Open Road Media Shares Best Practices for Ebook Marketing

Now in its tenth year, the company shared case studies as well as new research that shows ebook promotions have a halo effect on print sales

Open Road Media (ORM), established in 2009 as a backlist publisher of ebooks, has evolved into as much of a marketing firm as a publishing firm. As we’ve reported in the past, it has established consumer verticals and now has a substantial consumer email marketing list.

Last month, in a presentation hosted by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), the chief marketing officer of ORM, Mary McAveney, discussed the company’s best practices and revealed the results of a new study of interest to publishers and authors alike.

First, McAveney discussed ORM’s current success. Their ebook sales grew 36 percent year on year in January 2019, just as the Association of American Publishers reported a 5 percent decline in ebook sales for the traditional industry that same month. More than 2 million readers find new books monthly through ORM’s efforts. Thirty percent of customers purchase multiple times, with an average of 12 purchases per year; on average, customers spend more than five years purchasing via ORM promotions.

All of this has come at a cost: ORM has invested tens of millions of dollars in its marketing and promotion engine. McAveney says the company uses a number of different tech tools within a proprietary platform they created internally. They have a dashboard that feeds them metadata and price updates, with clear visibility into retail and whether retailers are adjusting pricing. They have social media listening tools and rank tracking that helps them capture any changes in rank at retail.

ORM prioritizes intensive knowledge and behavioral study of the customer, as well as “owning” the customer. That means getting customers onto an email newsletter list and not relying on social, for example. McAveney said, “It is not an easy proposition. But we did focus for the last three to five years on audience development.” To keep sales going, ORM has to find new content consistently to put in front of customers; currently ORM has 10,000 titles that are “homegrown”; another 8,000 come from Ignition customers—those publishers who hire ORM to market a set of titles. When promoting titles, ORM looks at conversion stats multiple times a day. (Conversion is when a customer impression—via email, website, social, or advertisement—leads to a book sale.)

Offering an example of how their system works, McAveney referred to a recent scenario where YA author John Green recommended Octavia Butler to his audience (a lucky event that ORM did not know about in advance). This resulted in huge traffic to Butler’s books, but those customers were not converting. McAveney said, “We needed to help qualify the people who were coming over to our product detail page at retail. So we basically hyper-targeted the John Green message to his fans and fans of the author to get a better conversion.”

In partnership with BISG, Open Road Media conducted a study to determine how ebook promotion affects sales of print. Traditional publishers may worry that focusing on ebook promotion—especially when digital is priced more favorably than print—could negatively affect sales and profitability elsewhere. This new study was focused on Ignition customers, where—before a title is promoted—ORM works on product optimization (full and accurate metadata, marketing copy revisions, and pricing) to improve conversion. Just looking at ebook sales alone, ORM was able to generate an average increase in sales of 2.5 to 3 times over the previous baseline, regardless of genre—even when sales had been degrading as much as 48 percent monthly prior to promotion. For print sales, the majority of titles saw a positive change or no change; on average, there is a 9.6 percent average increase in print sales on titles promoted in ebook format.

Bottom line: ORM’s success is driven by an understanding of how consumers are behaving; McAveney said that is more important to them than asking what customer preferences are. “We strive to deliver highly relevant content. … Consumers expect you to know who they are and what they want.” Wise words, but it would be difficult for the average author or publisher to replicate ORM’s efforts, as ORM has a proprietary, tech-based system that offers the benefit of scalability—with rapid title-vetting and measurement, agile response, and data-driven decision-making. ORM’s Ignition program is open to anyone, including self-published authors with just one title, but they do take care in selecting the titles they bring onboard to make sure they’re a fit for their audience. Learn more here.