Tag Archives: GetSmarter

Marketing

Book reviews are back in fashion!

Before I arrived at Paperight, there had been an attempt to make book reviews a regular thing to post on the blog. When I stepped into the ring, I fully intended to bring them back from obscurity.

Having worked in a bookstore, I know that book recommendations are incredibly valuable when it comes to making the decision to buy a book. Customers rely on experienced ‘readers’ giving them advice on what they already believe should be good reads, and that opinion is already made on what they have heard from friends and read in newspapers or magazines. There are so many titles out there that most readers rely heavily on instruction.

digital-photography-1-10_getsmarter_cover_20121113I started with a review of the GetSmarter Digital Photography course manual due to my personal interest in photography. At the time I happened to be taking a part time, manual photography course and I needed some further instruction when it came to capturing the perfect image. The fact that the title tied into a personal interest made the review so much easier.

macbeth-robert-deas_cover_20131001My second review was for the Manga Shakespeare series from Self Made Hero. Inbetween campaign prep tasks for the #textbookrevolution, I made my way through Macbeth and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. With beautiful drawings and a distilled version of the story, they were enjoyable to read and I made sure to emphasise that in my review.

Both reviews have been published on the Paperight blog. However, I envisioned that one day, these reviews would be seen on the Paperight.com home site, along with the opportunity for customers to review titles they have bought, too.

Apart from this, I also attempted to review a GetSmarter Marketing course manual, but I couldn’t strike the right tone in the piece so it was never released. This review highlighted the biggest problems with the reviewing process:

  1. There often isn’t enough time to focus on reading a new book and reviewing it too.
  2. It is much easier to review a title that you enjoy.

I would definitely advise having more than one person reviewing titles because one person’s chore is another person’s choice read. This also spreads the task around and makes it less difficult to produce many reviews over the same amount of time. If I had a perfect system, I would make sure that Paperight publishes at least 4 reviews a month, totalling 48 reviews a year. This may be a small number, but with a small team, this number is achievable and will grow exponentially as the team grows and the catologue of books grows. Just a thought! As much as Paperight has tried to distance themselves from ordinary bookselling practices, I think that this practice is absolutely essential to building regular customers.

Building business, Content

Pricing revisions

We kicked January off by updating all the pricing on the Paperight site. One of our major pivots from the previous year was our decision to charge a license fee/service fee for all documents, and to have no free material available on the site (excepting, of course, those Creative Commons titles with a Non-commercial license).  This included charging a nominal amount for all Paperight editions and matric past papers.

Initially, we had imagined the free content as a draw card, that would result in people also purchasing paid content. We found that while the former was true,  the conversion was not happening. We speculated that consumers found the draw-card content valuable in itself, and that they would be willing to pay for it.

The balance between paid and free content on the site was skewed heavily in favour of free, and given that this content accounted for the majority of license purchases and downloads, we needed to ensure that we were making enough money to reach sustainability. Initially, we had imagined the free content as a draw card, that would result in people also purchasing paid content. We found that while the former was true,  the conversion was not happening. We speculated that consumers found the draw-card content valuable in itself, and that they would be willing to pay for it.

We met with HMPG about medical journals, and continued our follow ups with Jacana and other publishers with strong African Literature lists. One of the latter included PanMacmillan/Macmillan, who we’d only recently contacted.  We also began contract negotiations with Pearson, a process which would later lead to the revision of our standard contract for all rightsholders.

The month also included a lot of prep work, with continued work on Mampoer shorts, GetSmarter, and csv and document uploading — we had a bit of a backlog at this stage given all the prep work done by our freelancers (Caitlin and Craig).

Other work included my proofreading of the Paperight catalogue, organising with PASA for attending the London Book Fair, and overseeing authorship of Now What? By this stage its author Paul had drawn together a final draft and we’d sent it to nine Together We Pass affiliated students for feedback.

Publisher registrations

  • Thenosis Publishing (10/1/2013)
  • Mindset Publishing (15/1/2013)
  • College Campus (23/1/2013)
  • P-Ridge Press (29/1/2013)
  • Porcupine Press (30/1/2013)
  • PUO Educational Press (31/1/2013)

 

 

Content, Tech

Removing ad space on Paperight documents

Our latest website update now allows the option for watermarking documents with ads or without ads. This was our crucial first step towards product improvement. We found over this first year that outlet owners and managers were not inclined to subsidize the cost of paper by selling advertising on their documents.  As a result, we decided to remove the ad space we’d left at the bottom of every page.

Because many of our PDFs have been laid up to account for the ad space, this meant that the watermarking functionality had to account for documents either with or without ad space.  It also meant that the 900+ documents that were on Paperight would eventually need to be reformatted to remove ad space. We’d have to lay up the documents from scratch, with the text now able to take up more of the page, which improved readability. 

By the end of September a total of 1081 titles were listed on Paperight, officially surpassing the amount of titles we had on Paperight 0.5.

We began by reformatting matric exams, our most popular set of products.  We uploaded more Paperight Editions, including Shakespeare titles, now using the new format. By the end of September a  total of 1081 titles were listed on Paperight, officially surpassing the amount of titles we had on Paperight 0.5.

We did our first round of Rightsholder statements for sales on the new site. These had to be created manually, and emailed to each publisher.

I also conducted the first real set of enmasse follow ups to publishers that I’d contacted and not heard back from. And the team was joined by Oscar, who started his internship at Paperight with metadata related tasks. His main focus is on reviewing existing metadata, and improving it where possible.

The Shuttleworth foundation approved a project pitch to send me to the Frankfurt Book Fair, so I began preparations. This included setting up of meetings, research, and pitching preparation.

Publisher registrations

  • T&P Books (1/9/2012)
  • Disruptive Publishing (5/9/2012)
  • GetSmarter (11/9/2012)
  • A.R.B (12/9/2012)