Here’s how to turn book samples into a powerful B2C tool

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Book samples are one of the most under-utilized tools in a publisher or author’s marketing arsenal. Most consumers will not buy a book without at least flipping through it, so many download samples before making a purchase decision. But how many times have you downloaded a sample which was nothing more than the frontmatter and a bit of an introduction? I’ve run into that problem countless times and those samples didn’t lead to me clicking the buy button.

The problem with today’s book sampling model is that it’s just some random percentage of the first several pages of the book. The fact that this approach involves no curation means it’s efficient but, unfortunately, it’s also highly ineffective.

Imagine how lame previews would be if movie producers used this same approach? You’re sitting in the theater and the teasers for a few upcoming movies are nothing more than the first two minutes of each. That’s not how it works with movies, of course, and it offers an important lesson for book publishers: Good samples require curation.

We learned that lesson recently at OSV. Rob Eagar, founder of Wildfire Marketing, is an expert in a freemium model where curated samples are the key ingredient. These samples feature more of the valuable content nuggets and enable readers to get a better sense of what they can expect to find in the full book. You’re not giving away all the book’s key ingredients, but you’re definitely providing readers with more value than they’ll find in a typical ebook sample.

These samples are delivered via email, so that means we’re able to establish a direct relationship with prospective customers, a critical step for a B2C business model. Having access to those names and email addresses means we’re able to build our B2C list and dramatically increase our up-/cross-sell activities.

If you’d like to see what this looks like, click here to visit the OSV freemium landing page. You’ll find the first several titles in our freemium campaign and more will be added in the coming months. We’re delighted with the initial results and we’re looking forward to building this out further as we add to our B2C capabilities.

Joe Wikert is director of strategy and business development at Olive Software. This post was originally published on his blog, Joe Wikert’s Digital Content Strategies, where he writes opinion pieces on the rich content future of publishing.

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