flat,” but we had them folded unlike regular cover flats so they ended up 8.5 x 5.5 in.)
Front page was the cover, back page was the back cover copy just like the regular book.
Inside front cover was a sample from the book to hook readers and also copyright information.
Inside back cover was the front cover of the book reprinted again with a box giving the instructions on how to download the book.
The plastic gift card itself WMG just glue-dotted in the middle of the inside back cover. (With glue dots the card can be removed and stuck back on without problem.)
We will do a bunch of things different with the next cards.
First, on the front cover it will say right across the top “An Electronic Book” in very large letters, on both the front and back.
Second, on the inside, instead of reprinting the cover, WMG will do what Cindie did with Greg Benford’s book card. On the inside back cover, WMG will put a picture and bio of the author at the top, right under the notice THIS IS AN ELECTRONIC BOOK.
Then, as Cindie did, WMG will leave the bottom half of the page white and blank so the card can be glue-dotted in the middle of the white area and be very, very clear.
Cindie, you can weigh in here in the comments to talk about what you would do different. It was great having three of these at the convention to learn how to do the next ones better. (So read the comments, folks.)
The biggest problem we had was explaining that the entire thing was an actual electronic book. People are so used to not having something physical for an electronic book, that needed to be very, very clear everywhere on the card and the book cover itself.
But once a person realized what they were holding, they loved them.
What We Used the Book Cards For
For the next few years, until book cards become more accepted by bookstores, I do not see them being economically viable for an indie publisher to produce for every book for sale. It would take too long to return the printing investment.
But WOW are they great promotion. Worth every penny.
Let me say that again. On special books and for events, book cards are worth every penny.
At the convention, Kris and I always carried at least thirty of the cards each, and we were always going back to the room to get more. We were giving them away.
Over the convention’s four days we gave away around 300 total. At our book signings, we offered everyone who wanted a book signed a free book card. And almost everyone took one and almost everyone had us sign the book card as well.
That’s right, an author can now sign an electronic book.
I also gave every book dealer in the dealer’s room five free copies of both cards to sell. The price on the back of the electronic book is the same price as we have the electronic books. So the book dealers could sell the book card and when the customer went online to get the book, they would see that the online price was the same as the book dealer sold them the book for.
A couple of the dealers had sold copies before I left, which stunned me considering Kris and I were giving them away for free at the same time.
So far, in the four weeks since the convention, we have had about 10% of the cards we gave away downloaded. That is about the number I had hoped, considering people get so much stuff at the convention, it takes time to go through it all. And many people did not have electronic devices who wanted a book card anyway. (Seems some people thought they were going to be collectable. Cool.)
I expect the total download to end up around 20%.
So my opinion.
Book cards right now are a fantastic promotion for any major event. Kris and I will be using these for the rest of the year at events and signings, plus if someone buys a book from WMG Publishing, like a signed advance order on the next Retrieval Artist novel, Anniversary Day, coming out in December, we will send along a copy of the book card as well with the book. Signed, of course.
There are a lot of promotional ways the cards can be used as electronic book reading becomes larger and larger over the next few years.
Costs
Both Lucky Bat Books and WMG Publishing used a wonderful printer out of Montana called PrintingForLess.com. WMG went with doing the orders by e-mail and phone instead of directly online because of the tight deadline. Adam and Alexa there went out of their way to make sure we got the orders in before Kris and I left for the convention. PrintingForLess.com is fairly priced and do wonderful work. (Wow, I should charge them for that commercial. (grin))
Okay, now to some math for selling book cards to bookstores eventually. (You had to know it was coming.)
WMG went with the lowest print run of 500 copies knowing we would do things wrong, so the costs were per unit higher than they would be if we had just ordered a 1,000 copies or more.
The cards were about $200 for 500 cards and the printing of the 5.5 x 8.5 full color cover stock was just over $300 for 500. So rounding, each full card cost about $1.00 to produce.
That price if we had done 1,000 would have come down to about 60 cents per full card (both pieces.) Even cheaper if we ordered more.
My The Women of the Felt short story collection sells online for $2.99. So a book dealer can sell it as well for $2.99 in book card format. (That’s the price WMG has on the back of the card.)
WMG can sell the book card to the bookstore at 50% discount, so WMG would get $1.50 per sale. (Bookstore would make $1.50 per sale.)
So even the costs at the highest amount gives about a 50 cent per card profit selling to bookstores. A 16% profit.
Kris’s Fey novel would be sold by bookstores for $4.99, the same price as the electronic book online. Bookstore would make $2.50 and WMG Publishing would get $2.50.
$2.50 minus $1.00 cost = $1.50 per book profit. 30% profit. Nice.
(Just another reason to be professional with your online pricing. You could never do this with novels at 99 cents.)
The Future
Honestly, I see book cards becoming a major way for bookstores to sell electronic books in four or five years. It’s going to take traditional publishers to jump onto the idea to make it easier for indie publishers to get book cards into bookstores.
And book cards, packaged like gift cards, have a huge market in major supermarkets and other major retail stores besides bookstores, placed right beside all the other gift cards that have already gotten into those stores.
Electronic books are clearly going to be over 50% of all books sold within five years. This is a way to get those books into reader’s hands and thousands of new markets that paper books are too expensive and large to get into.
And from the author perspective, all I can say is that they are great fun. These are fantastic promotion.
Now it is up to traditional publishers to get this going. Cindie and I gave copies of these to many New York editors and a couple major New York publishers who really, really loved the idea.
First publishers have to train bookstores.
And then bookstores have to train readers that they can buy their electronic books in a regular bookstore.
It will happen.
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Copyright © 2011 Dean Wesley Smith
Cover art The New World of Publishing copyright Philcold/Dreamstime
Cover art for The Fey: Sacrifice copyright © 2011 by Dirk Berger
Cover art for The Women of the Felt Konradbak/Dreamstime
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Okay, I admit it, I had issues at first with putting in a tip jar in the Magic Bakery. It was one of the “I have it made, why do I need to support my writing with tips.” A minor myth, sure, but still one that took me a few days and some talk with Kris to get past back when I started this series.
And speaking of the Magic Bakery, this chapter is now part of my inventory in my bakery. (Confused on that, read the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with your writing. I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie.
If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.
If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it.
And I would like to thank all the fine folks who have donated over this last year. Once this book is done, I will send you a copy. The donations and the comments both after the posts and privately are really keeping me going on this. Thanks!
Thanks, Dean
Why not put the standard edition e-book on a card to download from Smashwords, then do a special/enhanced edition with bonus material on the flash drive version and charge more? People ARE willing to pay $10 an e-book, provided they get something they can SEE is added value.
I don’t know if these would save bookstores, but I can envision them being very popular with the segment of the population with a collecting urge. They would still have something physical to show off only it could be limited to a binder or more sitting out on the coffee table to flip through instead of a wall of shelves. They could even spray them with “Eau de library” for that reading smell so many wax lyrical about.
Melodie, I imagine them being in a wood case like Dexter’s blood slides. That probably says a lot about me.
The thumb drive is interesting. It has value in itself. Copy off the books and then delete them from the thumb drive and you have an empty thumb drive to use.
For a Collector’s Edition you could do something like include a pewter keychain related to the books. You could have a poker chip keychain with the thumb drive attached for the Poker Boy collection, for example.
allow publishers to get a lot of books into a very small space, thus opening up stores like Starbucks to book selections
It’s all about $/square foot return. Let’s say I buy everything online, I still have to go to . . .
- The Grocery store. If the $/sf is high enough, they can have book cards in the checkout line next to the magazines. They can have them in the gift card isle. And in the book area.
- Gas station. Again, if the $/sf is high enough, they can have a thin rack or a display at the counter. Can you imagine publishers buying on-the-counter co-op for a monster release? Let’s say all the Texacos in red-state land for Dick Cheney’s memoir.
- Drug stores
- Botiques
- Lingere stores
- Fast food restaurants. They already include audio books in “happy meals”. Why not a book card?
- Movie theaters. Book cards for a bunch of movie tie-ins. Watch Twilight, buy the other Twilight books.
- Starbucks (already mentioned), Einstein’s Bagels, Panera, etc.
It’s all about $/sq foot.
In this way the card becomes another visibility mechanism. You’re trying to get as many target audience eyeballs as possible for your product. So publishers don’t have to rely on just the display in the bookstores, or the best-seller lists, or bought-this-bought-that.
Shoppers are going to these places already. This makes is more feasible to get books in there. Now they can see books alongside the Doritos.
The only issue I see is sampling in store. If you go to the card, there’s no sampling unless you expect everyone to carry their ereader with them everywhere they go. If you go with the first chapter plus the card, that would allow sampling and cut down space.
Point about QR codes: Not everyone can use them.
I don’t think anyone was suggesting just using the QR. Of course you’d have the URL spelled out in text, too. The QR is just a handy shortcut for those with phones or tablets which have the built-in camera but a less-than-adequate keyboard.
More:
- game stores (I think this would be a sweet spot for the SFF crowd)
It all depends on whether the store’s demographics matches up and provides the $/sf return.
This is no different than the old phone minute cards.
Of course, none of these places is going to keep 20,000 titles in stock. But these shops are not trying to compete on being the end-all. They’re just trying to make $/sf.
You don’t have to stock every soda pop ever made to make money on soda pop. Or every candy bar. I go into my local Staples and see a small selection of candy. And yet those candy displays stay year after year because of the $/sf return.
Buyers are happy making impulse buys with very small selections.
Report on the 64mb credit-card cards:
$5/unit for card/printing for quantities of 100. Prices slope down after that, but you gotta get around $1k before it gets down around $4. So, still too expensive for single books, alas alas.
This is from memorysuppliers.com
-Dan
I can see where having something physical would be a good deal, and for bookstores, having a physical cover to catch reader’s attention makes sense. Or as options to buying the physical book.
The advantage of bookstores over Amazon has always been the “get it now” factor. I could go to my local bookstore and have the book I wanted in my hands in a few hours or minutes (depending on how close I lived to one). With Amazon, I have to wait a week or so after I buy it unless I’m willing to pay a good bit of money for one day shipping, and even then I still have to wait a day.
I think the idea delivery method for a bookstore would be to have the ebook on some type of cheap memory device that could easily be transferred to an ebook. A auto program on the memory card could detect what kind of reader it is, then load the book into the right spot with little to no user interaction other than plugging it in.
Or another method could be they bring the card/book to the checkout, and the cashier loads the book onto their device using such a program. That way they could have the ebooks stored on their computer system and not need a delivery device like a thumb drive.
Then all they would have to do is block the main book retail sites on their store’s router, which would prevent the majority of folks from downloading the book from Amazon and other places within the store unless they have a 3G Kindle or cell phone that can bypass the store’s wireless network.
There’s one advantage to this no one has mentioned yet. If you have a physical book and one of these ebook covers next to each other, and the person prefers an ebook, they can easily look and read the physical book to sample it, which would be hard using the card unless you threw a chapter or two in the card for them to read.
The rack I saw at our local grocery store was a prepaid card rack. It included prepaid cards/gift cards from several companies, one being Amazon. But no specific books. But the concept is close to what you’re wanting to do, just dealing with a specific book.
Another thought. What would prevent me from using such a card marketing scheme, but instead of Smashwords, point them to my own site where I would get all the money? And get it that very day. I can see using Smashwords if that’s all you’ve got, but if you have your own ebooks, what would prevent you from pointing the downloads there?
These are ALL such exciting ideas and the possibilities are endless. I’m excited just to consider how any of this could help a beginning author get noticed. Thanks for the detailed descriptions of the card and covers. They’re beautiful.
I love my print books and have had some of them since I was a child. It’s really the only thing I dislike about the this “e” revolution, that there’s no sense of permanency to what I buy electronically.
In that spirit I’d like to see the card go one step further and be the reader as opposed to downloading to a reader or computer. Something similar to the musical birthday cards that are everywhere now.
The book cards could get more sophisticated as time went on but that wouldn’t affect the book card you originally purchased unless you wanted it to.
Just a thought.
“- game stores (I think this would be a sweet spot for the SFF crowd)”
In theory, yes, but in practice it probably won’t work. I’ve seen game stores in my area try it and they abandoned books eventually. Their selection tends to be too small and the space does better for them if they use it to sell games. It’s a games store, after all. That’s why people come there. And if they had book cards they’d probably feel a need to carry the paper books too.
There’s also a side-effect of these book cards that might not be desirable. How would you ever put your ebook on sale? You might want to do a temporary price drop, but if you have book cards out there you can’t in good conscience undercut the retailers who are stocking them. If they find out they may not continue to stock your books.
I like them as promotional tools but I’m not convinced they would work all that well as a way to sell the book. But hey, things are changing. It’s worth a try.
Quote from Mark: “It isn’t about ebooks per se — it’s about all books. The message is that while you might find it at a bookstore, you will always find it at Amazon.”
IMO, this sentiment gets the Nostradamus award for most prescient observation, at least in this discussion. Speaking as someone who has spent many of his happiest hours in bookstores: when I want to noodle away an hour or so while the wife is shopping for something else at the mall, I go to a bookstore, if there is one. When I want to buy a book, I log on to Amazon. End of story. And I’m hardly an early adopter about this sort of thing; more of a trailing adopter, as it were.
So, Dean, while I applaud your efforts in this regard, in my deepest “Après moi, le déluge” meditations I sometimes feel that you’re applying your awesome intellect and ingenuity to devising better and better life support systems for a dying patient. You’re doing us all a favor, though; future generations of completely digital writers will likely say, “Well, crap, if *Dean Wesley Smith* couldn’t figure out a profitable way of keeping some sort of physical book sales going, then nobody could.”
LOL, K.W., thanks, I think.
But in my worst nightmares, I don’t see bookstores going away. Changing, yes. But most reading this do not remember a time when all bookstores were indie bookstores. Before Mall stores and super stores changed the landscape and had all of us complaining. We’re going back to that sort of look in book selling with the additions of box stores still in the play, and of course major electronic stores. As everything in publishing (and life) tends to do, the goes around, comes around sort of thing. All kinds of new stuff from old ideas will be around in books and book-selling. I’m just tossing out a few ideas combining new and old.
What is interesting that in the history of publishing literature I have, bookstores were being declared dead when paperbacks started and caught on. (Same language as now, almost exactly.) Granted, you are hard pressed to find a bookstore similar to a bookstore of 1940 now, but they still exist. As do bookstores in general.
We’re big fans of the iTunes cards in Starbucks. At a computer convention last year, one of the Universities did promo cards for free iTunes downloads (10 songs). The cards all had the same code, but were time limited to expire a few days after the convention.
Putting unique numbers is no problem, I’ve done that with event tickets–heavy stock, full color, and leave a space for the unique number.
But I like the plastic card in the folded flats. It gives something that can be autographed, and content they can browse before deciding to buy the ebook version.
The credit card sized CD is also good for laptop folks.
Dean, I wish I could be as sanguine about the future of hard-copy book retailing as you are — but then again, nobody has ever said, “Wow, that K. W. Jeter just *defines* the notion of sunny optimism, doesn’t he?” My extrapolation of the future is to a large degree based upon my personal recorded music buying habits. At one time, long ago, I had a colossal vinyl LP collection, which I continually added to; Christmas wasn’t complete without me & Geri hitting Tower Records and coming home with stacks and stacks of new records. Granted, Tower had management problems other than just general industry trends, but except for a few niche enthusiast outlets, what happened to all the other vinyl LP retailers? Gone, gone, gone. Now I’ve got boxes and boxes of CDs — sitting in my storage unit. Yet I’ve got more recorded music available to me than ever, on the multi-terabyte external hard drives hooked up to my computers. I’m talking *years* of music. And if I want more, I don’t go to some brick-&-mortar retailer; I order it from Amazon, for the same reason Mark mentioned re books: if I go to a physical store, *maybe* I’ll find what I’m looking for; if I log on to Amazon, I *know* I’ll find it. This is something that J. A. Konrath blogged about recently, and I tend to agree with him: for me and for a lot of other people, the Kindle is the book equivalent of what my terabyte hard drives are for recorded music. I love bookstores, but I loved vinyl LP stores as well — but my love for them didn’t keep ‘em from disappearing, though.
One thing that always comes to mind is this image of a loyal bookstore customer getting an e-reader as a Christmas gift. That person is going to try it and if he or she likes the experience of using an e-reader, he or she will spend less money at the bookstore going forward. Instead of spending $20 a week at the store, it becomes $20 every other week or $20 a month.
How many loyal customers can bookstores lose and still survive? E-reader sales are booming. Every sale represents diminished revenue at physical stores.
Here’s one more reminder of the rather grim landscape of current bookstores. When was the last time you saw a brand new bookstore open? I live in the St. Louis area and we had a new one open up about three years ago. That’s one new store opening in the last three years in a metropolitan area of about 2.5M people.
Brilliant! I’m at work, so I couldn’t read all the replies, but here’s my opinion on retail issues. First, Kindle is Amazon only. They have apps for other devices, but all sales go through Amazon. That’s our new big box battle in ebooks. Second, you should consider special codes for each card, so people can’t post the code for free downloads. the printer of the cards has the ability to do this. I saw QR codes mentioned, and they are currently used by bookstores in front of the print books. This allows the customer to benefit from our expertise, and still get an ebook instantly. Here’s 2 ebook issues for the bookselller and publisher. Our QR codes take the customer to our website, where they download a Google ebook, and a percentage goes to us. They pay Google, who pays the publisher. Your idea could be done the way print books are sold. I would pay the publisher, sell the card at retail price, and pocket the profit. The card would have a barcode, or QR code, that indicated it was already paid for, and the customer can download it. BTW – a 100% markup, is actually a 50% margin, in that I collect half the price of the book to cover store expenses.
Just an anecdote to support the idea: I was in a small bookstore a couple of days ago, because the beach town where I was staying has one (it also sells newspapers, lottery tickets, and other conveniences, but it’s mainly a bookstore), and I am not a person who can resist walking into a bookstore. I looked at several books, and later wrote some of them down to consider purchasing later. I have a limited budget and wasn’t sure enough about any of the books to want to own them in paper. But if there had been book cards there, with a Kindle version available for a reasonable price, I would absolutely have purchased some of them. With the small space, that store could be selling a lot more books using book cards. My family stays in the same town every year, so hopefully some year soon I’ll walk into that bookstore and be able to buy ebooks!
Cool idea. I’m in favour of it.
Have you thought about leaving a blank spot somewhere for authors to sign? You could even create signed and numbered sets.
As for bookstores picking them up, how would that work? Would they buy the cards from the publisher, or would they only pay for each card that the customer purchases? The latter would be more like selling on consignment, and would avoid the chance that bookstores might ask to remainder book cards that didn’t sell out in a specific time (yes, this is the produce model I’m talking about, but bookstores are used to that model, and also use to remaindering books, so I’m trying to think of ways to at least encourage them to partially step out of that box).
On the book cards, what are your next plans?
I’m thinking of doing one for a new short story collection I’ll bring out in 2012 with Lucky Bat.
Greg, haven’t yet figured that out. I think we will be doing more this next spring and summer and slowly working them into bookstores as we set up bookstore accounts, more than likely as lost leaders of a sort on some. Since I saw you at Worldcon, I’ve been lost in the Bill Trojan estate and have just surfaced back to writing. So Kris and I and the folks at WMG Publishing will be talking about Book Card use this next month or so. I think we all learned a ton at Worldcon.
Hi,
Friend of mine just sent me a link to this. I’ve been using what I call eBook cards for awhile now. I had them at Orycon33 and have them in a couple bookstores. I thought it was MY idea until I googled it and found a German group had dropped 45 books onto eBook Cards and were test marketing them. My cards have the bookcover on one side and a QR code on the back as well as the URL to smashwords. They also have a blank place for coupon code as we learned that we ran out of code before we ran out of card.
I charge a very reasonable fee to do cards for folks, though I have no desire to get into doing this to any great degree. I charge $60 for 250 cards including shipping. When I make my own they cost me about .08 per card, so very reasonable. My biggest problem so far has been trying to explain the concept. I’m developing a sign with a succinct explanation I can use at signings, cons, whatever. Anyone who wants more info can go to this page on my website http://www.pambainbridgecowan.com/ebook-cards.html
Oh, and I also have a generic card that publishers can use. They place their imprint on one side with a couple blank lines on the back for title/code so they can offer it for any book in their line.
I’ve heard some folks are worried that people can use the coupon code until it runs out and share it with friends, but that’s exactly how any book is passed around and shared and in my marketing plan that will only lead to more readers coming back to read more of my books.
There is a gentleman who has developed a card with a scratch off, unique code. He may even have commented here. I didn’t have time to read all the comments. I believe his cards would be great for one time or very expensive books. Otherwise I can’t believe they would be affordable.