Tag Archives: dilemma

Marketing

Erotica Campaign

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In August 2013, we received a batch of saucy titles to upload from publisher Accent Press in the United Kingdom. To coincide with this new import, we brainstormed ideas to promote the titles and attempted to define which customers would want to purchase them. This campaign was to be a way of reaching out to repeat customers who could carry us through the slow seasons, in between main book buying cycles.

a-pinch-of-spice_alcamia-payne_cover_20130901The idea was to hand out 80 free Paperight copies of Accent Press books on UCT campus and ask students to review them for us as part of a PR stunt. As part of this, I put together a questionnaire to streamline the responses we would be getting, asking students, for example, to rate the book as an Erotic or Romantic title, rate the book on a saucy scale of 1 to 5, flag any offensive material within and more. This information would then be used to categorise the books on the website to assist other customers navigating the long list of available titles. We also wanted to ask students to write a short recommendation if they liked the book. After all, recommendations in book stores are proven to drive sales, as I learned in my 4 years working at the Bay Bookshop.

Nick designed a poster to advertise the handout on campus and the handout was scheduled for the 18th of September 2013 on Jammie Plaza.

To ensure that these books would get to students who would be interested in taking part, I contacted Jessica Tiffin of the English Literature department at UCT who runs an annual course for 3rd Years on Erotic Literature called ‘Sex: From Sappho to Cyber”. Jessica was very interested in sending details to students about how they could take part.

this campaign was shelved due to concerns about damaging our growing reputation as a distributor of educational material.

However, this campaign was shelved due to concerns about damaging our growing reputation as a distributor of educational material. At this early stage in Paperight’s lifespan, it was crucial not to alienate any potential supporters for the sake of a quick, provocative campaign. We needed to focus on building our number of repeat customers and South Africa’s predominantly conservative reading public might have taken issue with this content.

Marketing

Monthly Outlet Sales Winner

Between May and August 2013, we offered a monthly reward of R1000 to the best sales person throughout the Paperight network of registered copy shops.

The challenge was announced through the weekly newsletter and on the Paperight blog. Our intentions were to drive sales of Paperight books, encourage copy shop employees to familiarise themselves with paperight.com, and to drive home the need for all employees to have their own individual Paperight accounts, albeit subsidiary ones to their main business account.

Individual staff accountability within copy shops has been an uphill battle and a necessary struggle to secure the safety of the book titles already available through the Paperight network. In order to negotiate with publishers, it is essential that we put all the measures that we can in place to protect their copyright and offer complete reassurance of our efforts to combat book piracy. Knowing who specifically has accessed certain titles can assist Paperight and the copy shops themselves to identify any potential pirates.

Similarly, there has been an unusual trend through copy shop owners to not inform their staff that they are officially offering a new service, namely Paperight. The number of customers that have been turned away simply due to ignorance on the part of the copy shop employee cannot be measured, however we have had feedback from customers to let us know that it has happened to them. We hoped to also remedy this issue with this competition.

The winner was announced for each month in the first week of the following month, once we had double checked everyone’s sales figures.

Our very few ‘fine print’ rules were:

  • Free documents do not count towards sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides) – that would make it too easy to cheat!
  • The customer’s first and last names MUST BE INCLUDED on every purchase.
  • The competition is only for South African shops.

The winners were:

  • May 2013: Dean Mostert of Minuteman Press
  • June 2013: Aletta de Witt of Aloe X
  • July 2013: Unice Davies of Revprint Claremont
  • August 2013: Hennie van der Merwe of Minuteman Press Vanderbijlpark

The competition was supposed to run from May to December 2013. However, by August 2013, we came to realise that copy shop managers were not sharing Paperight information and news (shared through the newsletter) with their staff so the competition became effectively meaningless.

More often than not, copy shop managers expressed an unwillingness to share the Paperight account details with all of their staff in order to prevent abuse of the system. This was an unexpected insight as it showed us just how serious these managers are about avoiding copyright infringement in store- which is great reassurance in our negotiations with publishers about distributing their content through Paperight.

Content

Project Dagobah & The Great Content Drive of 2011

I started at Paperight, as employee number one, on the 1st of November 2011. My mandate for the first four months on the Paperight Team was to get 1000 content items on to Paperight. The mission was code-named Project Dagobah, because who doesn’t love a little Star Wars?

International rights/sales managers needed more time to get familiar with the Paperight model, and we needed content as soon as possible. We decided that the most productive way forward would be to focus on public domain and open access material, and to grow our list of licensed content once we had an already established list.

I began by working with setwork lists, and approaching the rights departments of relevant publishing houses. It soon became apparent that this strategy was not going to work. International rights/sales managers needed more time to get familiar with the Paperight model, and we needed content as soon as possible.

We decided that the most productive way forward would be to focus on public domain and open access material, and to grow our list of licensed content once we had an already established list. To this end I began to draw up a list of 1000 open and public domain titles from www.gutenberg.org and www.internetarchive.org.

our-first-booksWhen I started, Arthur had already signed up a couple of publishers (our early champions). So, during this first month I also facilitated the receipt of files from EBW and The Professional and Higher Learning, and created individual posts for each of these to serve as product pages on the site. This first version of the site was hacked together in WordPress, and required manual order fulfillment via email. We called it version 0.5.

Part of my work at this stage was also learning how to approach publishers myself. I shadowed Arthur, and attended meetings with him.

Publishers approached

  • Siyavula (via email, with an intro from Arthur)
  • Faber (via email)
  • Heineman (via email)
  • Penguin SA (via email)
  • Harper Collins (via email)
  • Lexis Nexis (via email)
  • Jonathan Ball (via email)
  • Haynes (via email)
  • Juta (via email)
  • Pearson (via email)
  • WITS University Press (via email)
  • Future Managers (in person, with Arthur)

Publisher registrations (existing)

  • The Professional and Higher Partnership (10/10/2011)
  • Carolyn Jewel (6/10/2011)
  • Electric Book Works (6/10/2011)